Russian literary Formalism

Russian literary Formalism

Russian literary Formalism, an active movement in Russian literary criticism from about 1915 to 1929,
approached the literary work as a self-referential, formed artefact rather than as an expression of reality or
experience outside the work. It asked the question, How is the work made? rather than What does the work
say? Its founding assumption, that poetic language differs from the language of ordinary communication,
spawned numerous investigations of what the Formalists called literariness - the qualities that make a work
artistic. This distinction between practical and poetic language also allowed the Formalists to argue that
literature was an autonomous branch of human activity, evolving according to its own immanent laws rather than
as a consequence or reflection of historical events. Proceeding from this theoretical model, the Formalists viewed
literary works as responses to previous literature rather than to the outside world.
In their literary theory and their interpretations of particular literary works, the Formalists were reacting to the
predominant tendency of Russian literary criticism to draw direct correspondences between lived experience and
the literary work. Boris Eikhenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovskii, Boris Tomashevskii, Iurii Tynianov and
other Formalists questioned accepted correspondences between life and art, casting doubt upon realist
interpretations of Russian authors such as Gogol and Tolstoi, and examining the narrative structure of
non-Russian works such as Tristram Shandy and O. Henrys short stories. Their analyses showed how intonation,
word order, rhythm and referential meaning interact within a literary work, and they argued that literary works
are less a reflection of life than an attempt to refresh conventional perceptions. The influence of Russian literary
Formalism is felt in more recent theoretical schools such as semiotics, structuralism, deconstruction, feminist
criticism and new historicism, in so far as all of these take account of the particular use of language in any
literary work.

1 Practical versus poetic language

Russian literary Formalism can be roughly divided into three periods. From 1915 to 1919, it sought to establish the
distinction between practical and poetic language; from 1919 to 1921 it investigated the use of poetic language in
particular literary works; and from 1921 until 1929 it examined literary works as responses to previous literary
history. The movement began as part of the avant-garde experimentation in the arts in the years surrounding the
Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Its practitioners formed two groups: the Moscow Linguistic Circle, which included
Roman Jakobson, Ptr Bogatyrev, N. Trubetskoi and Grigorii Vinokur; and its sister group in St Petersburg, the
Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Opoiaz), whose members included Osip Brik, Boris Eikhenbaum, Lev
Iakubinskii, Evgenii Polivanov, Viktor Shklovskii, Boris Tomashevskii and Iurii Tynianov. This collaboration
between linguists and literary scholars addressed language as the focal point of literature. Verbal texture was
examined as the artistic medium of literature, which contributed to message. In seeking to build an objective
theory of literature, Russian literary Formalism ignored authorial intention, biography and social and historical
conditions, the better to focus on the work itself.
Taking its cue from the sound experiments of Russian Futurist poetry, early Formalism drew attention to the
non-referential aspects of language, particularly to the role of sound. In Voskreshenie slova (The Resurrection of
the Word) (1914), which may be considered the inaugural work of Russian literary Formalism, Viktor Shklovskii
declared that the expressive impact of words was dulled by habitual usage and that the purpose of literature was to
restore to words a sense of newness and to stimulate new perceptions. In Iskusstvo kak prim (Art as Device)
(1916), Shklovskii introduced the concept of ostranenie (defamiliarization) to refer to the ways in which literary
works may overturn conventional perceptions.
The whole edifice of Russian Formalist theory rests on the differentiation between practical and poetic language,
formulated by Iakubinskii in his 1916 article, O zvukakh stikhotvornogo iazyka (On the Sounds of Verse
Language). Iakubinskii argued that the goals of ordinary speech and poetic language were fundamentally opposed.
Everyday utterances were aimed at rapid, efficient communication, and to that end they employed readily
recognizable formulations. This automatized language, as the Formalists termed it, grown familiar through
repeated, habitual use, had attained a narrow functionality at the expense of its vitality and richness. The goal of
poetic speech was to restore the palpability of language that is lost with quick recognition. Poetic language, said

