David Gorman
In the literary humanities, there is currently a received account of Russian Formalism, which will be abandoned here. Its essence is this: Formalism begat Structuralism, which in turn begat Post‐structuralism. When Structuralism had its brief heyday in Anglo‐American literary studies, during the 1970s, familiarity with Russian Formalism seemed like the required preliminary to immersion in Structuralism—though only the preliminary. Structuralism (a contemporary movement of thought with French sources) was what critics of the time were doing; Formalism (a bygone Russian movement) was a precursor. Subsequently, when Structuralism gave way to the many varieties of Post‐structuralism as the primary focus in literary theory, Formalism gave way to Structuralism as the main topic of the introductory lecture in a theory survey, or of the first chapter in books of the Theory for Dummies type. If this is where we stand, it seems best to start over with Russian Formalism.
The assumption in what follows is that this kind of theory matters to literary study in its own right, and not as a preface to some other theory. The case proposed here is that the Formalists developed ideas about verbal art and the methods of studying it that still offer resources and challenge students of literature. Two points to keep in mind about this article are, first, that it refers to Formalism as a “school” or “group” for convenience of exposition, not factual accuracy—even the name, “Formalism,” fails to apply—and second, that it offers a theoretical reconstruction of Russian Formalism, not a historical reconstruction. Only a brief word about the historical situation is provided.
The Russian Formalist school, such it was, emerged between 1914 and 1916, and was suppressed after 1929. It was not identified as a school or named until 1923, when Leon Trotsky and others formulated their objections to the practices of various critics in collective terms. As such, Russian Formalism remains literally an unfinished project, leaving behind a historical and a conceptual task.
The historical task, which can only be touched upon here, must begin with clearing away some mythology. The frequent evocation in commentaries of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOIAZ), as if they constituted an organized group, has to be replaced by a patient re‐imagining of the networks and affiliations that developed, without planning and always under the pressure of very limiting circumstances, among young scholars in Petersburg and Moscow interested in literary phenomena in relatively distinct ways. Studying these people in this context requires attention to institutional membership and collective publications, relations of patronage and alliance, and patterns of citation. Some of the relations involved were purely personal; there were also substantial tensions and conflicts.
Although there was no official membership list in the supposed school, it seems plausible to distinguish three types of participants in the network. At the core were Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yuri Tynianov, Osip Brik, and Boris Tomashevsky, with Roman Jakobson (who left Russia in 1920) and Vladimir Propp (a folklorist with almost no personal or institutional connection to the others) standing further out. Only work by these core participants is cited in this article. Peripheral figures (sometimes referred to as “fellow travelers”) included Viktor Zhirmunsky and Viktor Vinogradov. Among others who produced work that arguably contributed to Formalism or showed its influence were Sergei Bernstein, Petr Bogartyrev, Olga Freidenberg, Lydia Ginzburg, Yevgeny Polivanov, Aleksandr Reformatsky, Aleksandr Skaftymov, Nikolai Trubetskoy, Grigory Vinokur, Lev Yakubinsky, and Boris Yarkho. A full account of Formalism would involve a consideration of each of these figures (and others no doubt), and of their interconnections. This would probably involve considerable revisions in our ideas about the postulated network. This article takes Anatoly Liberman’s remark as its slogan: “What unites the Formalists as a group can probably be stated in three pages; all the rest consists of special investigations by very different people” (Liberman 1990: xxxi).
Here we turn to the second job facing anyone who contemplates the unfinished project of Russian Formalism: reconstructing the concepts these scholars developed and picking up their research from the point where, under duress, they abruptly broke off. Until this work is carried through, literary theorists have no basis for deciding the significance of Russian Formalism. The focus of this article is on some of the broadly shared topics that help to define the group: principles of literary study, lyric poetry, narrative fiction, and literary history. The earliest work by Shklovsky, Jakobson, and others was produced in the milieu of Futurist poetry and avant‐garde art generally, which had an impact on Formalism that is noted recurrently in what follows, but not separately discussed. Other shared topics had to be omitted: style, oratory, folklore, and film. Also unaddressed is the complex topic of the relation of the Formalist School to the contemporaneous Petersburg group now called the Bakhtin Circle.
