The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond

By Galin Tihanov

Until the 1940s, when awareness of Russian Formalism began to spread, literary theory remained almost exclusively a Russian and Eastern European invention. The Birth and Death of Literary Theory tells the story of literary theory by focusing on its formative interwar decades in Russia. Nowhere else did literary theory emerge and peak so early, even as it shared space with other modes of reflection on literature. A comprehensive account of every important Russian trend between the world wars, the book traces their wider impact in the West during the 20th and 21st centuries. Ranging from Formalism and Bakhtin to the legacy of classic literary theory in our post-deconstruction, world literature era, Galin Tihanov provides answers to two fundamental questions: What does it mean to think about literature theoretically, and what happens to literary theory when this option is no longer available? Asserting radical historicity, he offers a time-limited way of reflecting upon literature—not in order to write theory's obituary but to examine its continuous presence across successive regimes of relevance. Engaging and insightful, this is a book for anyone interested in theory's origins and in what has happened since its demise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jul 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781503609730

Book preview

THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF LITERARY THEORY

REGIMES OF RELEVANCE IN RUSSIA AND BEYOND

GALIN TIHANOV

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tihanov, Galin, author.

Title: The birth and death of literary theory : regimes of relevance in Russia and beyond / Galin Tihanov.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018057691 (print) | LCCN 2018059673 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503609730 | ISBN 9780804785228 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Criticism—Russia (Federation)—History—20th century. | Literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. | Formalism (Literary analysis)—Influence.

Classification: LCC PN99.R9 (ebook) | LCC PN99.R9 T54 2019 (print) | DDC 801/.950947—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057691

Cover design: Rob Ehle

Cover image: Olga Rozanova, Non-Objective Composition. Oil on canvas, 62 cm x 84.2 cm, 1917. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

FOR ADELINA

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Prologue: What This Book Is and Is Not About

Introduction: The Radical Historicity of Literary Theory

1. Russian Formalism: Entanglements at Birth and Later Reverberations

2. A Skeptic at the Cradle of Theory: Gustav Shpet’s Reflections on Literature

3. Toward a Philosophy of Culture: Bakhtin beyond Literary Theory

4. The Boundaries of Modernity: Semantic Paleontology and Its Subterranean Impact

5. Interwar Exiles: Regimes of Relevance in Émigré Criticism and Theory

Epilogue: A Fast-Forward to World Literature

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been enriched not only by the works of the thinkers whose paths it follows, but also by the contributions—tangible and intangible—of many scholars, colleagues, students, and friends who have been part of my work on it. The book originates in a conference paper which subsequently became an article in the journal Common Knowledge, attracting many responses. Immediately after the conference, Caryl Emerson, Bill Todd, Katerina Clark, Irina Paperno, and Laura Engelstein began encouraging me to write an entire book on the birth and death of literary theory; for this encouragement—then and over the years—I remain deeply grateful to them all. I was skeptical at the time, because I believed that the article format is better suited to my argument and concise style of presentation. Time has proved them right: the need to demonstrate the radical historicity of literary theory and its embeddedness in a particular regime of relevance that valorizes literature in ways so different from those before and after that, just as the compelling question about the legacies of literary theory, could not be addressed within the confines of that original text. As my research in this field evolved, I felt increasingly empowered to expand and nuance my argument by drawing wider comparative parallels. Continuing to think as an intellectual historian, I have been at pains to discern the foundational paradoxes of literary theory, its time-limited manifestations concealed behind an illusion of timelessness.