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Russian literary Formalism

Iakubinskii, retards the process of comprehension while making it multilayered, bringing out a wealth of
accumulated meanings. Where practical language is highly referential, pointing unambiguously to objects and
ideas, poetic language is largely self-referential, drawing attention to the verbal pattern of the work.
In their preoccupation with the renewal of automatized perceptions and with the properties of language, the
Formalists were influenced by Andrei Belyi and Henri-Louis Bergson. Belyis 1910 book, Simvolizm (Symbolism),
had attempted to establish an anatomy of style by counting syllables, accents and parts of speech in thousands of
lines of verse. Following Belyi, the Formalists took an almost scientific approach to literary analysis.
Until about 1919, Russian literary Formalism was occupied with attempts to characterize poetic language,
investigating the question of how the renewal of automatized language was achieved. Studies by Brik, Polivanov
and Shklovskii showed that in poetry and other short genres words were selected for their auditory properties no
less than for their referential meaning. They explored sound patterns in literary texts, showing that meaning resides
in sound as well as in semantics. Shklovskii in particular identified literary devices, such as retardation (the
intentional slowing down of plot development to create suspense), parallel story lines and repetitions. Plot
development itself was shown to be a device: the chronology of a narrative could be rearranged to achieve
particular effects. The presumed chronological order of events in a narrative the Formalists termed fabula
(frequently translated as story); the artistic rearrangement of events for purposes of narration they called siuzhet
(usually rendered as plot). As with the distinction between practical and poetic language, here too the Formalists
cast matters in terms of an opposition between the non-literary (fabula) and the literary (siuzhet).

2 Literariness
The Formalists emphasis on the device and their attention to arrangement and selection of verbal elements were
an attempt to account for what Jakobson termed the literariness of the work. Message was necessarily affected by
presentation, so that a works literariness was an integral and inseparable part of its message or content. Instead of
seeing form as a covering imposed on a pre-existing content, the Formalists rejected the dichotomy of content and
form, seeing words, syntax and intonation as simultaneously both content and form. The literary work consisted
exclusively of formed content.
Formalist theory and practice were part of a strident literary debate with Russian Marxist critics, and many
Formalist statements were deliberately polemical and one-sided. Formalism shared its polemical stance and
emphasis on form with Russian Futurist poetry, which emphasized sounds in isolation from meaning; the
self-valuable word; neologisms; and shock value. Shklovskiis widely publicized statement, art is the sum of its
devices, was an example of the polemical nature of Formalist utterances, as were his assessment of Laurence
Sternes Tristram Shandy as the most typical novel of world literature, and his categorical statement that a literary
work is nothing but form.
In spite of such catchwords and slogans, the Formalist emphasis on form in no way dismissed meaning.
Eikhenbaums study of verse intonation in his book Melodika russkogo liricheskogo stikha (Melody in Russian
Lyric Verse) (1922) examined the interaction of lexical meaning and syntax in dozens of poems, showing that
literary interpretation rested on the blend of the semantic and the formal. Formalism sought to displace the usual
explanation of content as a reflection of the non-literary world, replacing it with an approach to content as a
literary component of a work. What the Formalists objected to (like the American New Critics after them) was the
attempt to paraphrase a works content, extracting it from the verbal blend. The problem with the content-form
dichotomy was that it implicitly equated content with meaning.
With the distinction between poetic and practical language in place, the Formalists began to examine the workings
of poetic language in specific literary texts. This middle stage of Formalism, lasting from about 1919 to 1924,
treated the literary work as a dynamic system in which contrasting and often conflicting features competed for
primacy. Instead of matching each other and forming a congruous whole, elements such as rhythm, syntax and
intonation were shown often to be at odds, forcing concessions from one another in a struggle for dominance. At
the heart of poetic language the Formalists saw not harmony but dissonance, incongruity and struggle. This
followed logically from their premise of automatization: the need for poetic language constantly to renew and
defamiliarize meant the creation of new, unexpected combinations of linguistic and semantic material. Borrowing
from the German aesthetician Broder Christiansen the concept of the dominanta, Tynianov in Problemy