Official or unofficial schools or styles of criticism arise wherever literature becomes a subject of academic study, as a kind of natural byproduct. The main reason why the Formalist group continues to be discussed in the current era (among hundreds or thousands of others long forgotten) has to do with their commitment to theory. Much Formalist writing consists of programmatic statements of broad ideas about literature and its study, as well as debates on methodology, and critiques of previous theory and practice. Predecessors are faulted much less for the results of their studies than for holding the wrong principles. Even “applied” critical and historical work by the Formalists is typically intended to illustrate a program—or at least to explore the consequences of adopting certain ideas or methods. Contemporary critics would probably qualify this by saying that the Formalists’ conception of theory was much narrower than is currently presumed in the literary humanities: they described their area of interest as “theory of literature.” But because their notion was relatively circumscribed, it may be possible to state some of their main principles which, if we find them interesting, we can then criticize.
If there is a conceptual starting‐point for Formalism, it can be stated thus: literature is autonomous. The Formalists began as a group of young scholars who rejected the prevailing manners in which they found literature treated. Journalistic or belletristic critics recognized the phenomenon of literature but discussed it in subjective, impressionistic ways that could not contribute any lasting knowledge about it. Meanwhile, academic specialists generally treated literature as epiphenomenal: for them literary facts were reducible without remainder to some other range of facts—psychological, social, philosophical, and so on—that explained them.1 Of particular concern to the Formalists was the temptation to translate literary particularities into vague aesthetic terms—a temptation common in both academic and journalistic discourse on literature. Although they approached literature as a form of art, these critics held that the purpose of literary study was to pay attention to features specific to verbal art, undistracted by general aesthetic principles, which were a different concern entirely.
To assert that verbal art is autonomous is not to hold that it constitutes an isolated sphere. This was exactly the charge brought by Trotsky and others in the initial reaction against Formalism (Erlich 1981: ch. 6). But the Marxists have been followed by a very long line of theorists who are unable for one reason or another to accept the strong antireductionist principle from which Formalist criticism begins. If we grant the idea that literature is something about which we can have knowledge (which is not ultimately knowledge about something else), of course the question that follows is what the relations are between the domain of verbal art and the rest of the universe. Here the Formalists can be criticized, in the easy hindsight of historical perspective, for brash overstatements. Eventually, however, many of them did turn to consider how literary facts related to the nonliterary.2 It would have been interesting to see what they would have made of this, had their work had not been cut short. At any rate, the validity and specificity of a literary domain remains very much a current issue in the humanities.
There are many ways to pursue a program of studying literature as literature rather than as something else. The New Critics, with whom the Russian Formalists are routinely compared, began from the same antireductionist principle, but diverged widely in how they pursued it. New Critical method focuses on one work at a time, starting from observations on its verbal texture, eventually drawing interpretive conclusions. So influential has this model of “close reading” or “practical criticism” been in the Anglo‐American academy that scholars trained in this style have difficulty even grasping that there could be any alternative. Consider Shklovsky’s essay of 1921 on Tristram Shandy, a survey of Laurence Sterne’s use of narrative devices and his style, anti‐mimetic in effect, of highlighting rather than concealing them. Various critics have complained that this seems a totally inadequate “reading” of the novel, about which there is so much more to say. Granted—but all that concerns Shklovsky here is how Tristram Shandy is composed.3 Methodologically he follows linguists and folklorists in trying to identify the shared features of a corpus of utterances or compositions. Neither the unique qualities nor the larger significance of these items come into this kind of study. As applied to literature, this amounts to a renewal of the project of general poetics (in contrast to the restricted sense of the study of verse practice; generalized poetics is what the Formalists meant by “theory of literature”).4 The Formalists share with the poetics of Aristotle a conception of literature as a distinct craft, but drop its prescriptive orientation. Like modern linguists, they aim only to describe.
It would have saved much confusion later on if these critics had been called the Russian Functionalists, since an emphasis on function gives the school its distinctive orientation. In the agenda‐setting studies collected in Theory of Prose (1929 [1925]), Shklovsky focuses on compositional design: identifying various linguistic devices and literary techniques in the work and describing how they contribute to it. This kind of operationalism is hardly unique: in a close‐reading model, for instance, you can also select a textual feature and ask, “what does this do?” But New Critics pose this question on a case‐by‐case basis. What interests Formalists is the range of functions a device might serve in a corpus of works. The paradigm here is Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928), where he demonstrates that the same narrative function—for example, helping the hero—can be fulfilled by entirely different figures, be it a wise old man, a fairy godmother, or friendly mice. The composition is made, not of forms, but functions—or, better, devices serving functions.
