Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays

by Lee T. Lemon (Editor), Marion J. Reis (Editor), Gary Saul Morson (Introduction)

The Russian formalists emerged from the Russian Revolution with ideas about the independence of literature. They enjoyed that independence until Stalin shut them down. By then, however, they had produced essays that remain among the best defenses ever written for both literature and its theory.

Included here are four essays representing key points in the formalists’ short history. Victor Shklovsky’s pioneering “Art as Technique” (1917) defines the literary as a way to make us see familiar things as if for the first time. His 1921 essay on Tristram Shandy makes that eccentric novel the centerpiece for a theory of narrative. A section from Boris Tomashevsky’s “Thematics” (1925) inventories the elements of stories. In “The Theory of the ‘Formal Method’” (1927), Boris Eichenbaum defends Russian Formalism against various attacks. An able champion, he describes Formalism’s evolution, notes its major figures and works, clears away decayed axioms, and rescues literature from “primitive historicism” and other dangers.

These essays set a course for literary studies that led to Prague structuralism, French semiotics, and postmodern poetics. Russian Formalist Criticism has been honored as a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year by the American Library Association.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Criticism, Russia, Essays, Theory

198 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 1965

Reviews

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ah, my first review! And many of you out there who deign to read my natterings here, might just be asking, “What a strange little volume for someone to lose their GoodReads virginity by? Somewhere in the mind of some reader and blogger is the question, “Why didn’t he review his favorite book?” for his first foray. Well, I am reminded of my dear Russian literature professor and tutor from my college years. Having read one of my first scribblings, he handed me a Xeroxed copy of Boris Tomashevsky’s Formalist essay, Thematics entombed in this handy little volume. Standing before an open door, I took the bright bit of Formalist thought into my naïve hands while my dear professor Mark Davidov offered me a wise grin roughly translatable into, “Alright punk, let’s see if you dare run this bit of tense floss through the tight, moist catacombs encased in that skull of yours!”

I accepted the gleaming, refractory and enlightened little volume of essays and crossed the threshold of becoming a serious and contemplative reader and writer. Unbeknownst to myself, I was not entering a hallway, but a labyrinth. So, into the dripping corridors I plunged, holding this illuminating volume before me, shining brightly upon the once hidden mechanisms and tools of the mad writer, toiling behind the walls like some lonely Daedulus manically gluing and hammering on the wings in order to defy the truculent laws of physics. And while my journey of reader and writer wound through all sorts of false passages, doors opening up to brick walls, startled by skeletons hanging by manacles and chains with obvious teeth marks on bones, and though many inerrant steps led me down to dead ends, this little volume of essays helped set me right and guided me to the many entertaining corridors, leading to gleaming chambers replete with gears and gizmos spinning wildly, sent whirring, throbbing, humming and, sometimes clanking(by lesser writers) by those daring souls who challenged their talents, sat down(had an ass for it) and wrote stories and novels.

And what a bodacious lamp these essays were for my searching mind, glowing upon the details and entrails of novels and stories. Reading Tomashevsky’s dissection of the robust and still living body of Gogol’s The Overcoat was a shocking revelation equal to seeing the heartbeats pulsing through the carefully exposed intestines in an operating theater.

Tomashevsky’s essay reveals the themes, motifs (dynamic vs. static), images, story vs. plot and the relationship of the hero to all those devices that create the robust bones of stories and novels. Written masterfully, the essay throws light upon the jewels in the robust and rich anterooms that provide the super structure of plot, allowing readers to tramp about the tunnels of novels and stories to reach the next elegantly appointed chamber and shout, “Aha! That’s brilliant!” Or not.

My father once tried to hammer the point into the confused webbing of my teenage mind on a fine spring day, complete with twittering birds and cheek warming sunshine. On the back patio of my boyhood home, he was hunkered down over his fruit salad, empty spoon hovering impressively over the dish as he paraphrased the romantic composer Johannes Brahms who once, intoned, I suspect with a righteous and stentorian attitude, something on the order of, “Structure gives you freedom!” Well, dad, you were right and it took a slew of dead Russian Formalist Critics to reinforce the point along with countless drips of subliminal references encountered in my daily mundane adventures, splashing upon my writers forehead like Chinese water until I finally acquiesced to the torture and shouted, “Okay, I admit it, you’re right! Structure gives you freedom!”

