On Language and Poetry: Three Essays

By L. P. Yakubinsky

Written between 1916 and 1931 and available in English for the first time, Yakubinsky’s seminal essays afford us an unprecedented view of the history of modern literary and cultural theory. Addressing central questions of poetics and (socio)linguistics – such as what distinguishes poetry and literature from ordinary language?, where do poems come from?, what is our role in and contribution to the evolution of language?, how are language and politics intertwined? – their insights and criticisms are as fresh and apposite today as they were a century ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781935830566

L. P. Yakubinsky

Russian linguist Lev Petrovich Yakubinsky (1892-1945) attended the University of Petersburg from 1909-15, during a period of academic renewal and challenge in Russian linguistics, which had hitherto been dominated by the neogrammarian study of language. The neogrammarian, positivist and historicist approach was contested by a range of young scholars concerned with the functional and social diversity of language as an individual and collective activity. In this heated atmosphere of re-evaluation and change Yakubinsky, together with some of his fellow students and colleagues, such as Osip Brik and Viktor B. Shklovsky, founded, in 1916, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, thus initiating the movement that would subsequently go down in history under the moniker Russian Formalism (without which, in turn, such schools of thought and criticism as structuralism, poststructuralism and deconstruction would be unthinkable).

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Yakubinsky, Lev Petrovich, 1892-1945 author. | Eskin, Michael

translator editor.

Title: On language & poetry : three essays / Lev Petrovich Yakubinsky ; translated from the Russian, edited, and with an introduction by Michael Eskin.

Other titles: On language and poetry

Description: New York : Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., | Series: Subway line ; no. 13 | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017015857 | ISBN 9781935830511 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Poetics. | Language and languages--Philosophy.

| Saussure, Ferdinand de, 1857-1913--Criticism and

interpretation.

Classification: LCC PN1042 .Y35 2017 | DDC 808.1--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015857

Contents

Introduction: The Forgotten Formalist

A Note on Translation

On the Sounds of Poetic Language

Where Do Poems Come from?

Ferdinand de Saussure on the Impossibility of Language Politics

Name Index

Also Available from UWSP

Introduction

The Forgotten Formalist

Even among the cognoscenti—linguists, literary critics, and cultural theorists—the name ‘Yakubinsky’ will not necessarily ring a bell. But it should: for his significance for modern poetics and criticism can hardly be overestimated. Occasionally mentioned in academic literature on early twentieth-century Russian and Soviet literary and linguistic scholarship, he has remained virtually unknown outside a small circle of specialists. Eclipsed by such luminaries as Viktor Shklovsky, Yury Tynyanov, Boris Eikhenbuam, Roman Jakobson, and others who came to represent the so-called ‘Russian formalist’ movement, which he co-founded and which revolutionized the way we look at and interpret literature and culture to this day, Yakubinsky has been relegated to the footnotes of modern intellectual history. Thus, the book you are now holding in your hands can be viewed as a recovery mission of sorts, aiming to give a powerful, unduly forgotten thinker the historical credit he deserves by making his work widely available in English, and to broaden and enrich our overall perspective on and understanding of the vagaries of modern literary and cultural theory. Together with Yakubinsky’s book-length essay On Dialogic Speech—originally published in the Soviet Union in 1923 and first published in English in 2016—the present volume gathers some of Yakubinsky’s historically and critically most relevant writings, giving the non-Russian-speaking reader the opportunity to engage with this influential mind first-hand.

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Born in Kiev in 1892, Lev Petrovich Yakubinsky studied philology and linguistics at Kiev and Petersburg Universities from 1909 to 1915, during a period of change and renewal in Russian linguistics, which had up to then been dominated by neogrammarian positivism and historicism. Originating in Leipzig, Germany, in the