I am indebted for their knowledge, friendship, and collegiality over many years to Alison Finch, Ann Jefferson, Catriona Kelly, Jim Reed, Ritchie Robertson, Andreas Schönle, David Shepherd, Gerry Smith, and Andrei Zorin. For various gestures of kindness, large and small, I am grateful to colleagues and friends working in cognate fields, among them Sanja Bahun, Craig Brandist, Andy Byford, Catherine Depretto, Ben Dhooge, Rossen Djagalov, Aleksandr Dmitriev, Evgeny Dobrenko, Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Vladimir Feshchenko, Lazar Fleishman, Susanne Frank, Matthias Freise, Boris Gasparov, Bruno Gomide, Jens Herlth, Anke Hennig, Ken Hirschkop, Stephen Hutchings, Tomi Huttunen, Valentina Izmirlieva, Ilya Kalinin, Soo-Hwan Kim, Ilya Kliger, Adam Kola, Ilya Kukulin, Vladimir Laptun, Anne Lounsbery, Mark Lipovetsky, Michał Mrugalski, Oleg Osovsky, Igor Pilshchikov, Kevin Platt, Nikolai Plotnikov, Fedor Poliakov, Irina Popova, Kirill Postoutenko, Sally Pratt, Dušan Radunović, Harsha Ram, Alastair Renfrew, Douglas Robinson, Maria Rubins, Gabriela Safran, Sergeiy Sandler, Irina Sandomirskaia, Irina Savelieva, Schamma Schahadat, Tamás Scheibner, Ulrich Schmid, Thomas Seifrid, Patrick Sériot, Nariman Skakov, Peter Steiner, Clive Thomson, Vera Tolz, Danuta Ulicka, Ekaterina Velmezova, Michael Wachtel, Anthony Wall, Annette Werberger, Georg Witte, Sergei Zenkin, Alexander Zholkovsky, and Andrea Zink. For their shared interest in comparative literature and world literature, their important research, and many good conversations, I would like to thank, among others, Alexander Beecroft, Vladimir Biti, Timothy Brennan, Helena Buescu, David Damrosch, Wiebke Denecke, Theo D’haen, César Dominguez, Angela Esterhammer, Oana Fotache, Marko Juvan, Djelal Kadir, Prafula Karr, Youngmin Kim, Dieter Lamping, Svend Erik Larsen, Laura Marcus, Aamir Mufti, Thomas Pavel, Martin Puchner, Bruce Robbins, David Quint, Haun Saussy, Igor Shaitanov, Robert Stockhammer, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Delia Ungureanu, and Robert Young. In China, I have learned from various colleagues, including Zhang Hui, Zhou Qichao, Nie Zhenzhao, Wang Ning, Fu Qilin, Weigui Fang, Hongzhang Wang, Luo Lianggong, Ling Jianhou, and Su Hui.

For their friendship, which has helped me sustain the motivation to write this book, I am grateful to Mike Weaver, Anne Hammond, Philip Payne and his family, Philip Bullock, David Duff, Catherine Dille, Jay Wagner, Ventsislav Arnaudov, Ekaterina Temelkova, Ivo Vassilev, Nagore Calvo, Zoran Milutinović, Alan Kennedy, Piuzant Merdinian and his family, Charalambos Neophytou, Colin MacKinnon, and Habbo Knoch.

I would like to record my profound debt to a number of people who are no longer with us but who have left lasting legacies: Sergei Bocharov, Malcolm Bowie, Svetlana Boym, Michael Holquist, Yuri Medvedev, John Neubauer, Anthony Nuttall, Nikolai Pankov, and Greta Slobin.

Various institutions have supported my work over the years. My thanks to Queen Mary University of London, the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and its Poletayev Institute, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. The Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community Research Programme of the AHRC Open World Research Initiative (OWRI) financed a number of research trips, especially my work on the Epilogue, as well as the compilation of the Index. I am also deeply grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Modern Languages at Queen Mary University of London, and to my fellow comparatists in the London Intercollegiate Network for Comparative Studies (LINKS). Many colleagues and students have served as inspiration through their questions and contributions to discussions following my lectures as a visiting professor at universities in Brazil, China, India, Russia, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States.

Finally, this book would not have materialized without the unconditional commitment, graceful patience, and helpful interventions of Emily-Jane Cohen, Faith Wilson Stein, and Tim Roberts at Stanford University Press.

My most significant and ineffable debts are acknowledged in the dedication.

