Эпоха «остранения». Русский формализм и современное гуманитарное знание

The Polish and the Western receptions of the concept of the priem brought about the splitting of its original unity, and the splitting meant usually overlooking the receptive facet of priem. Quite simply, the foreign words that, in translation, began to signify the priem, did not have the same connotations as the Russian original; they usually lacked the receptive component. Despite the fact that Viktor Zhirmunsky in the first ever presentation of the Russian Formal Method in Germany (and probably in the whole West as well [cf. Wellek, 1963: 280]) rendered priem as Wirkungsmittel, a means of effect or a medium of effect (onto the reader) [Žirmunskij, 1925: 124], the other words started soon to stand in for priem: Verfahren, Kunstgriff, in line with device, artificio, procedimento. All these words emphasize either the subjective aspect of an utterance or on the utterance’s construction. This is exactly the case with the Polish chwyt, or ‘grip’, a pendant to German Kunstgriff, which was used by virtually all scholars of the “aesthetic school”. Chwyt refers to the activity of the author, even if it is an activity of grabbing a hold of the reader.

Now, the fission of priem in the process of its reception that lead to losing its receptive facet directs our attention to the initial unity that the word which encompassed all the three aspects of the literary process. The whole point in assuming the existence of an entity called the intellectual morphic field of literary theory is to avoid banal claims that the notion of priem was just an amphibology, or that the ambiguity of the word does not affect the terminus technicus that is marked by it, because any such explanation fails to explicate why virtually all formalistic notions were constructed in that particular way, why literary theory emerged at this particular point in time, in a particular place and language, for the sake of symbolist, futurist and no other poetry.

We should rather accept the fact that the circumstances in which formalist literary theory emerged were different than those of our time and see what these were like, so that the terms that to us sound equivocal not only could have emerged effortlessly, but also quasi spontaneously and were readily seized in other cultures of the region even at the cost of a partial or incomplete translation. My claim is it was easier for the translators in those days to accept the loss in translation in hopes that any loss in language transfer would be compensated by the assumptions of the cultural context (or by the forces of the morphic field, if you like) in which it was carried over. Chwyt is in a way one half of the ancient symbolon, a piece of parchment, a picture or a coin that was cut in half or broken, and only if the two halves were brought together could messages be conveyed to unknown recipients. In other words, both the Russian Formalists and their Polish and German translators worked in a field that assumed the unity of production, product, and reception. If a translator could not find a word that, like priem, would connote all three aspects of literary communication, he put faith in the force of the field that it would restore the symbolic homology of emitter, artifact, and receiver. Some of them, in particular the central figure of Polish Formalism Manfred Kridl, did not let things drift. Kridl’s “integral method of literary studies” tends to explicitly restore the lost receptive side with the help of a very liberal and nominalist version of the phenomenological method. Other Polish scholars, in the first place the members of the Warsaw Circle, fought off Phenomenology, so that it would not have taken the vacant position of reception, because they thought Phenomenology had done enough harm in Russia and Czechoslovakia. (I expand on this topic in the second part of the paper.)

It would not at all be possible to come up with the idea of priem outside of the intellectual space that was formed by, among other, Hegel’s notion of Geist and Goethe’s concept of Urphänomen, concepts that, at the time when Formalism emerged, were amplified in international symbolism or the aesthetics of expression. Priem emerged from the same premises that enabled Wilhelm Dilthey’s unity of experience, expression, and understanding or Benedetto Croce’s notion of intuition that has to be an intelligible expression in order not to fall to the order of animalistic perceptions. What is not objectified in a form cannot be an intuition and belongs to the realm of nature [Dilthey, 1979: 87; Croce, 1908: 11–12]. The field in which Dilthey, Croce, and Russian Symbolism operated (it was Belyj who first talked about a series of technical priems as a structure of the work of art [Hansen-Löve, 1978: 54–55; cf. Žirmunskij, 1925: 119]) thusly dates back to Hegel and Goethe.