1[Style 37 (2003): 353-66]

2
Translator's Introduction
Boris Tomashevskii (1890-1957) was one of the major figures in the short-lived Russian
Formalist movement. As this survey article explains, the Formalist school was indeed a
new one at the time he was writing it (1927)--just a little more than a decade old. By the
time it was published (1928), the Formalist school or movement was just a year or two
away from its abrupt, complete termination, decreed by Soviet authorities.
During the period of his involvement with Formalism period, Tomashevskii
published a book on Russian Versification (1923) and a collection of articles On Verse
(1929), as well as a study of Pushkin (1925); his most important contribution during this
period, however, was no doubt the textbook Literary Theory: Poetics (1925), which went
through six editions in the next six years. 1 The article translated here was written and
published in French, and was clearly aimed at providing an overview of Formalist
thought that would be available to a wider audience. Otherwise it closely resembles the
well-known essay on The Theory of the Formal Method by Boris Eikhenbaum, which is
almost contemporary with it.
It would be interesting to compare the two essays in detail. Both tell much the same
story about the emergence of the school, its major themes and key technical terms, and
the most significant publications reflecting its orientation. Both surveys are implicitly
optimistic about the prospects of the Formal method, ironic as this seems to us now. A
key difference lies in the relation of these two critics to the school. Eikhenbaum, whom
Tomashevskii describes as a kind of associate director of the movement (see n. 2),
writes very much as an insider in Theory; by contrast, and although he alludes to the
group to which I belong at the outset of his essay (see n. 1), Tomashevkii otherwise
gives an objective-seeming account, conveying the sense that while he began in the
Formalist movement, and still sympathizes with it, he now stands at some distance from
it. In his conclusion, describing the critical scene in Russia, Tomashevskii distinguishes
between orthodox Formalists, mentioning Eikhenbaum along with Viktor Shklovskii
and Iurii Tynianov, and independent scholars, who took part in the creation of the
school, and contributed to its work; but [who] do not conform to the school's program,
and have chosen to follow a separate course. It is not at all clear which category he
places to himself in. Methodology aside, Tomashevskii was primarily a historian, and it
is no accident that he presents Formalism as a new school of literary history. His
emphasis on the interdependence of literary history and poetics remains a crucial
insight, notably seconded by Grard Genette (Potique), and reflects Tomashevskiis
own work on literary history and biography.2
As to the translation, although I have added headings to the seven sections of
Tomashevskiis essay, the divisions are original. I have made a very few omissions and
insertions, and have indicated them. The only problematic term was procd
(Tomashevskiis equivalent for the Russian priem): I have translated it uniformly as
device, although in many cases technique would have sounded better; the word was
needed for other purposes, however.

3
David Gorman
Northern Illinois University
NOTES

WORKS CITED
Eikhenbaum. Theory of the Formal Method. 1926/1927. Trans. I. R. Titunik. Readings
in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. Ed. Ladislav Matejka and
Krystyna Pomorska. Cambridge: MIT P, 1971; rpt. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic
Publications, 1978; rpt. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2002. 3-37. Previously trans.
Lemon and Rice 102-39.
Genette, Grard. "Potique et histoire." Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972. 13-20.
Lemon, Lee T., and Marion J. Reis, ed. and trans. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four
Essays. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965.
Tomashevskii, Boris. Interpreting Pushkin. 1925. Russian Views of Pushkin. Ed. and
trans. D. J. Richards and C. R. S. Cockrell. Oxford: Willem A. Meeuws, 1976.
153-61.
--. Literature and Biography. 1923. Matejka and Pomorska 47-55.
--. Literary Genres. 1925. Trans. L. M. OToole. Russian Poetics in Translation 5
(1978): 52-93.
---. Thematics. 1925. Lemon and Reis 62-95.
[in a note at the foot of the first page:]
First published as La nouvelle cole dhistoire littraire en russie, in Revue des tudes
slaves 8 (1928): 226-40. Thanks to the Revue des tudes slaves for permission.
The New School of Literary History in Russia
Boris Tomashevskii
Translated by David Gorman
[1. Emergence]
Since the first years of the twentieth century, a pronounced and continually
growing interest has been perceptible in Russia in the aesthetic appreciation of literary
works. Publicists' criticism has given way to that of literary critics properly speaking. But

