Эпоха «остранения». Русский формализм и современное гуманитарное знание

In this paper, I specifically shed some light on the intellectual milieu of Central and Eastern Europe at the time when Russian (as well as German and British) ideas served as building blocks for Polish Formalism and position it as a network of possibilities, out of which modern literary theory could have arisen and spread – first as a regional science in Central and Eastern Europe, than as a broader phenomenon reaching beyond its original European context. The Big Bang, if you will, that lead to the emergence of the “mophic field” of Central and Eastern European literary theory took place in Germany at the turn of the 19th century. But the field itself is defined by theoretical exchange between the East and West that takes place within its fuzzy confines. First, I will expand upon the displacements in space and in meaning in regard to the central formalist notion of priem with the purpose of elucidating some general premises of the morphic field of Formalism.

I place into focus the most central problem that concerns Polish Formalism – its tense relationship to Phenomenology and the release of this tension through Manfred Kridl’s “integral method of literary study” – in hopes of creating a context against which the tensions in other parts of the field (especially in Russia) consequently become more lucid. In the context of conceptual travels – described in the first part of the article – it becomes apparent that both the vehement rejection of Phenomenology by the Warsaw Formalists and Kridl’s attempt at a compromise between Formalism and Phenomenology may also be interpreted as an effort to the restitution of the original (Russian) meaning of priem in the context of the other part of the morphologic field. The point is that only the loss and the attempts of the restitution of original connotations – sometimes too obvious to be noticeable in the original context – give a clearer outline of theory’s original arrangement than the attempts that do not account for reception.

Travelling priem

In the case of the reception of Russian Formalism in Poland, one deals with the reception of reception, because the positions of Opojaz were, as Hansen-Löve put it, from the onset oriented extremely rezeptionsästhetisch [Hansen-Löve, 1978: 106–107; cf. Жирмунский, 1923; Выготский, 1986: 74 ff.] (As a side, aesthetics after Kant or even after Baumgarten function exclusively rezeptionsästhetisch.) I assume that the etymological origin of priem that comes from priniat’ is on the brink of obviousness for the Russian ear. Undeniably, Russian Formalism was more than just a mere Rezeptionsästhetik; it is exactly the surplus value added to the reception in the theoretical conceptions of Formalism that interests me most.

In Russian, the word priem has thanks to its etymology and connotations a nature of the Urphänomen, as Goethe described it on the example of color that unites not only the opposed forces of darkness and light, but also the subject and the object in a definite situation of experiencing an effect of color. [Goethe, 1981a; 1981b; 1981c; Christiansen, 1909; 1911/1912; Wóycicki, 1914] The priem is one of the central notions of Russian Formalism that, like ustanovka, motivirovka, encompass not only the production and the reception of an artistic entity, but also the inner construction of the work [cf. Hansen-Löve, 1978: 212–213]. All three aspects of the literary process of communication are united in the most important notions of Russian Formalism: priem, ustanovka, motivirovka. They all relate to the subject, the object, and the recipient of the literary work. Priem’s holistic pretentions forced Hansen-Löve to use in his reconstruction of the formalist methodology differentiated symbolizations (priem-I, priem-II, priem-III, motivirovka-I, motivirovka-III etc.) for the facets that in the original context made up a unity of the notion. But a historical reconstruction should not only render the whole range of meanings subscribed to certain Russian words, but also explain the conditions of the possibility of the polyphonic unity carried by a polysemantic word.

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