Nothing shows better the dynamic aspect of Formalists’ thought than the evolution of their functionalism. One thing they quickly realized is that not every compositional element works on the same level: thus the introduction of the notion of the “dominant,” the function that organizes all the others. They were slower to realize the implications of the fact that functions must correlate within a system, but later Formalist work is much concerned with which literary system best pertains to functional analysis—that of the work, or of the oeuvre, or perhaps of the conjuncture or milieu overall (see “Literary History”).
The principles stated aim to make overall sense of Formalist writings and to bring out what is still important about them. In other words, broad theses of this kind are approximations that will not be equally manifest in all Formalist writings. The other side of making sense of Formalism is avoiding misinterpretations, and this is where it would be useful to add remarks about common misunderstandings.
Reading in Formalist writings, one soon notices a relative lack of interest in form—that is, in the ornamental and stylistic matters traditionally identified as formal. It comes as a surprise that the Formalists were not formalists only if we forget that it was opponents of this school who gave it the name. Not only did the label stick, however, but students continue to be distracted by its connotations. The term “formalism” applies to an aesthetic outlook, and anyone who criticizes the idea that aesthetics can provide the basis for a program of literary study—as the (so‐called) Formalists did—will naturally reject the name. So when we come across someone like Shklovsky or Tynianov discussing thematic, generic, or contextual matters, it would be absurd to find that inconsistent; at best it would be to forget the historical irony of referring to these critics as Russian “Formalists.” That said, it is not absurd to be puzzled by their critique of the form/content distinction, particularly in light of the distinction they draw between form and material. Isn’t this just replacing the term “content” with “material”? It is not, because a different contrast is proposed. A literary work’s compositional features are what make it literary; but a work cannot entirely consist of these features.5 It draws semantic elements, so to speak, from the larger world. In a literary composition, this material takes on form. To put it somewhat crudely, “form” in the new distinction subsumes form along with what was traditionally called content—because images and themes are as much compositional elements as stylistic and structural features.
From time to time in Formalist writings, reference is made to “science” (nauka). The context typically relates to the need to establish a science of literary study, formulating “laws” of literary evolution, and so forth. Such references have provided an easy excuse for dismissing Formalism as intellectually unsophisticated. But this response is completely misconceived. For contemporary practitioners of the literary humanities, “science” is a red‐flag term—a trigger word—conjuring up associations of positivism, universal quantification, and instrumental reason. To interpret the usage of the Formalists in this sense is to commit an anachronism. Their invocations of science do not connote natural science but, as in other European languages (cf. scienza in Italian, Wissenschaft in German), something much more general. They are expressing themselves in the same way that Ferdinand de Saussure did, for example, in proposing that linguistics become a discipline, part of a larger “science of signs”: what he found missing in linguistic study was a conception of it as a teachable body of knowledge. Likewise the Formalists saw literary study as falling short of being an academic discipline. In public discourse, what passed for literary discussion consisted mainly of gossip about writers and personal impressions of journalists, while within the academy specifically literary phenomena were not addressed in suitable terms, but always with reference to other frameworks, aesthetic, psychological, sociological, and so forth. With some exceptions, then, it will save contemporary students of Formalist work much distraction if they read “science” in Formalist writings as meaning “discipline.”
While their interest in literature was comprehensive, most Formalists were primarily concerned with poetry. This is a problem for those who study them in translation, obviously. Of the limited selection of their writings available in English, most pertain to narrative and literary history; of work on verse, with some exceptions, what tends to be translated are selections that generalize.6 However interesting these broad comments on poetry are, they mislead students as to the orientation of the group, which was toward specifics. Although this chapter is written under the same handicap, it may be possible to give some indications about how the Formalists approached the lyric, both generally and specifically.
