THE RUSSIAN FORMALIST MOVEMENT
295
of Shklovski's writings but of Russian Formalist criticism in general.
The device, conceived as a deliberate technique of "making" the
work of poetry--of forming its material, language, and deforming its
"referent," reality-became the key term and the battle cry of mil–
itant Formalism.
"If
literary history," Jakobson declared categorically,
"wants to become a science,
it
must recognize the artistic device as
its only hero." All other components of the literary work-its "ideol–
ogy," its emotional content or the psychology of the characters--were
found secondary, if not totally irrelevant; they were airily dismissed
as
a
post factum
motivation of the devices employed, designed pre–
sumably to make the "literary product" more palatable to the phil–
istine reader.
This single-minded concern with craftsmanship found expres–
sion not only in the methodological generalizations but in the choice
of the illustrative material as well. The Formalists were quick to ac–
cord preferential treatment to cases where the conventional nature
of literary art was thrown into bold relief, or, as the favorite Form–
alist phrase has it, "laid bare." They praised the uninhibited verbal
play in verse and encouraged techniques of literary indirection in ar–
tistic prose, e.g., parody and stylization. Eikhenbaum spoke approv–
ingly of O'Henry's whimsical toying with the plot. Shklovski, de–
lighted by Sterne's keen "form-consciousness," hailed
Tristam Shandy
as
one of the world's greatest novels.
The search for the
differentia
of literature threatened at times
to degenerate into aesthetic isolationism. The emphasis on the idio–
syncratic, the "purely" literary, produced the tendency to equate
literature with "literariness," to reduce art to its distinguishing feature.
The Russian Formalists realized eventually the inadequacy of
this
reduction. Shklovski's and Eikhenbaum's later studies in liter–
ary history treated with full earnestness-and at great length–
such "motivations" as Tolstoy's "class-determined" view of the 1812
campaign or his "archaist" philosophy of life. In general terms, the
Formalists felt compelled to admit that there are periods in the
history of literature when ideological or social considerations 100m
rather large and thus ought to be taken seriously by the critic.
But this was still a far cry from a sorely needed re-examination
of the Formalist position.
It
w.as left to the critical supporters of
Russian Formalism in Czechoslovakia and in Poland to reopen the