*   *   *

Earlier versions of portions of this book—reworked, recomposed, and enriched by new research in the process of their incorporation here—have appeared in Common Knowledge, Poetics Today, Stanford Slavic Studies, in a volume on Bakhtin edited by David Shepherd, Craig Brandist, and myself for Manchester University Press; in a book on Gustav Shpet edited by me for Purdue University Press; in a volume on critical theory in Russia and the West that Alastair Renfrew and I edited for Routledge; and in my chapters and sections in the History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism, which Evgeny Dobrenko and I co-edited for the University of Pittsburgh Press. I am grateful to these journals and presses for their permission to draw on this material.

GT, London, April 2019

PROLOGUE

What This Book Is and Is Not About

This is a book about the foundational paradoxes of literary theory and the regimes of relevance in which it is embedded. The narrative I construct is as much an exercise in intellectual history as it is an attempt to grasp what thinking theoretically about literature involves over longer segments of time, which—because of their continuance and sheer duration—create an illusion of timelessness. Chronologically, the examination I offer is clustered around the interwar decades of the twentieth century, since I am interested in the twenty or so years in which literary theory first takes shape in competition with aesthetics and philosophy. Russian literary theory is the terrain I choose to explore, for there is no better and more compelling example of literary theory seeking to come into its own by trying to negotiate its space in constant engagement not just with philosophy but with pervasive grand narratives, such as Marxism and (to a lesser extent, and a point on which I do not dwell) psychoanalysis. This focus on the interwar decades, vital as it is if we want to understand how literary theory operates early on, is supplemented by attention to the present day: what happens once literary theory is no more, how can one capture its elusively seminal afterlives?

The presuppositions of this book are partly Foucauldian, partly Derridean. The meaning I invest in the term regime of relevance harks back to Foucault, but here it has a more specific semantic compass: it refers to a historically available constellation of social and cultural parameters that shape the predominant understanding and use of literature for the duration of that particular constellation. I submit that literary theory is the product of one specific phase in the evolution of one particular regime of relevance. Methodical reflection on literature, known to have existed in the Western tradition at least since Plato, should not be confused with literary theory. Literary theory is only a particular shade of that phenomenon; disciplined, rational thinking about literature does not come to an end with the demise of literary theory as a unique and time-limited episode in that disciplined, rational reflection. What makes this episode both characteristic and important is that it unfolds within the bedrock of a distinct, equally unique and time-limited, regime of relevance that posits and circumscribes literature’s significance. To put it briefly, and in anticipation of the more elaborated argument I offer in the book, this specific regime of relevance sees literature as an autonomous discourse that tends to differ—in various ways and to a varying degree—from other discourses: journalistic, philosophical, quotidian, and so forth. This regime of relevance commences with the wider discursive formation we still refer to as Romanticism. But literary theory, I contend, was born later. Romanticism channels the notion of the autonomous worth of literature almost exclusively through the figure of the writer. With his doctrine of the literary field, Bourdieu has memorably rearticulated a long Romantic tradition of positioning literature as beneficially marginal, the product of writers who are both extraordinarily talented and unmistakably relegated to the periphery of society: prophets, madmen, outcasts. The Romantic notion of the writer as singled out, unusual, exceptional, and ultimately isolated—which casts its long shadow into the mid-nineteenth century (Carlyle, one example instead of many) and beyond (the potency of the writer-destroyer in Italian Futurism and in Dada is only the opposite version of this image)—translated the autonomy of literature through the language of personal autonomy that often assumes the form of painfully individual effort. Our modern notion of exile was, not by chance, born in the folds of Romanticism: not only because the nascent European nationalisms eventually drew the boundaries of belonging to, and exclusion from, the polis and its culture, but because it was in the literature of the long eighteenth century that the writer was first consistently cultivated as an exile, an outcast from the habitual conventions of that same polis, not through forceful removal from it but by dint of his or her newly acquired burden of exceptionality.