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Russian literary Formalism

stikhotvornogo iazyka (Problems of Verse Language) (1924) theorized that the prevailing element in this struggle
deformed the others. Tynianov introduced the term constructive principle to refer to the relationship between the
dominanta and the other elements in a work. Shklovskiis catch-phrase art is the sum of its devices was now
shown to be an oversimplification: art was far more than the mere sum of its parts, because the meaning of each
part was dependent on the whole context created by the work. Each element served to place the others in relief.
To view the literary work as a system was to see it as a self-created world rather than an imitation of outside
reality or referent. In this the formalist concept of the literary work paralleled the work of Ferdinand De Saussure
(2) on the sign. Saussures sign, which consisted of mental concept (signified) and word (signifier), took no
account of the referent, which was completely outside the sign. Similarly, for the Formalists content, like
referent, was completely outside the literary work, which consisted of aestheticized meaning - the interaction of all
components of the literary work.
Since the goal of poetic language was to renew familiar, automatized language, and since what was familiar
changed over time, it followed that what constituted poetic language in one epoch would cease to be poetic in the
next. Poetic language itself was susceptible to automatization through repeated usage in different works, thereby
losing its poeticity. Writers trying to overcome the automatized conventions of their literary fathers would turn to
works by their grandfathers or uncles for devices that might revitalize exhausted genres. In Noveishaia
russkaia poziia (Modern Russian Poetry) (1919), Jakobson stated that new literary forms arise to replace
previous literary forms that have become exhausted. This position, for which the Formalists found precedent in the
work of the nineteenth-century Russian ethnographer Aleksandr Veselovskii, contrasted with the widely held view
of the nineteenth-century civic critics and the Bolsheviks that new forms in literature are needed to express a new
content, such as a change in the structure of society.

3 Literary evolution
In building change into its model of poetic language, Russian literary Formalism differed from theories that
applied a formulaic description to all works of a given genre. Poetic language was by definition new language. In
O literaturnoi voliutsii (On Literary Evolution) (1927), Tynianov described this process of renewal and change
in poetic language as a four-step cycle of literary evolution: (1) a new constructive principle arises to replace the
previously dominant one that has finally become automatized; (2) the new constructive principle gains currency in
new literary works; (3) it becomes more widespread; (4) it becomes automatized and evokes opposing constructive
principles.
The concept of a constructive principle within a dynamic system whose elements are constantly colliding allowed
the Formalists to challenge accepted interpretations of major literary works, especially those widely characterized
as examples of realism. Eikhenbaums seminal article on Gogols short story The Overcoat called into question
the consensual interpretation of that story as a portrayal of the humble man disdained by his colleagues and
superiors in an inhumane society. Eikhenbaum argued that the realist passages, including the famous words I am
your brother, universally interpreted as a plea for recognition of human dignity, constitute only one strand of
Gogols narrative, and that they are undercut by another, comic strand woven out of sheer linguistic play. When a
realist narrative is placed in the context of a linguistic game, Eikhenbaum argued, its meaning is altered.
Eikhenbaums article reflected the Formalist bias that realistic mimesis was not the main business of literature.
Having established that each work constituted an aesthetic system, the Formalists now had an approach to
literature that could be offered as an alternative to realist readings. A system of interacting elements meant that the
function of a device could change depending on its context. Furthermore, the workings of this dynamic system, the
demands of artistic presentation, worked against an accurate reflection of the world. Aesthetic requirements
conflicted with factual accuracy; literary works on historical themes might need to sacrifice historical accuracy in
the interests of aesthetics.

