Russian Formalism and Literary Theory
Russian Formalism
1. Introduction
Contemporary literary theory arguably begins with the Russian Formalist school. Two groups comprised this movement:
- The Moscow Linguistic Circle, founded in 1915, included researchers like Jakobson, Tomashevsky, Vinokur, and Bogatyrev.
- The Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Opojaz), founded in St. Petersburg in 1916, included linguists such as Shklovsky, Tynyanov, Eichenbaum, and Brik.
While the Moscow Linguistic Circle leaned towards applying pre-existing linguistic theories to literary texts, Opojaz developed its own theories for analyzing artistic texts. Despite this difference, their interests and objectives aligned, creating a relatively unified movement.
From 1916 onward, the formalist group, with its two foundational schools, solidified its identity by rejecting positivism. Instead of external considerations of artwork, they advocated for an internal, immanent approach.
The avant-garde literary movement played a crucial role in shaping these critics’ direction. Formalist theories often reflected the avant-garde aesthetic, characterized by a radical inversion of Romantic concepts, where traditional literary thought proved inadequate.
This inherent focus on the internal aspects of art inevitably led to clashes with social theories of art. In a politically charged intellectual climate demanding commitment to the revolutionary cause, the rise of Marxism as official doctrine resulted in open conflict between Marxists and Formalists. The Formalists faced severe consequences, leading to isolation and, in many cases, emigration.
2. Literary Thought of the Russian Formalists
Initially aligned with a specific avant-garde aesthetic, the Russian Formalists gradually distanced themselves from this direct association, developing theories applicable to all art. While many of their works analyzed avant-garde authors, they also studied classic Russian writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Pushkin and Gogol.
Contemporary literary theory owes a significant debt to the concepts and assumptions of the Russian Formalists. Their contributions can be categorized into three areas:
- The concept of literature.
- Metatheoretical contributions concerning the concept of literary theory, science, and methodology.
- The characterization of literary language, particularly verse and prose.
Understanding the Russian Formalists’ concept of literature requires examining their most prominent theory: the theory of defamiliarization (ostranenie), developed by Viktor Shklovsky and largely supported by Roman Jakobson in his essay “On Realism in Art” (1921). This theory proposed a realism based on disrupting conventional perceptions.
According to Shklovsky, the poetic message creates a gap for the reader, preventing unconscious, automated reading and drawing attention to the text itself, thus producing aesthetic pleasure.
This defamiliarization and the resulting disruption of automated perception stem from the poetic function of language. The Formalists were the first to address the specificity of literary works and the distinction between literary and standard language.
The concept of art as a device or process was widespread among Russian Formalists in the 1920s. Their pursuit of literary specificity led them to differentiate between practical/communicative language and literary language. As Jakobson stated in 1965, “Poetic language operates a fundamental change in relations between signifier and signified, and the sign and the concept.” Literature, therefore, represented a profound alteration of everyday language rules, constituting a special language.