Exile remains a key aspect in the formation of literary theory, as I demonstrate in this book; it does so because literary theory seeks, of necessity, to flee the constraints of thinking about literature through the prism of a national culture and a single national language; it wants to go further and establish what constitutes literature beyond the singularity of the language in which it happens to be written. Literary theory begins to do all this about a century after Romanticism had become a wider European phenomenon: precisely one hundred years separate the publication (in London) of Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne (1813), which signals the expansion of the Western core of Romanticism beyond England and France, from Viktor Shklovsky’s public proclamation, in a Saint Petersburg’s cabaret, of his belief in the resurrection of the word (1913), as the title of his speech (to be published as an essay the year after) read. Literary theory thus emerges at a later stage in the life-span of this particular regime of relevance that defines literature and its significance with reference to its autonomy. What is so distinct about literary theory is that it contemplates this autonomy (and the resulting uniqueness of literature as a discourse) not through the figure of the writer per se, but through language. This, in a sense, is the great breakthrough of the Russian Formalists around World War I: literature presents a specific and autonomous discourse, not because of the exceptionality of the writer who writes it, but because of the specific way in which language functions in it. Of course, after Derrida, we know that this is a claim that is not always possible to uphold: not because language in literature is not metaphoric or figurative, but because it is so not only in literature. Yet what the Formalists did, amounted nonetheless to a veritable revolution: the writer was taken out of the equation; for the first time what really mattered was the text and its language.

This regime of relevance, in which literature is valued for its autonomy and uniqueness as a discourse that is unlike other discourses, breaks with previous regimes of relevance in which literature’s significance is linked to its capacity to convey ideas, emotions, or knowledge of the world, or to instigate socially and politically oriented actions. Those previous regimes of relevance foreground forms of writing that still preserve the links of literature to an earlier state of symbiosis with philosophical, historiographical, pedagogical, and political discourses. Suffice it to point to the genre of the philosophical novel (recall Voltaire) in the eighteenth century, or the novel of education and the historical novel in the next century, and we promptly obtain a good sense of this different regime of relevance in which literature is still an allegory, a tool of cultivation, and a transmission mechanism for values and ideas formed elsewhere—with the language of literature consistently taking a back seat, seldom seen as the prime reason why literature itself should be taken seriously. Even the Romantic notion of the writer as a guarantor of the autonomy of literature—through his or her own position of freedom, often at the price of voluntary exile and marginalization from society—still bears the marks of this older regime of relevance: a seer and a prophet, the distance of the artist from the polis, his independence, is, paradoxically, a form of moral engagement, of serving the public good by enunciating painful truths and exemplifying an unpalatable stance. All this changed around World War I with the work of the Russian Formalists, which was concomitant with artistic developments that emphasized the value of language as such, making it difficult (think of the Russian Futurists, whose formative impact on Formalism is well known) or absurd, deliberately denying it the status of a medium that expresses logically advanced arguments (think of Tzara’s Seven Dada Manifestos, which celebrate the power of literature to contradict itself, to be a safe haven for the absurd and the illogical). This new regime of relevance, with its insistence on grounding literature’s significance in the autonomy it derives from the special way in which language is used in it, sustained literary theory’s dominant position among other modes of reflecting on literature into the late 1980s.

Of course, no one regime of relevance is ever available in pure form; rather, it is an abstraction that has heuristic purpose: to highlight that particular regime among others that are co-present and compete with it. The story of literary theory as a historically bounded way of thinking about literature can thus be told as the story of adaptive interaction, often also competition, with other ways of thinking about literature nurtured by these co-present regimes of relevance. Things are further complicated by recognizing the fact that literary theory itself incorporates competing strands; it evolves through divergence away from what might—in retrospect—be identified as its prevalent version at any one time.