4 Autonomy of literature
The differentiation between practical and poetic language, as well as the notion of system, allowed the Formalists
to claim that literature was an autonomous activity not chained to economic, social or political reality. The
Formalists thus liberated literary studies from the mimetic orientation that sees the work as a reflection of the

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Russian literary Formalism

world. Such harnessing of the literary work to the outside world had been the practice of mainstream Russian
literary criticism. It characterized the radical civic critics of the mid-nineteenth century, who pressed literature into
the service of social justice; the academic critics of the cultural-historical and cultural-psychological schools; and
also the Marxist critics who gained legitimacy after the Bolshevik Revolution and with whom the Formalists
engaged in bitter polemics. Russian literary Formalism set out to make literary criticism into a scholarly discipline
by constructing an objective theory of literature, centred on the work itself, that would not subordinate the study
of literature to other disciplines. Most of the Formalists theoretical concepts, such as their early emphasis on
sound and the palpability of the word, pointed to the work itself rather than to the cultural context that produced
it.
The case for literary autonomy was a major achievement of Formalism while simultaneously containing the germ
of its demise. The notion on which autonomy rested - that of a poetic language whose definition lay in the
revitalization of automatized forms - accounted merely for the fact of literary change, not for the actual direction of
change at any given time. By the mid-1920s, it became clear that the automatization/revitalization dynamic, while
at least partly valid, left too many questions unanswered, and that the answers were to be found in the non-literary
contexts that Formalism had dismissed as irrelevant to literariness and aesthetics. Within the confines of the purely
work-centred poetics, no further insights were possible.
In an attempt to incorporate some of these contexts without sacrificing the literary autonomy for which Formalism
had fought so hard, Tynianov proposed a modification of Formalist theory. His article of 1927, On Literary
Evolution, put forth a model of culture presenting its various aspects - economic, social, political, religious,
linguistic, literary - as parallel, autonomously developing lines, or series. Tynianovs model preserved the
Formalist premise of literary autonomy, since each series had its own immanent development that was not directly
affected or caused by any other series. Indirect influences from other series, however, could occur, passing
vertically from one series to the next as though through a porous membrane. The most significant influence,
Tynianov suggested, would come from the neighbouring series; influences from more distant series, which would
have to pass through the intervening series, would be modified along the way and more difficult, if not impossible,
to trace. Initially Tynianov maintained that the literary series had as its closest neighbour the linguistic series;
subsequently, in a collaborative article of 1928, Problems in the Study of Literature and Language, Tynianov and
Jakobson proposed that the series change their positions, so that in different eras the literary series might border on
the economic, the social or the political.
At the same time that the model of the parallel series was intended to reinvigorate the increasingly repetitive
practice of Formalist criticism by admitting a select amount of extra-literary information into literary
interpretation, it also challenged the Marxist model of economic base and cultural superstructure (see Marx, K 8).
Tynianovs model, in providing for immanent development within each series, conferred on literature and all other
activities an autonomy that was incompatible with the notion of a base reflected in a superstructure.
With the rigid controls imposed on literature, philosophy and theory at the close of the 1920s when Stalin
consolidated his power, the Formalists had to abandon the attempt to open their literary theory to include
extra-literary factors. Those Formalists who remained in Russia by and large omitted theoretical issues from their
subsequent writings. The tendency of post-structuralist literary theories to place literary works in their broader
cultural context addresses an omission of Formalism; but these same critical schools have internalized the
founding Formalist assumption that the construction of the linguistic/literary utterance is central to meaning.
See also: Deconstruction 1; Semiotics; Structuralism; Structuralism in literary theory
CAROL ANY

References and further reading

Any, C. (1994) Boris Eikhenbaum: Voices of a Russian Formalist, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.(See
ch. 3 for analysis of Formalist theory.)
Belyi, A. (1910) Simvolizm: Kniga statei (Symbolism: A Book of Articles), Moscow: Musaget.(Referred to in 1.)
Bennett, T. (1979) Formalism and Marxism, London: Methuen.(Examines Formalism with respect to Saussure,
Bakhtin, Althusser and post-Althusserians.)
Eikhenbaum, B. (1922) Melodika russkogo liricheskogo stikha (Melody in Russian Lyric Verse), St Petersburg:
Opoiaz.(Contrasts the melodic intonational structure of poems by Zhukovskii and Lermontov with unmelodic
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Russian literary Formalism

poems of Pushkin, Tiutchev and Fet.)