Given their opposition to impressionistic criticism, Formalist work on poetry always treats it as a craft—that is, as a practice that can not only be learned, but learned about. Within their program for the theory of literature as a general poetics, the Formalists aimed to renew the study of poetry—poetics in the narrow sense—by drawing on modern linguistics. The hypothesis was that poetics in this sense would be a linguistics of poetry; and Jakobson illustrates this method in “The Newest Russian Poetry” (1921), in which he treats the language of Velimir Khlebnikov’s poetry as a dialect, the workings of which can be described.
Since much of the craft of poetry lies in versification, the Formalists took a special interest in verse composition. On the one hand, they produced significant work on meter. Unsurprisingly, they were dissatisfied with traditional approaches to metrics, which they tried to set on a new basis, borrowing freely from linguistics. Tomashevsky and others criticized reliance on the notion of metrical “feet,” and aimed to develop a line‐based metrics. They also pioneered the use of statistical methods in the analysis of meter. On the other hand, the involvement of many in the group with avant‐garde writing inoculated the Formalists against treating poetry as a fixed practice. They postulated that the essence of verse is rhythm, of which meter is one aspect, one particular set of techniques among others that a writer can utilize to develop a distinctive verse rhythm. Beyond that, however, the Formalist approach to poetry as a linguistics of verse involved, first, recognizing all the verbal elements on which a poet could draw and, second, analyzing how these elements were integrated in poetic composition. Of course, the lexical and stylistic choices made by poets are the perennial stuff of literary analysis; it was Brik who first suggested that their syntactic choices should also be considered—not just the kinds of words poets use, but the kinds of sentences they write. This idea, set out in “Rhythm and Syntax” (Brik 1927), that there is a grammar of poetry and poetry of grammar, guided a long series of Jakobson’s later studies.7
Tynianov’s The Problem of Verse Language (1924b) synthesizes early Formalist conclusions about lyric poetry. Content and form, previously treated as separate domains of analysis, must be subsumed under the general notion of construction, understood as the way in which various linguistic elements become integrated into a poetic composition. The notion of the dominant serves as a way to organize these factors into a describable hierarchy of functions within poems, while the notion of orientation or set (ustankova) is introduced to provide a starting point for functional analysis: in poetry, for instance, the set is toward the sound, which controls how the sense is employed—the reverse in prose. It was the history of poetry rather than some abstract theory of it that was Tynianov’s primary objective, and in later work he is much taken up with developments in Russian poetry, in which the literary milieu of each period was treated as a kind of system in evolution, within and against which writers defined themselves by using such practices as parody and what we now call hybridization.8
A related direction in Formalist work led toward a general stylistics, in which even prose works can be analyzed according to how they use language. Eikhenbaum’s essay on “The Overcoat” (1919) focuses closely on Gogol’s stylistic play, continued in his writings on skaz narration (that is, narration reflecting an oral style); and the writings of the Bakhtin school on dialogism and heteroglossia can be seen as an extension of this line of work.
No doubt influenced by Eikhenbaum’s treatment of the topic in his survey, commentators have strongly emphasized the conflicts, ambiguities, and outright confusions in Formalist discussions of the relation of poetry to prose. These provide a vivid example of the provisional quality of the school’s work. It is historically, but perhaps not theoretically, misleading to treat as a discovery the gradual realization that poetry is not some universally definable kind of language, but that in any given context there may be linguistic usages that serve a recognizably poetic function. This description brings out some distinctive commitments of Russian Formalism: what matters for literary analysis is not form but function; treating literature as a compositional craft constitutes a first step toward literary history; and the project of a linguistics of poetry can become part of a general poetics, within which lyric will be one topic.
Although decidedly a lesser concern for the Formalists than poetry or literary history, they did produce landmark work on fictional narrative, or, as they inclined to call it, “prose.”9 They took folkloristics as a model in their thinking about narrative in a way parallel to their use of linguistics in the study of poetry (Doležel 1990: ch. 6). It is no accident that the most important Formalist publication on narrative was Propp’s Morphology; but the idea that stories can be studied comparatively, in groups, underlies Formalist work on narrative. In his 1925 essay on O. Henry, for example, Eikhenbaum treats the stories as a corpus, the compositional rules of which can be established by induction; and one of Shklovsky’s perennial aims was to create a typology of narrative techniques, in the use of devices such as parallelism, delay, linking, and so on.10 Formalist work on “prose” contributed directly to the formation of the contemporary subdiscipline of narratology, and the Formalist influence remains evident in the sense the Structuralist pioneers in the field share of what pertains to narrative analysis (in particular, structural techniques) as well as what does not (for instance, the traditional category of character). The most important legacy is a deepened sense of narrative composition as a matter of elements with interacting function—in other words, of “how X is made.”