My book, then, essays to tell the story of literary theory in the twentieth century by focusing on the formative interwar decades. Russia is the natural terrain to explore, since nowhere else did literary theory emerge and peak so early, sharing room with other modes of reflecting upon literature. In fact, until the 1940s, when global awareness of Russian Formalism began to spread,¹ literary theory remained almost exclusively a Russian and Eastern European invention (I write more about this in the Introduction). Under pressure from the grand narratives of Marxism—probably the most resilient manifestation of a regime of relevance hostile to recognizing the autonomy of literature and its presumed literariness, embedded in the workings of language—literary theory was eventually to be canonized in the Soviet Union in the 1940s as what it didn’t want to be: a perspective on literature that would go back to the old regime of relevance, highlighting the social and political significance of literature and attending to language as little more than technical matter. But I do not seek to essentialize the Russianness of Russian theory; as a matter of fact, in the Introduction I dwell at length on what I call the radical historicity of literary theory, and throughout the book I draw substantive parallels between intellectual and artistic developments in Russia, Germany, and Eastern and Central Europe.

Alongside the Foucauldian presupposition, there is also, as I signaled before, a Derridean premise on which my narrative builds. When I insist that literary theory is a historically circumscribed mode of thinking about literature—a specific mode that has a birth date and a point of dissolution—this is not necessarily a call to rejoice in its transitoriness. The death of literary theory has to be met with the same sanguinity with which one should register its birth. For the historian of intellectual formations, radical historicity is the only credible approach; I would even submit that our understanding of literary theory has been greatly skewed and impoverished by our reluctance to historicize it. The temptation to think of it as a timeless procedure rather than a form of reflection on literature shaped by a particular, historically valid regime of relevance has meant that over many decades literary theory has been perceived and taught as a phenomenon that is divorced from culture and society at large; what is worse, literary theory had often been decoupled from literature itself, forgetting that the former tracks developments and innovations in the latter.

When we thus talk of the demise of literary theory, an inevitable offshoot of one particular regime of literature’s relevance coming to an end by the late 1980s, we do so not in order to indulge in the art of composing its obituary (undoubtedly a morbid business), nor even to sound an elegiac note of nostalgic appreciation,² much as this might itself be an act of intellectual gallantry, but in order to pose—with due sanguinity, cultivated by the resilient practice of radical historicism—the important question of its legacy. In recognizably Derridean terms, it is only by acknowledging the death of literary theory that we can open up the conversation about its continuous significance. This legacy, as I demonstrate in the Epilogue to this book, is not available in a pure and concentrated fashion; instead, it is dispersed, dissipated, and often fittingly elusive. The reason for this is that this inheritance is now performing its work in a climate already dominated by a different regime of relevance, which it faces directly and which it must negotiate. As the last part of this book argues, the patrimony of literary theory is currently active within a regime of relevance that thinks literature through its market and entertainment value, with only residual recall of its previously highly treasured autonomy. The enduring legacy of literary theory is present in a spectral way: instead of assuming reliably material form, it is available solely relationally; it disintegrates every time one forgets that it is the volatile product of a past regime of relevance still at work within a new regime vis-à-vis which it is no longer dominant.

My book, then, is perhaps best read not simply as an account of various exfoliations of literary theory in Russia during the interwar decades of the twentieth century—although this, too, could be a profitable way of approaching it. Ideally, it ought to be read as a narrative that selectively highlights versions of literary theory that help us understand its work and multiple impacts at the cusp of intersecting, often competing, regimes of relevance.

Perhaps one final note of caution might be in order. The project I pursue here is demonstrably different from recent attempts to locate the birth of Theory. I use a capital T, for these are projects that understand by theory an important but somewhat softly defined object of analysis that gravitates toward a full overlap with Continental philosophy. There are two versions on display here, each represented by a seminal recent work. One is the equation of theory with French post-Structuralism; in this version, theory with a capital T unfolded in France in the second half of the 1960s and migrated to the United States in the mid-1970s. François Cusset, who has studied the process of this migration, has written persuasively about French Theory (to quote the title of his book published in France in 2003, in which the words French Theory, in English, drive home his point about the transformative power of Theory). Cusset makes an excellent argument about the possible reasons for this equation, or substitution. On reaching the shores of America, dominated as it was (and still is) by the traditions of analytic philosophy, French philosophy was appropriated not as philosophy per se but as a powerful method of analyzing (and putting in question) narratives: literary, religious, legal. Theory, in Cusset’s words, became mysteriously intransitive: no longer a theory of something, but above all a discourse on itself.³ The second version is the equation of Theory with the dialectical method, honed by Hegel but detectable before him (right down to medieval philosophy and letters, in Andrew Cole’s reconstruction). The linguistic element here remains as significant as it is evasive; what matters most is that Theory, in this second version, allows one to perform a move within philosophy away from philosophy, as Andrew Cole would have it when he associates the birth of Theory with Hegel.⁴ Again, the ensuing claim is all-encompassing: theory historicizes thought, studying its materialization across disparate forms of human expression—music, literature, art, architecture, religion, philosophy—either in a diachronic or synchronic analysis—or, aspirationally, both at once.⁵

