Эпоха «остранения». Русский формализм и современное гуманитарное знание

In 1968 Vasko Popa invited me to write an introduction for the revised and final edition of his groundbreaking collection of poems Bark (Kora, first edition 1953), noting that he would like me to analyze its poems and cycles in “the formalist spirit” [Петров, 1969]. Soon after his return from exile in 1965 Crnjanski gave me his just published Collected Works in ten volumes, telling me he was acquainted with my partially “formalist” criticism from the time he still lived in London. As a critic I truly endeavored to provide even the criticism published in newspapers and journals with a scholarly-objectivist potential. I felt like a disciple of Russian formalists in my close interest for contemporary literature and my effort to link criticism and scholarship, and therefore I decided to dedicate my dissertation to the study of a living poet – Crnjanski. I defended my doctoral dissertation “The Poetry of Crnjanski in the Evolution of Serbian Poetry” in Zagreb in 1971.

The book that appeared that same year [Петров, 1971], my doctoral dissertation under a slightly changed title (The Poetry of Crnjanski and Serbian Poetry) did not deal only with the constructive function, Crnjanski, to use Tynyanov’s terminology, of the elements of Crnjanski’s poetic works, but also with their literary function, i.e. the mutual ties between his works as well as with works by other authors of the same literary epoch, but also prior and subsequent epochs. This marked the transition from the study of the work as a closed whole towards the interpretation of the work in the dynamic and evolutionary substitution of canonized forms. My book also focused on the author’s poetic/critical attitude towards his own and others’ works as well as the attitude of the critics of various epochs towards Crnjanski ad his works, meaning the reception of literary works.

The poet Miodrag Pavlović, who was also an editor in Prosveta, which had published the Poetics of Russian Formalism, invited me to compile a representative anthology of Russian poetry from the 17th century to the present for Prosveta. My work on the anthology was not simply that of an anthologist, but also that of a theoretician and literary-historical challenge. Working on this project my guidelines were the ideas of Eikhenbaum on the transformation a movement into a drawing, of Eliot on the “ideal order”, of Taranovsky on references and subtext, and contemporary interpretations of intertextuality. Brezhnev personally complained to Tito when he was in Belgrade on a visit in 1976, attempting to prevent the publication of this anthology. However, Tito, after asking for and receiving from me an explanation of what this anthology was about, and the question I posed on the Yugoslav and his personal independence regarding Moscow, consented to the anthology’s publication. Needless to say, Leonid Ilyich was not concerned with the theory the anthology was based on, but with the fact that it included a substantial number of undesirable poets such as, for example, the “oberiuts”, emigrant poets and representatives of the “samizdat” from the Liazonovo group. To Brezhnev’s horror together with Pushkin in the same book!

Towards the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, based on formalist theories and those of structuralism as its partial scholarly heir, three scholarly and critical projects were launched: the establishment of the journal Književna istorija [‘Literary History’] in 1968, the Department for the Study of Serbian Literary Periodicals in the Institute for Literature and Art in 1971, and the publication of a book jointly authored by ten younger critics and scholars brought together by their critical attitude towards the current university and academic scholarship on literature. For these new projects, especially the journal, we owe gratitude to the poets Davičo and Popa for providing support for them from the authorities.