THE
RUSSIAN FORMALIST MOVEMENT
283
and others advocated a so-called "integral" method of approach to
the literary work of
art.
Russian Formalism has often been represented as merely a re–
furbished version of the late nineteenth century
"art
for art's sake"
doctrine. This notion is largely misleading. For one thing, the Russian
Formalists were not primarily concerned with the essence, or purpose,
of art. Avowed champions of "neo-positivism," they sought to steer
clear of "philosophical preconceptions" as to the nature of art; they
had little use for speculations about Beauty, or the Absolute. For–
malist aesthetics was empirical rather than metaphysical.
The driving force behind Formalist theorizing was the desire to
bring to an end the methodological confusion prevailing in traditional
literary history and to evolve a system of literary scholarship as a
distinct and integrated field of intellectual endeavor. It is high time,
argued the Formalists, that the study of literature, so long an intel–
lectual no-man's land, delimit its area and define unequivocally
its object of inquiry. And this was precisely what the Formalists set
out to do. They started from the premise-today widely accepted–
that the literary scholar ought to address himself to the ,actual works
of imaginative literature rather than, to quote Sir Sydney Lee, to the
"external circumstances in which literature is produced."
But to a militant Formalist this was not specific enough. In order
to disengage the study of literature from the obtrusive contiguous dis–
ciplines, such as psychology, sociology, cultural history, it seemed
necessary to narrow down the definition still further. "The object of
literary scholarship," wrote Jakobson, "is not literature in its totality,
but literariness
(literaturnost)
,
i.e., that which makes of a given
work a work of literature." "The literary scholar
qua
literary scholar,"
chimed in Eikhenbaum, "ought to be concerned solely with the in–
quiry into the distinguishing features of the literary materials."
This, in turn, begged the most important single question of
literary theory: what are the distinguishing features of imaginative
literature? What is the nature and the locus of "literariness"?
In their attempts to answer the crucial query, the Formalists
sought to steer clear of traditional answers and pat solutions. In line
with their deep-seated distrust of psychology, they were impervious
to
all
theories which located the
differentia
in the poet rather than
in
the poem, which invoked a "faculty of mind" conducive to poetic
