Russian Formalism
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Russian Formalism includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars (Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur) who revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature. Russian Formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman, and on structuralism as a whole. The movement's members are widely considered as the founders of modern literary criticism. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art.
History of Formalism
The "Formal School" or Russian Formalism began as two, distinct groups of literary scholars who were interested in the theory of poetry and language. One was OPOJAZ (Obscestvo izucenija POeticeskogo JAZyka - Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in St. Petersburg and the other was the Linguistic Circle in Moscow, organized by Roman Jakobson in 1915. OPOYAZ published several collections of essays. It eventually dissolved in 1923. This was a diverse movement, producing no unified doctrine, and no consensus amongst its proponents on a central aim to their endeavours.
Origin of the Name
The term "Formalism" was first used by the adversaries of the movement, and as such it conveys a meaning explicitly rejected by the Formalists themselves. In the words of one of the foremost Formalists, Boris Eichenbaum: "It is difficult to recall who coined this name, but it was not a very felicitous coinage. It might have been convenient as a simplified battle cry but it fails, as an objective term, to delimit the activities of the "Society for the Study of Poetic Language...."[1]
Theory of Formalism
There is one idea that united the Formalists: the autonomous nature of poetic language and its primacy as the object of study for literary criticism. The Formalists' main endeavour consisted of identifying and defining a set of properties specific to poetic language (be it poetry or prose) itself, recognizable by their "artfulness" and consequently analysing them as such. The attitudes of the Formalists is well expressed by Viktor Shklovsky's (the founder of the OPOJAZ) early text, "Art as Device" (Iskusstvo kak priem, 1916): art is a sum of literary and artistic devices that the artist manipulates to craft his work.
Shklovsky's argument in "Art as Device" is that the role of the literary scholar and critic is to study the artistic strategies that are deployed in the text. Jakobson used the term literaturnost, or "literariness" to describe the object of their study. Literature isa verbal art. The formalists set about to analyze the production of this art. This view explicitly rejected many of the assumptions of previous literary criticism, directed at the inspiration or insight of the author, replacing those conceptions with the notion of artistic vision. Even more pointedly, it disputed the conception of literature and literary criticism common in Russia at that time that literature was a social or political commentary (in the tradition of the great critic Belinsky) or the personal expression of an author's world vision, expressed by means of images and symbols. Belinsky had called literature "thinking in images." This view emphasized art's continuity with other forms of thought, and made it readily adaptable to philosophical, political and social causes and movements. The Formalists' objection is that literature is not considered as such, but evaluated on a broad socio-political or a vague psychologico-impressionistic background. In simplistic terms, the previous approaches emphasized the "content," while the Formalists emphasized the literary "form," although such a formulation runs counter to the understanding of the formalists.
The aim of Shklovsky and his colleagus was to isolate and define something specific to literature (or "poetic language"): these, as we saw, are the "devices" which make up the "artfulness" of literature. Poetic language possesses specific properties, which can be analysed as such. Precisely which devices were identified varied from theorist to theorist. Boris Tomashevsky, in his Theory of Literature, focused on the aggregate of motifs. Vladimir Propp, in the Morphology of the Folktale, reduced the basic structure of all folktales to a list of thirty-seven functions. Other Formalists attempted to apply his basic insights to more complex narratives.
Formalism and Literary History
Formalists did address historical development of literary styles as well, but predictably, they focused on intertextuality and the continuity and change between authors, periods and genres. In other words, literary history was and should be discussed as a question of the deployment of different strategies and devices rather than its role within social and political history.
Key Concepts
Shklovsky developed many of the key concepts of Formalism. One crucial one is the concept of ostranenie or defamiliarization:
- The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important." (Shklovsky, "Art as Technique", 12)
In the Soviet period, the authorities further developed the term's pejorative associations to cover any art which used complex techniques and forms accessible only to the elite, rather than being simplified for "the people" (as in socialist realism).
Influence of Formalism
There is no direct historical relationship between New Criticism and Russian Formalism, each having developed at around the same time but independent of each other. However, despite this, there are several similarities: for example, both movements showed an interest in considering literature on its own terms (instead of focus on its relationship to politicial, cultural or historical externalities), a focus on the literary devices and the craft of the author, and a critical focus on poetry.
[1] Boris Eichenbaum, "Vokrug voprosa o formalistah" (Russian: "Вокруг Вопроса о Фоpмалистах") (Around the question on the Formalists), Pecat' i revolucija, no5 (1924), pp.2-3.
es:Formalismo ruso he:פורמליזם רוסי fi:Formalismi fr:Formalisme russe ja:ロシア・フォルマリズム
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