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Russian Formalist Sociology of Literature: A Sociologist's Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Liah Greenfeld
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Extract

Russian formalism has been of interest in the west for at least three decades since the publication of Victor Erlich's authoritative study of the school in 1954. Almost every year significant new contributions are made to the analysis of the formalists’ scholarship; their multiplex theory, with all of its different, and at times seemingly contradictory, aspects, is elucidated, and many of these aspects are successfully incorporated in modern criticism and literary theory in the west. I will not dwell upon the better known “internalist” aspects of the formalists' work, nor will I try to summarize their theory. Several leading members of the school systematically attempted to create a coherent theoretical framework for the sociology of literature. In this article I will look at the sociology of the Russian formalists from the point of view of a sociologist, analyze it, and suggest that the formalist sociology of literature makes a valuable contribution not only to our understanding of literature, but also to the understanding of social reality and to the discipline of sociology.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , Spring 1987 , pp. 38 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1987

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References

1. Erlich, Victor, Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine, 2nd rev. ed. (The Hague: Mouton, 1965)Google Scholar.

2. For elucidation of the Russian formalist theory see in particular: Bann, Stephen and Bowlt, John E., eds., Russian Formalism (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Bennett, Tony, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979 Google Scholar; Erlich, Russian Formalism; Jackson, Robert L. and Rudy, Stephen, eds., Russian Formalism: A Retrospective Glance; A Festschrift in Honor of Victor Erlich (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center for International and Area Studies, 1985)Google Scholar; Jameson, Frederick, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Steiner, Peter, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Wellek, Rene and Warren, Austin, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949)Google Scholar. Regarding incorporation of the Russian formalist legacy into thecriticism and literary theory in the west, see, for example, Thompson, Ewa M., Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism: A Comparative Study (The Hague: Mouton, 1971 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature.

3. The sociology of literature has not escaped the attention of Slavicists and other students ofRussian formalism. See, for example, Todd, William Mills III, “Literature as an Institution: Fragmentsof a Formalist Theory,” in Jackson, and Rudy, , eds., Russian Formalism, pp. 15–26 Google Scholar. See also Gary S. Morson, “Return to Genesis; Russian Formalist Theories of Creativity,” in ibid., pp. 173–194.Among earlier sources see Erlich, Russian Formalism, and Brang, Peter, “Sociological Methods inTwentieth-Century Russian Literary Criticism,” in Strelka, Joseph P., ed., Literary Criticism and Sociology. Yearbook of Comparative Criticism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973)Google Scholar.

4. Primarily, three of Eikhenbaum's works will be discussed: “Literaturnyi byt,” originally publishedin 1927; “Literatura i pisatel',” 1927; and “Literaturnaia domashnost',” also 1927; all three ofthese are collected in Moi vremennik (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo pisatelei, 1929), pp. 50–58, 59–81, and 82–86. Two works of Tynianov will be discussed: “Literaturnyi fakt,” published in 1924, and “Literaturnaia evoliutsiia,” published in 1927; these appear in Arkhaisty i novatory (Leningrad, 1929; reprint, Munich: Fink, 1967). Aronson and Reiser published Literaturnye kruzhki i salony (Leningrad: Priboi, 1929) and Grits, Trenin, and Nikitin published Literatura i kommertsiia (Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929)under the influence of Eikhenbaum. All the quotations in this article are given in my translations, although some of the articles have been previously published in English. Both Tynianov articles and Eikhenbaum's “Literaturnyi byt” have appeared in Matejka, Ladislaw and Pomorska, Krystyna, eds., Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971 Google Scholar. TheEikhenbaum article is titled “Literary Environment” in this collection.

5. Terms, such as sociologist, sociology of art, are used in this paper to refer to professionalsociology only, namely to sociology as practiced by sociologists. No discussion of sociological aspectsof the work of other scholars who are not primarily sociologists is attempted, and what is said aboutsociologists implies nothing in this regard.

6. Erlich, Russian Formalism, p. 20.

7. Trotskii, Lev, Literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow; Krasnaia nov', 1923)Google Scholar; reprinted as Literature and Revolution, in a translation by Rose Stransky (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971). P. N. Medvedev [Mikhail Bakhtin], Formal'nyi metod v literaturovedenii (Leningrad: Priboi, 1928); published in English as Medvedev, P. N. and Bakhtin, M. M., The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, trans. Wehrle, Albert J. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

8. Erlich, Russian Formalism, p. 176.

9. Wolff, Janet, The Social Production of Art (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), p. 66 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wolff isa sociologist. This opinion is, however, widely shared by the students of literary theory as well. See, for instance, Jefferson, Ann “Russian Formalism,” in Jefferson, Ann and Robey, David, eds., Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1982), pp.16–37 Google Scholar: “Formalist theory rigorously and systematically excludes the non-literary, so that where theAnglo-American tradition devotes much of its effort to exploring the different relations between lifeand art, the Russian Formalists see the two as mutual opposites” (p. 18).

10. See, for example, Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik, p. 50, and the discussion in Steiner, Russian Formalism, pp. 259–270.