Eikhenbaum, B. (1919) Kak sdelana "Shinel" Gogolia; trans. R. Maguire, How Gogols "Overcoat" Is Made,
in R. Maguire (ed.), Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1974, 269-92.(The classic example of Russian Formalism, showing how syntax and word play can
undermine conventional semantics.)
Erlich, V. (1981) Russian Formalism: History - Doctrine, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.(Fourth edn of
Erlichs definitive 1955 work on Russian Formalism, with full bibliography.)
Gorman, D. (1992) A Bibliography of Russian Formalism in English, in Style 26 (4): 554-76.(Thorough listing
of anthologies, works by individual Formalists, and works about Formalism.)
Hansen-Love, A. (1978) Der russische Formalismus, Vienna: Akademie der Wissenschaften.(Written after
Erlichs study and assumes greater knowledge of Formalism.)
Iakubinskii, L. (1916) O zvukakh stikhotvornogo iazyka (On the Sounds of Verse Language), in Sborniki po
teorii poticheskogo iazyka (Collected Articles on the Theory of Poetic Language), Petrograd: Opoiaz, vol. 1.
(Referred to in 1.)
Jakobson, R. (1919) Noveishaia russkaia poziia; trans. E. Brown, Modern Russian Poetry: Velemir
Khlebnikov, in E.J. Brown (ed.) Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, New York, NY: Oxford University
Press, 1973, 58-82, 413-14.(A Formalist study of the Futurist poetry of Velemir Khlebnikov.)
Jakobson, R. and Tynianov, Iu. (1928) Problemy izucheniia literatury i iazyka; trans. H. Eagle, Problems in
the Study of Literature and Language, in L. Matejka and K. Pomorska, eds, Readings in Russian Poetics:
Formalist and Structuralist Views, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971, 79-81.(Written when Russian Formalism
had exhausted its possibilities, this brief outline suggests new directions for literary theory.)
Jameson, F. (1972) The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.(Theoretical analysis for knowledgeable readers.)
Shklovskii, V. [Shklovsky] (1914) Voskreshenie slova; trans. R. Sherwood, The Resurrection of the Word, in
S. Bann and J. Bowlt, (eds), Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation, Edinburgh:
Scottish Academic Press, 1973, 41-7.(The first work of Russian Formalism argues that a poets task is to make
us perceive familiar words in a new way.)
Shklovskii, V. [Shklovsky] (1916) Iskusstvo kak prim; trans. B. Sher, Art as Device, in V. Shlovskii
[Shklovsky], Theory of Prose, Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive, 1990.(How literary works renew conventional
perceptions.)
Shukman, A. (1977) A Bibliography of Translations of Formalist Writings, in Russian Poetics in Translation,
vol. 4, Formalist Theory, eds L. OToole and A. Shukman, 100-8.(123 titles in English, French, German and
Italian. Includes a category on Bakhtin and his School.)
Steiner, P. (1984) Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.(Argues for
metaphorical basis of Formalist theory, which variously approaches literature as machine, organism or system.)
Striedter, J. (1989) Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value: Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism
Reconsidered, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.(Ch. 1 explicates Formalist theory of prose and
evolution; ch. 2 examines relationship of Russian Formalism with the Prague School.)
Tynianov, Iu. (1924) Problemy stikhotvornogo iazyka; trans. M. Sosa and B. Harvey, Problems of Verse
Language, Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1981.(Distinguishes literary criteria for poetry versus prose.)
Tynianov, Iu. (1927) O literaturnoi voliutsii; trans. C. Luplow, On Literary Evolution, in L. Matejka and K.
Pomorska, (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
66-78.(Theoretical discussion of how new literary genres eventually become automatized.)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London and New York: Routledge (1998)