And here the Russian Formalists of the first third of the 20th century charged into the fetid colon of literary criticism, cleansed the stale aromatics and detritus of primitive historicism from the twisting Augean corridors with ample blasts of purgative common sense that Harvey Kellogg would appreciate and provided an ample pile of techniques to root about in until, the happy smiling writer lifted up a raw diamond and polished it until it gleamed clear and clean as a usable tool. With Boris Tomashevsky, Boris Eichenbaum and Victor Shklovsky applying the full purifying power of their analysis, Formalism emerged as a great tool not only for critics but burgeoning novelists regarding writing as an actual structured craft rather than a mystical hobby for muddling through by gut instinct alone.

Shklovsky’s Art as Technique, deals with the literary device of defamiliarization, a technique of taking a familiar object and describing it as if the writer is encountering it for the first time. Or, in laymen’s terms, ye olde fish out of water technique of story telling, a method used in countless books and films, including the seminal movie of displacement, Splash! Shklovsky simply and elegantly “lays bare” the device and offers up the sacrificial example of a flogging described in Tolstoy’s story Shame, where, “to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor and rap on their bottoms with switches” and, “to lash about on the naked buttocks,” illuminates the technique thoroughly. Tolstoy could have just written, “The thief was flogged,” and everyone would have understood, but he didn’t and Shklovsky is there to read and decipher the entrails like some long scarfed gypsy with a crystal ball beside her just in case the translation of signs and wonders of the past needs further enhancement by predictions of the future.

In Shklovksy’s stylistic commentary on Tristram Shandy, a digressional, dense, multi-techniqued, labyrinthine (eerily post-Modern) masterpiece meant never to be finished by the writer(narrator) and by extension the reader (Can anyone tell me how many people have started this 18th century masterpiece and actually finished it?! It makes ones head hurt! And is sometimes infinitely boring.), he argues elegantly, through 32 pages, replete with intestinal shaped squiggles representing plot structure, the idea that Tristram Shandy is “the most typical novel in world literature.”

Boris Eichenbaum’s The Theory of the “Formal Method” is an apt defense against the attacks of Stalinists. Though his passionate plea was delivered admirably, the movement was squashed by the debased Soviets. Yet the Formalists lucid theory has out lasted the reprehensible communist government and its kitschy designs to create a new artistic order upon the soft malodorous edifice of Socialist Realism.

For writers not wishing to rely on, albeit valuable, gut instinct alone, the Tomashevsky and Shklovsky essays are a rich and fertile soil for rooting about to find the fine truffles of technique. By denuding the methodically applied tools of writers and thus revealing the limbs, boughs and twigs behind the brilliant foliage, the formalists helped remove the beguiling mystique of the writer as part shaman, part demigod. For the observant reader, their “laying bare” of the veins and sap routes feeding the leafy façade do not destroy the seemingly organic magic of the beautifully pruned work, but allows the thorough reader to enjoy the architectural aspects of the entrancing creations of the greatest authors.

[melanie]

Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. "If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconciously, then such lives are as if they had never been." And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. 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.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has deepened the way I think about arts of all kinds. Like Lawrence Weschler's authorial collaboration with light artist Robert Irwin Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, the articles by the three Russian/Soviet authors included here deal with art as art, artistic method, and forcing the spectator to stop looking and start perceiving. In just a few days I am seeing applications in everything I am reading. In particular I am noticing the ways that authors use devices to slow down the reader down by inserting unfamiliar ways of describing people, events, time sequences, environment, etc. (Shklovsky’s key insight), and the consequences of doing so.

The Russian Formalists rejected the nineteenth century’s critical focus on context. Traditional critics discussed the literary work in light of the author’s biography, and the sociological and political environment of the time. The Formalists, not unlike what Anglophone New Critics were doing, insisted that analysis of the work of art needed to be limited to the work itself. How does the author structure the work to lift it into the realm of art? Shklovsky, the best known of the Formalists, differentiated between the story and the plot. The story would be a linear description of events: first this happened, then that happened, with objective causal relationships at each step. The plot is how the author structures telling the story to force the reader to perceive the structure itself, and thus to think about the art of telling the story. The author also wants to make the reader really think about what it really looks like see a sunrise or feel the cold, so he or she finds new and unusual ways to do so. These methods could be vocabulary, digression, perspective, interrupted time, or anything that ‘roughens’ the text and forces us to slow down.

Better in Shklovsky’s own words:

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. “If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.” And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known [by habit]. The technique of 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.

