The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Although intellectual freedom in the public sphere constricted at times to the choking point, Russian thought about literature broadened and became more systematic in the twentieth century. Russian theories burst upon the world, with ambitions of being applied to the world. Russian Formalists in the 1920s made claims about the nature of all narrative; the structuralist Roman Jakobson about all language; cultural semioticians in the 1960s–70s (Yury Lotman and his Tartu School in Soviet Estonia) about all sign systems; and the ideas on dialogue, carnival, and literary time-space of an obscure provincial professor, Mikhail Bakhtin, came to be embraced by a vast global community a decade after his death. In deference to this rich critical tradition, whenever the need arose for some organizational framework I have sought to use categories or paradigms developed by Russian thinkers. In the post-communist period, this includes theworkofsome bicultural e´migre´s–Mikhail Epstein, Boris Gasparov, Mark Lipovetsky, Vitaly Chernetsky – who continue to work as “culturologists” on material from their native land. Such an application of Russian categories to Russian creativity is intended to anchor these chapters without falling into that least wholesome of all theoretical habits: imposing, on defenseless primary texts, alien instruments devised in some context distant or indifferent to them.

Three major approaches to literary expression achieved currency beyond Russia’s borders in the twentieth century: the Formalist, the Dialogic, and the Structuralist-semiotic. From each of these schools I have chosen one concept to help focus our literary juxtapositions and link them up into a more coherent national narrative.

From the Formalists, in particular Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) and Yury Tynyanov (1894–1943), comes the idea of “respectful” parody. The idea grows out of the Aesopian defense discussed above. Many authors and critics in the latter half of the nineteenth century believed that a protest literature, one that exposed social ills and assigned blame, was the only morally justified position for a writer. But by the century’s turn a reaction had set in against this civic-minded – and usually stridently materialist – mandate, first among Symbolist poets and critics seeking a more mystical reality, then among a group of Petrograd literary scholars, known as the Formalists, who sought to defend the autonomy of art against all such ragged, ill-formed obligations to “real life.” Formalists did not preach “art for art’s sake.” They acknowledged that art and life were interdependent. Shklovsky stressed this symbiosis in his twin ideas of “estrangement” and “automatization,” by which he meant the duty of art to “make everyday objects strange” so that our habitual perceptions would be

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jolted out of their drowsy rut and we would wake up to life anew. As he put it in 1916: after viewing nature – or people, or ideas – through the lens of art, “the sun seems sunnier and the stone stonier”; without art, our automatized life would “eat away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, at our fear of war.”5 This is definitely art in the service of life. Overall, however, it was not the “wake-up” function that the Formalists advocated for verbal art as much as a higher degree of autonomy.