Textbooks routinely declare that a milestone in the development of narratology was the distinction drawn by the Formalists between fabula and syuzhet. Textbooks define fabula as the sequence of occurrences that implicitly constitute the story and syuzhet as the way the story is explicitly presented in narrative (sequentially or not). There is some confusion here. These terms are intended as applications to the narrative domain of the general contrast between form, as whatever belongs functionally to a literary work, and material, as whatever in the world at large the work draws upon. On this understanding, the syuzhet is the narrative (story included) and the fabula the stuff out of which it was composed. In effect, the textbook definition actually distinguishes two levels of syuzhet: that of the story, already composed not only by the identification of the occurrences, but their organization into a series (or even, in some textbooks, a causally related series), and that of the narrative. In fact later accounts usually identify yet a third layer of syuzhet, pertaining to the textual or discourse aspect of the narrative, a central focus of narratology but not generally a Formalist concern.
There is nothing inherently wrong with narratologists distinguishing as many layers of syuzhet as they can find useful; indeed, this has been a very productive idea. But it represents an extension of Formalism, not an application. The confusion, which begins with the Formalists themselves (Todorov 1971), lies in treating the fabula/syuzhet contrast as an analytical tool. Much more potentially useable is the Formalist distinction, so far under‐utilized in narratology, between device and motivation.11 Actually, there are two distinctions here. Literary works are composed of techniques or devices, which can either be concealed (or “motivated,” as the Formalists said) or revealed (“laid bare”). Take the narrative example of a coincidental meeting. In the Western tradition, narrative plausibility correlates with the degree of motivation supplied for the devices (Genette 1968): in a realistic story, the coincidental quality of the meeting will be disguised much as possible. But realism, like all other literary effects, is a result of compositional technique (Jakobson 1921b). Other effects may be gained from highlighting the implausibility of the coincidence instead—comic, parodic, artistic, and so on (many examples of which can be found discussed by Shklovsky and others). What we are really talking about here is the role in narrative of literary convention, a notion which, likely as a result of their emergence in an avant‐garde literary context, the Formalists generally downplayed, but towards which the whole tendency of their thought gravitates.
In “Rhythm and Syntax,” Brik observes that critics of poetry cannot afford to neglect the claims of sound in favor of sense, or the reverse, because poetry involves both. Of course this is a platitude that could be stated by a critic of any type. But when Brik goes on to say that among poets themselves the emphasis has always fluctuated between sound and sense, and that this fact constitutes a basic topic for historians of poetry, then we hear the distinctively Formalist note. In his survey of 1928, Tomashevsky describes the group as a “new school of literary history,” and we should take this self‐description seriously.
The historical approach of the Formalists is predicated on their commitment to general poetics.12 If literature were just a series of authors, or books, or great authors and great books, there could be no history of that, beyond the life‐and‐works summaries dear to journalistic criticism, the indiscriminate masses of contextual information accumulated by academic criticism, or the timeless conversations among lofty souls projected by philosophical criticism. If, however, you conceive of literature in terms of techniques, genres, and styles, then you have topics that can be studied in a historically specific way. The functionalism of the Formalists also contributes to their historical outlook. If literature consisted of themes (“content”) set into forms by writers, literary history could only be source study. But if you think of literature as a network of motifs and devices to be identified through the functions they serve in compositions then, as Victor Erlich puts it (1981: 268), the historical question is no longer where from, but what for?
Fundamental to the Formalist conception of literary history is conflict. The (gendered) slogan coined by Shklovsky and repeated across the movement, that literary tradition does not pass from father to son, but uncle to nephew, only intimates the kind of storm and stress that the Formalists associated with literary change, and that many of them witnessed first‐hand as youthful partisans of Futurism and similar movements.13 As scholars attempting to put these slogans to use in the study of previous episodes in literary history, they tended to present literary phenomena as elements in a struggle. In Young Tolstoy (1922), for example, Eikhenbaum describes Tolstoy as someone who categorically rejected the literary practices of his own time and place, looking for themes and techniques in eighteenth‐century works by non‐Russian authors like Sterne and Rousseau. Eikhenbaum emphasizes conflict even more strongly in Lermontov (1924), explaining many of the peculiar features of this author’s works as compromises between or adaptations to contending forces in the literary milieu. Overall, the Formalists were much more comfortable dealing with novelty than tradition, although these are the two faces of literary history, indissociable from each other. Had they been able to continue their work, they would presumably have adjusted to give consideration to both.