4
the critical and historical essays inspired by this new interest remained scattered for
quite some time--until the advent of a group of writers who formed a school that devoted
its efforts to the systematic application of the new tendencies. 3
Russian poetry, in 1916, underwent a crisis. Symbolism was in its decline, and the
younger generation turned away from it in search of other sources [of inspiration] than
a wavering philosophy expressing itself in vague creations and diffuse utterances. New
schools arose, full of bluster if the truth be told, breaking a path for themselves by noisy
demonstrations, employed to pater le bourgeois. Yet beneath the exuberant exterior
that was so sharply criticized in these young writers, behind the extravagances and
occasionally the mere mystifications, there was a steady effort toward the discovery of
masculine inspiration, and the creation of a "tangible" art opposed to the effeminate art
of the Symbolists, and their cult of the imprecise.
Among the creators of the Russian Futurist school (which has nothing more than
the name in common with its homonyms in Western Europe) a slogan was current: "The
word itself!" [la parole comme telle]; attention was turned to the means of expression, to
the linguistic basis of poetry. Some members of the younger generation, poetry
enthusiasts, came together to construct a new theory, which, at first, addressed
practical aims alone: it was technique that interested them rather than doctrine. Mostly
students of Badouin de Courtenay, they were eager to find new pathways in the domain
of art as well as that of science. Thus from the alliance of criticism, science, and poetry
was born the first fasicules of the Collected Articles on the Theory of Poetic Language,
and shortly thereafter a group was formed, the first members of which were Viktor
Shklovskii, Osip Brik, Lev Iakubinskii, Boris Kushner, and Evgenii Polivanov; this group
organized itself, around 1918, into the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (or,
conforming to the fashion for military, revolutionary abbreviations, OPOIAZ). 4 Some
young historians of literature, dissatisfied with the current state of philology and
preoccupied with finding in the Collected Articles the elements of a new conception of
the literary work, rallied around the proclaimed movement. It was during the years 19191921 that OPOIAZ was liveliest. It was also then that the Moscow Linguistic Circle was
founded, where young representatives of F. F. Fortunatov's school, chaired by Roman
Jakobson, oriented themselves in the same direction.
Three years of polemics followed. Lectures, and essays in slender periodicals posted on
walls (for lack of paper, journals had disappeared) assaulted the citadels of the old
academic learning, and the "formalists" little by little established themselves in its
strongholds. The creation of a Division of Verbal Arts, thanks to Viktor Zhirmunskii, at
the Institute for the History of the Arts in Leningrad, made possible the attendance of the
young auditor who was not intimidated by the cold, or sometimes the lack of lighting.
This was the period of "militant formalism." Victory, attained in 1920, led to some
dissidence within the school: debates began over questions of method; there was talk of
a crisis, of the need for a synthesis, of revision, etc. But the time was not propitious for
these quarrels--abstract questions about method no longer attracted the workers. One
set about one's task without lingering over disputes. And the polemic with the
sociological (Marxist) school, occurring a little later, likewise collapsed of its own accord,
for the same reasons, without having aroused any great passions. Several essays

5
appeared, outlining the research carried out by the Formalists. New problems presented
themselves. The need was felt for a deeper kind of understanding of the different
periods of Russian literature, the study of which had been so rarely pursued before;
what was desired was to reconstruct the development of literary forms in our literature.
It is only today that these primary problems can finally be grappled with and that broad,
large-scale investigations can be undertaken: the first workers were surrounded from
the outset by the younger generation, who were entirely differently prepared for the
tasks incumbent upon them, and whose energies were not consumed by a struggle
against traditionalists.
[2. Literary history]
The early ideas of the new school bore the imprint of the polemics amid which
they had been introduced: often excessive and paradoxical, it was various general
tendencies opposed to those of the traditionalists that they strongly expressed rather
than the precise opinions of those who formulated them. For that matter, it was not the
ideas of Aleksandr Potebnia or Aleksandr Veselovskii that were put on trial, so much as
their having largely inspired traditional literary history.5 Although the names of these
scholars were often mentioned, what was in question was less traditionalist ideals than
traditionalist practices. War was declared against these practices along the three main
lines that the traditionalists gave literary history, namely biographical history, social
history, and philosophical history.
The "biographical" school, practitioners of which had multiplied in recent years, saw in
the literary work only the author's individual action of the author, a fact of his intimate,
private life. One searched the work for marks of such purely personal details; one
expected to "explain" it through events in the author's life. Against these bad habits the
Formalists opposed two sets of arguments. (1.) The historian's analysis, they said,
ought not to leave the domain to which a work belongs, that is, the domain of literature.
What is given in the work itself should suffice for the historian, and this alone that should
be taken into consideration in determining the true literary value of the work. What is
hidden from the reader does not interfere with, and can only falsify, our experience
[impression]. (2.) Besides, biographical fact, even in the case where it is the source of
poetic inspiration, explains nothing about a poet's work, just as a model's biography
does not explain a painting. To explain a work is to demonstrate its literary value, its
influence on literature, its relation to the literary milieu in which it was created.
Biographical facts can only illustrate some momentary impulse preceding creation: the
deeper cause of a work resides, and should be discovered by us, in the overall
development of literature that determines the paths it takes and frames the problems it
faces. Biographer-historians were compared to agents of the secret police who question
the servants about the trivial affairs of their masters' lives without daring to approach the
latter openly and directly. Formalists reached the point of denying any usefulness to
biographical research, and indeed biographical indications hardly find a place in their
work, except sometimes, if necessary, in footnotes.
The publicists thought of literature as a collection of documents of "social" history.
They were satisfied with writing the history of Russian society on the basis of the works

