A Poetics of Composition: The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form

by Boris Uspensky

English, Russian (translation)

181 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

Reviews

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was written in 1973, way before the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union. I don't really understand politics, not really, and so if this book is political, it's lost on me. It seems like a very straightforward (for which I am grateful) elucidation of the role of "point of view," i.e how an author presents the material of the fictional text--whether he knows what he knows about characters from the inside or the outside; and where he positions himself in terms of the chronology of the events in the work. To a much smaller extent he describes some of the same techniques as they apply to "pictorial art," as he calls it, meaning representational art up to the Renaissance, as well as Russian icons, of which he's made special study elsewhere.

I found this book in the bibliography of the Arnheim book I read earlier this year on principles of composition in traditional art (western and eastern). I doubt many people would consider a book like this one (the Uspensky) delightful, but I did. I have this lifelong desire to understand the why of everything (which I'm finally accepting is just NOT going to happen) and this book does a wonderful job of laying it out there in plainest possible terms, how the use of POV works in fiction and why an author might choose one method over another, or combine them deeply, in the case of true genius.

Normally a book like this could feel a bit distant and abstract for me, but, happily, Uspensky uses, among many others, Tolstoy's "War and Peace," and Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov," two of my most favorite books, as the sources of passages to use as examples of the points he's trying to make. I'm well-read though not well-educated, and I think the more one reads, especially if one will try challenging works, the more intuitive sensitivity one gains to the greatness of some writing. But to have a set of word choices or point of view choices explained for a well-loved book is to open a whole new door on the work. I'm sure some literature major reading this will laugh at me; I guess that's what those people do (not laugh, but pick over those choices). But if you haven't done it yourself, you might not even know you could :-) And ultimately I think if you look at enough art or read enough (good) books, the subtle work has its way with you. As Arnheim posits in that other book, on artistic composition, what the author does by instinct or intuition vs. what they do by manipulation and control, in a great work, essentially and eventually becomes indistinguishable to the artist/author.

This book makes "the crooked straight and the rough places plain," as Isaiah says in the Old Testament!

Much to my surprise, Uspensky is still alive--he's 87. This is a scholarly book, the product of a man of wide reading, scholarly collaboration, and deep understanding of literature and art. Very little of his work has been translated into English, which is too bad. I wonder what his life has been like in the upheaval of the last 40 years in the Soviet Union/Russia. Don't expect I shall ever know.