My narrative evolves differently. It wants to tell the multiple story of emergence, disappearance, and trace that focuses on a particular time-limited episteme. In this account, theory is a specific mode of reflection on literature, and hence literary theory.⁶ I begin by locating the birth of this episteme in the work of the Russian Formalists; then I proceed to examine a situation of abortive inception, in which literary theory does not manage to emancipate itself from the master discourses of aesthetics and philosophy that continue to keep their hold on Shpet’s approach to literature; in the chapters on Bakhtin and on Semantic Paleontology I am interested in exploring another scenario, in which what begins as reflection on literature swerves into the domain of philosophy of culture. Across all these chapters, language and its peregrinations are a major protagonist. The final chapter seeks to explain how established regimes of relevance are maintained, reworked, and challenged in the diasporic being of literature, while the Epilogue reattaches the historical narrative to current concerns and our current debates on world literature. Throughout the book, as I reflect on the fortunes of literary theory, I am in fact at pains to capture the contours of that which, in Walter Benjamin’s words, emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance.⁷

INTRODUCTION

The Radical Historicity of Literary Theory

This book draws many of its examples from Russian literary theory; it is important to de-essentialize this presumed Russianness by placing the inception of theory in a larger—and more diverse—cultural context whose contours encompass a space far beyond Russia. At the same time, de-essentialization involves thinking about literary theory as marked by radical historicity: it is the product of a particular historical constellation of factors, and as such it has a nonnegotiable life-span. To account for the emergence of literary theory, then, requires nothing short of a chronotopic approach: an emphasis on place and time, and on thicker cultural and intellectual plotlines that crystallize in that continuum.

Modern literary theory was born in the decades between the World Wars, in Eastern and Central Europe—in Russia, Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland—due to a set of intersecting cultural determinations and institutional factors.¹ Before specifying them, I ought to recapitulate the contribution of Russia and Eastern and Central Europe to later developments in literary theory.² This contribution would be difficult to overstate. Indeed, the advances in literary theory in its second golden age, the 1960s and 1970s, were to a large extent elaborations and variations on themes, problems, and solutions worked out in the interwar period in Russia and in Central and Eastern Europe. French Structuralism depended as much on Saussure as it did (however reluctant it was at times to acknowledge this) on the attainments of Russian Formalism and (perhaps to a lesser degree) the Prague Linguistic Circle, as well as on the formulation of the principles of phonology by Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson in the 1930s.³ Narratology—notwithstanding the differences discernible in its later versions since the 1950s—never quite severed itself from the legacy of Vladimir Propp, whose Morphology of the Folktale appeared as early as 1928.⁴ The Continental version of reception theory in the 1970s was anticipated in works of the Prague Linguistic Circle, above all those of Felix Vodička, who borrowed somewhat freely from Roman Ingarden.⁵ Finally, Marxist literary theory in its later heyday was deeply influenced by György Lukács’s works of the 1930s.