11. See the editorial introduction by Iurii Tynianov and Roman Jakobson to “Problemy izucheniialiteratury i iazyka,” Novyi lef 12 (1928): 36.

12. Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik, p. 53.

13. Aronson and Reiser, Hteraturnye kruzhki i salony, p. 17.

14. Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik, p. 54.

15. Ibid.

16. Schücking, Die Soziologie der literarischen Geschmacksbildung (Munich: Rösl, 1923), wastranslated by Viktor Zhirmunskii, a philologist who was close to the formalists and shared theirinterests. In the Russian translation it is included in the bibliography of Grits, Trenin, and Nikitin, Literatura i kommertsiia. There is a reference to the German text in Sakulin, P. N., Nauka o literature: Sinteticheskoe postroenie istorii literatury (Moscow: Mir, 1925, p. 98 Google Scholar.

17. See in particular Todd, William Mills, “A Russian Ideology,” Stanford Literature Review 1 (1984): 85–118 Google Scholar; Ohmann, Richard, English in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976 Google Scholar.

18. Wolff, Social Production of Art, p. 1.

19. Becker, Howard S., Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. xi Google Scholar.

20. Ibid., pp. ix-x.

21. Sakulin, Nauka o literature, p. 24. Sotsiologicheskii metod was also published by Mir in 1925.

22. Aronson and Reiser, Literaturnye kruzhki i salony, p. 17.

23. It is worth noting that the name formalism was apparently bestowed upon the school byoutsiders, not by its members; see Eikhenbaum, “Teoriia formal'nogo metoda,” Literatura (Leningrad: Priboi, 1927), and Erlich, Russian Formalism, p. 188.

24. Eikhenbaum, Literatura, p. 117.

25. Ibid., pp. 117–120.

26. Ibid., pp. 120–121.

27. Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik, p. 59.

28. Language is sometimes referred to as “a social institution” (for an example, see Steiner, Russian Formalism, p. 57). This usage is a misapplication of the sociological term. Language, while itis a system, and while this system is clearly social, is not an organized activity oriented towards adefinite goal.

29. Bakhtin's criticism of formalism starts with the assertion that literature is an ideologicalformation like any other: “Literature, like any other ideology, is social from the beginning to theend “; “The specificity of a phenomenon … is entirely determined by its interaction, the interactionof the phenomenon as a whole and the interaction of all its parts, with all the other phenomena in theunity of the social life.” (Bakhtin, Formal'nyi metod, pp. 43, 44.) For more recent examples of similarapproaches in literary theory see Eagleton, Terry, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Literary Theory (London: New Left Books, 1976).Google Scholar

30. Bakhtin, Formal'nyi metod, p. 40.

31. For example, see Weber's discussion of the need of intellectuals for cognitive organization ofthe world and the role of this inner propensity in the formation of world religions in Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 500–517. Shils, Edward, “Knowledge andSociology of Knowledge,” Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization 4 (September 1982): 7–32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, emphasizes the role of curiosity in science. His “Center and Periphery,” Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 3–16, stresses the crucial importanceof human capacity for conviviality and political need or propensity in society.

32. Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik, p. 55.

33. Tynianov, Iurii, “Literaturnyi fakt,” in Arkhaisty i novatory (Leningrad: Priboi, 1929 Google Scholar. Thiswork was published in Germany in 1967 by Wilhelm Fink Verlag of Munich.

34. Ibid., pp. 9–11.

35. Bakhtin, Formainyi metod; Michael Holquist (“Bakhtin and the Formalists: History as Dialogue” in Jackson and Rudy, Russian Formalism, pp. 82–96) seems to agree with Bakhtin on thispoint.

36. Bakhtin, Formal'nyi metod, pp. 202–203.

37. Tynianov and Jakobson, Problemy izucheniia, p. 37.

38. Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik, p. 61.

39. Erlich, Russian Formalism, p. 256.

40. Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure ofScientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962)Google Scholar.

41. See Barber, Bernard, Science and the Social Order (Glencoe, III.: Free Press, 1952)Google Scholar; Ben-David, Joseph, The Scientist's Role in Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971)Google Scholar; Merton, Robert K., The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1973 Google Scholar. Normal science is Kuhn's phrase for the scientific work within a paradigmaticframework.

42. Quoted in Erlich, Russian Formalism, p. 256.

43. Eikhenbaum, Moi vremennik, p. 54.

44. Ibid., p. 57.

45. Ibid., p. 56.

46. Ibid., p. 57.

47. Ibid., pp. 59–81.

48. Ibid., p. 58.

49. Tynianov and Jakobson, Problemy izucheniia, p. 35.

50. Tynianov, Arkhaisty i novatory, p. 24; see also the discussion in Jameson, The Prison-House of Language, pp. 93–94.

51. Ben-David, The Scientist's Role; Merton, The Scoiology of Science; Shils, “Knowledge andSociology of Knowledge. “

52. Eikhenbaum, “5 = 100,” Knizhnyi ugol 8 (1922): 40.