I very much recommend reading this in conjunction with the aforementioned text that combines decades of interviews with Robert Irwin with Wechsler's observations about his art and method . Both books articulate an artist's meticulous concept of what the purpose of art is, and how the artist constructs a work that guides the viewer/reader to experience it as art, that is, to truly, fully see it. These are books that show the artist at work, making decisions.

There are four essays in Russian Formalist Criticism, two by Shklovsky and two by other members of the Opoyaz group.

One of the most useful texts in this book is Sklovsky’s analysis of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Surely Tristram is one of the works of classic fiction with the most obvious exposed structure. Digressions within digressions, red herrings, misunderstandings, people talking at cross-purposes, transposed chapters, blacked out text. Specifically, Shklovsky uses the novel to illustrate the use of displacement of time, splicing story lines so that time is suspended for the thread he has left dangling, repeatedly focusing on oddities such as characters’ awkward posture, and many more devices that keep the fact of the structure always in the foreground.

In Sterne’s novels the usual forms are changed and violated; it is not surprising that he handled the conclusions of his novels in the same way. We seem to stumble upon them, as if we found a trap door on a staircase where we had expected a landing.

But Shklovsky also points out that all this had to be held together somehow to become a work of art, and he argues that the crisscrossing motifs are the glue. For example: the ubiquitous knots, and the mysterious Jenny.

The essay by Boris Tomashevsky provides an overview of elements of Formalism. The explanation of the specific vocabulary as it is defined by the Formalist method is very helpful. For example, practical and poetic language, theme, reality, story and plot, motif, intrigue, types of motivation, device.

The final essay by Boris Eichenbaum gives a history of the development of the Formalist Method. This essay was written in response to attacks on the group in the mid-1920s. Throughout, Shklovsky is credited as the source of many of the key concepts.

Threaded throughout the four essays are useful discussions of the Formalists positions on many other concepts, in particular realism in art, and form and content (the Formalists decide that form is content—there is no distinction).

I have previously read Sklovsky’s Witness to an era, which is an anecdotal memoir and a easy introduction to him. After this overview of Formalism, I’m eager to start on On the Theory of Prose and Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar. Even if you’re not prepared to join the Formalist camp full on, I recommend this book as an addition to whatever critical approaches you already use.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rusya biçimsel eleştiriyi kesecek diyorlar.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

In general, Formalism was an attempt at a scientific approach to understanding literariness. This approach was used sometimes to the detriment of aesthetic and moral concerns, which the Formalists denigrated as mere sentimentalism. 

    The Formalists make a strong differentiation between story and plot. They define story as the natural causal sequence of events, this happened and then this happened, etc. Plot is the story "defamiliarized (literally made strange in Russian) in the process of telling". Shklovsky saw this device as the key feature of literature as an art. It is what forces us to slow down and consider an object for what it is. However this is done, and in whatever medium, constitutes art for the Formalists. Thus, understanding a novel or poem involves breaking down how the plot defamiliarizes the story for the reader, either by transposing events or otherwise interrupting the habitual reading of the story. 

    Tomashevsky adds to this methodology a distinction between motifs, which the Formalists see as the atomic building block of plot, upon which all else is built. Bound motifs are those which are required to tell the story (e.g. That Lydia is drowned is required for her to die in Everything I Never Told You) while free motifs are those added to the story for whatever reason by the author. A proper reading of a story should give greater weight to free motifs than bound ones. 

    Tomashevsky also addresses the device of defamiliarization, specifically as it relates to the introduction of non-literary material in a novel, such as social and political commentary. He argues that the introduction of these topics must be justified by a new and individual interpretation of the material. By presenting it this way, the material's presence is artistically motivated and fully involved in the narrative. Otherwise, it will come across as heavy-handed and banal to the reader. Sufficiently artistic presentation of this nature is how authors are able to get readers to accept worldviews contrary to their own or protagonists they would otherwise find repugnant, at least for the duration of the reading. 

[Liam Guilar]

Most standard histories of Literary Theory start here, with the Russian Formalists, summarise their ideas and then point out why so many of them were 'wrong'.
Reading what they wrote, rather than what people said they wrote, is an interesting experience. It's remarkably easy to read.

[Nisah Haron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bacaan untuk tesis. Buku penting yang menghimpunkan permulaan teori formalistik Rusia. Antara tokoh yang dibincangkan oleh Viktor Shklovsky dan teori estrangement. Pinjam dari Perpustakaan Universiti Malaya.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Righteous.

[Andris Sanjaya · Rating 5 out of 5]

very interesting