It is obvious, too, however, that there have been trends in modern literary theory that evolved away from the determining effects of Eastern and Central European theory. A particularly good case in point is hermeneutics, which was widely deployed in the German humanities before being put to use in literary theory by E. D. Hirsch in the United States. In Germany, hermeneutics was slower to become literary theory as such, for it has always been more than literary. Nurtured by its deep roots in German theology and philosophy, hermeneutics (especially as practiced by Hans-Georg Gadamer) has had the status of a philosophy of culture and a method of cultural history—and this was so even in the case of works more obviously oriented toward literary analysis, such as Wilhelm Dilthey’s Poetry and Experience. It was only with the explorations of Hans-Robert Jauss, and with Peter Szondi’s work on literature (specifically Hölderlin), that German hermeneutics unequivocally assumed the distinct profile of a literary theory.⁶

In other words, the emergence of literary theory was conditional upon the process of disintegration and modification of monolithic philosophical approaches that occurred around the time of World War I. Though hermeneutics did not develop into a literary theory during the 1920s and 1930s, other philosophical paradigms were transformed to generate theoretical approaches more specifically germane to the study of literature. That sort of transformation is one of the major ways in which modern literary theory came into existence. The strongest case is, doubtless, the reworking of Marxism in its application to the interpretation of literature in the 1920s and 1930s, most seminally by Lukács; equally crucial are the modifications, produced roughly at the same time, of Husserlian philosophy in the work of Ingarden, who rendered phenomenology pertinent to the study of literary art and later influenced the work of Wolfgang Iser.⁷

A second venue we need to explore when discussing the birth of modern literary theory is that exemplified by the collective efforts—and for some years, the joint efforts—of the Russian Formalists and the Prague Linguistic Circle. The emergence of literary theory in Russia and Czechoslovakia in the 1920s and 1930s followed a path different from those of Lukács and Ingarden. In Leningrad, Moscow, and Prague literary theory reflected a need to confront, make sense of, and give support to fresh and radical modes of creative writing that were making themselves felt in the Futurist environment of the Russian avant-garde and the largely Surrealist milieu in Czechoslovakia. In Russia, Viktor Shklovsky made the cardinal discovery a theorist could hope to make: that the true Other of literary theory is literature itself.

Thinking about literature, in other words, altered radically in the earlier twentieth century because of changes in literature itself, on the one hand, and changes in—exfoliations of—some important meta-discourses of Continental philosophy, on the other. The non-identity and separation of these two sets of factors is, of course, a heuristic abstraction that is convenient for our purposes, but also, to a large degree, verifiable.

Before dwelling in more detail on these two scenarios, I should emphasize one vital point in my account. In three of these four instances (the Russian Formalists, the Prague Linguistic Circle, and Roman Ingarden), we are dealing with a resurgence of creative freedom in the aftermath of radical historical events. In both Czechoslovakia and Poland (if not in Horthy’s Hungary), the interwar years were a period of a secondary national revival after the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is essential to realize that both Russian Formalism and, even more straightforwardly, the Prague Linguistic Circle were inherently linked to the process of constructing a new state with a new political identity. As I demonstrate in the first chapter, the Formalists’ engagement with leftist art was much more than a perfunctory demonstration of loyalty or a ploy designed to gain tactical advantages. After all, two of the most seminal and innovative theoretical pieces of the mature Formalists—Yuri Tynianov’s On Literary Evolution (1927) and Boris Eikhenbaum’s Literature and the Literary Everyday (1927)—were both published in Na literaturnom postu (On the Literary Guard), a journal of the radical leftist Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP). (Eikhenbaum’s article indicated his departure from Formalism to sociology of literature, for which he was criticized both by fellow Formalists, such as Shklovsky, and by Eikhenbaum’s orthodox Marxist disciples, such as Vol'pe.)

Yet the shaping force of the political environment should not be overstated. Modern literary theory developed at the intersection between national enthusiasms and a cultural cosmopolitanism that transcended local encapsulation and monoglossia.⁸ For a number of years, the activities of the Russian Formalists took place in a climate of enhanced mobility and benefited from the exchange of ideas between metropolitan and émigré Russian culture. In equal measure, the foundations of Formalism were laid by scholars, many of them Jewish, who were steeped in more than one cultural tradition and felt at ease with the ethnic and cultural diversity of both Moscow and imperial Saint Petersburg: Jakobson, Brik, Boris Eikhenbaum, and the Polish linguist (of