The unfinished project of Russian Formalism left behind other promising lines of historical research, of which only two can be mentioned here briefly. One gives a central role to the device of parody in the transition from one set of literary norms to another (Tynianov 1927b). In hindsight, replacing parody with the broader notion of pastiche might prove useful. Another suggestive line of approach to literary history begins by recognizing the importance of the milieu (that is, the whole literary culture) in the study of particular figures. This may prove a helpful category under which to think about marginal figures and trends as potentials for historical change.
Many accounts of Formalism hold that their key notion was defamilarization (ostranenie). However, the popularity of the term in modern anthologies and reference works says more about the need for a convenient buzzword or sound‐bite by which to identify the school than anything about either the historical facts or theoretical interest of Formalism.
Shklovsky introduced the notion in an early article, “Art as Device” (1917), which he reprinted as the lead essay in his Theory of Prose, where he explained ostranenie14 as an artistic technique aimed at the renewal of perception. The thought goes like this. Our perceptions are prone to become dulled by habit: if you perceive something often enough, it will no longer make a dent in your consciousness. The task of art is to compensate for this shortcoming, by refreshing our ability to experience things, and ultimately to help us rediscover the world. Art serves as a kind of spiritual cataract removal. Considered as a way to define Russian Formalism, however, this idea is a non‐starter.
To begin with, the idea lacks novelty (for a survey of some precursors, see Ginzburg 2001). Shelley states it clearly in the Defense of Poetry; but we cannot call it an exclusively Romantic idea. Variations on the theme occur elsewhere, and there have been a number of studies comparing Shklovsky’s defamiliarization to Bertolt Brecht’s idea of an “alienation effect” (Verfremdungseffekt; see Robinson 2008). However interesting this influence or convergence may be from the viewpoint of intellectual history, it presents a problem for anyone wanting to define Formalism in this way, precisely because it fails to distinguish the school.
A more immediately literary problem is that the technique that Shklovsky describes for producing the effect of defamiliarization—not calling something by a common name, for instance, or avoiding conventional descriptions of it—remains one device among others. Some authors make abundant use of estrangement effects, notably Shklovsky’s favorite Tolstoy (see also Eikhenbaum 1922), but others none at all. What Shklovsky was presumably aiming for in his essay was to emphasize the centrality of the device or technique (priem) for literary study; if he had followed through, “Art as Device” would indeed serve the purpose of a programmatic statement, since the notion of compositional technique is as basic to Russian Formalism as anything is. In the essay he wrote, however, Shklovsky goes off (very characteristically) on tangents, including a long discussion of erotic euphemisms in folk literature—not an insignificant topic, but not a good example of verbal art renewing perception.
But the overwhelming objection to taking the estrangement theory as somehow definitive or explanatory of Formalism is that it is an aesthetic doctrine: Shklovsky is laying down what art ought to do. As previously explained, this is just one of the things that the Formalists insistently rejected. Aesthetic speculation remains something different from the careful specification of the forms and functions of the elements of verbal art that the Formalists took to be the distinctive task of poetics. Shklovsky’s essay is an interim statement; with a few exceptions, neither he nor other Formalists later tried to characterize what they were doing in terms of ostranenie.
Where the doctrine does have an afterlife in Formalist work lies in the concept of deautomization. The idea was in effect reconfigured to identify an intra‐literary factor: what disruptions of convention serve to make more perceptible is not phenomena generally, but precisely of literary “facts” (Tynianov 1924a). In short, defamiliarization became deformation, which cannot be distinguished from transformation: herein lies a highly promising way to characterize intertextual relations, and the role of convention (and the breaking of convention) in literature. Understood as a philosophy of art, Russian Formalism amounts to a historical curiosity; taken as a project for the general description of literature, however it holds promise for the future of literary study.