Victor Erlich
THE RUSSIAN FORMALIST MOVEMENT
Russian Formalism is a ,school in Russian literary scholar–
ship which originated in the years 1915-1916, and had its heyday
in the early '20s.
It
was championed by unorthodox philologists and
linguistically oriented students of literature such as Boris Eikhen–
baum, Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovski, and Yuri Tynyanov. The
Formalist critics viewed literature as a distinct field of human en–
deavor-a verbal art rather than a mere reflection of society or a
weapon in the class struggle. They focused on "literariness," i.e., the
artistic devices peculiar to imaginative writing, and produced a num–
ber of acute studies of prosody, style, and composition.
At first the Formalist spokesmen grossly overstated their case:
they played down the links between literature and society and ques–
tioned the relevance of "extra-aesthetic" considerations. Eventually,
in the face of a concerted attack on the part of the Soviet Marxists,
they made an effort to combine formal analysis with a sociological
approach to literature. But this attempt at synthesis came too late.
In 1929-1930 the methodological debate in the Soviet Union
was
rudely called to a halt. With Soviet criticism being whipped into
orthodoxy, Formalism was suppressed as a heresy.
If
in the Soviet Union the Formalist movement was brought to
an end, its influence was felt in Czechoslovakia, which
in
the mid–
'20s became a vigorous center of linguistic and literary study. The
theorists of so-called Czech structuralism, grouped around the Prague
Linguistic Circle, Dmitrij Cyzevskyj, Jan Mukarovsky, Rene Wellek,
and-last but not least-Roman
J
akobson, who had lived in Prague
since 1920, restated the seminal methodological insights of Russian
Formalism in more judicious and rigorous terms. A similar trend
was
discernible in Poland, where Manfred Kridl, Franciszek Siedlecki,