6
of our novelists (Dmitri Ovsianiko-Kulikovskii, R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik). They treated the
heroes of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Turgenev as historical characters, as types
representing political, social, and moral ideas current among the different classes of
society. The Formalists, in contrast, held that no literary work is a good historical
document. Real life is not reflected in novels: it is deformed in them. The poet organizes
facts from his aesthetic viewpoint. Art leads him to falsify reality, to derogate nature, or
at least to make a selection according to the needs and tastes of his time. It is
impossible to gather positive knowledge from a literary work without knowing exactly
how a poet reacts to interior impressions and facts, or what the intrinsic laws of literary
genres are, the conditions of the literary illusion. The history of ideas ought to be based
on authentic documents, and in no way on the words and actions of the heroes of
novels, who are only phantoms of real life.
The philosophical school, represented by the Symbolists (Vyacheslav Ivanov, Lev
Shestov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, and Mikhail Gershenzon), played at interpreting the
esoteric meaning of works: they found religious and philosophical doctrines in them,
arrayed in symbols and allegories. The Formalists thought that studies of this kind
resulted only in arbitrary, fantastic, and contradictory interpretations, and to characterize
them the Formalists made ironic use of the figure of speech often used by these
philosophers' disciples, misled by the persuasive exterior of their reasoning: "the poet's
multifaceted soul."
[3. Literary language]
The new school undertook the study of literature conceived as a specific
phenomenon possessing its own laws. The school has made use, since its beginnings,
of several notions that were established as the original hallmarks of what was called
"the Formal method."
The very title of the Collected Articles edited by OPOIAZ indicates one of these
notions to us, namely the distinction between "poetic language" and "practical
language." Scrupulously respected in the first writings of the Formalists, this distinction
came straight out of the works of Potebnia and Veselovskii (and particularly from
chapter 3 of the latter's Historical Poetics [1899]), with the qualification that the theory of
"interior form" was abandoned. The goal, then, was to erect a new doctrine upon a
purely linguistic foundation: prose was contrasted to poetry in terms of an opposition
between practical, utilitarian language and other languages with their own laws, and
with the principal trait of no longer presenting expression merely as a "means" or the
mere play of an automatic mechanism, but as an element having acquired an original
aesthetic value and become a linguistic end in itself.
Considered from this angle, poetic language was defined and studied in a series
of articles by Iakubinskii. This scholar limited himself to phonetics, and principally to the
phonetics of verse. He established that certain phonetic facts, purely mechanical in
origin and without any semantic value in practical language, play a very important role in
poetic language and are consciously observed and put to work by poets; such is the
case of certain phonetic nuances through which poetic language approximates
emotional language. This was the point of departure for a series of studies of the role of

7
sounds in verse. Among these studies, particularly noteworthy was one by Osip Brik on
"sound repetitions," which presents a development of the Maurice Grammont's ideas
on harmony in verse and attempts a classification of observed phenomena, and which
served as a model for subsequent work. This line of research benefitted from the
Eduard Sievers's ideas on "auditive philology" (Oherenphilologie) and those of the
French experimental school (Paul Verrier, E. W. Landry), as well as English works on
Scripture. Starting from the notion of poetic language, the next step was naturally to
seek in the linguistic analysis of works the scientific explanation for their literary
significance. Literature was even described as a "dialect" and held to be an object of
study to which the methods of general dialectology should be applied (see Jakobson's
work on Khlebnikov).
While pursuing these inquiries into poetic language, Viktor Shklovskii devoted
several studies to thematic structure, to "plot" [sujet]. He examined a series of novels, to
discover the intrinsic laws of their construction; in this connection he devoted himself
particularly to Sterne's work. In contrast to Veselovskii, Shklovskii directed his attention
to the whole of the work rather than to details of the themes gathered in it. Thus he
established a certain number of notions that took their place in the new school's
doctrine.
The first was that of "plot" itself. Plot ceased to be conceived as the mass of
incidents presented in a work. To the amorphous mass of facts and incidents (the
fabula, in his terminology), Shklovskii opposed the author's composition [mise en
oeuvre], the disposition of materials by the artist, in a word, the plot. Indeed, plot is
nothing in his eyes but the mode of utilization of events by which the author controls his
work's development. It is as a function of this development that the writer introduces
such and such a fact, or employs such and such an aesthetic device. Shklovskii aimed
to examine the conditions under which the plot of a novel is developed. He formulated
the notion of "retardation" or "suspension" of action as a law necessitating a certain
distribution of the relevant motifs. He demonstrated the role of motivation with respect to
the incidents presented. He also pointed out the aesthetic value of "laying bare" artistic
means (that is, introducing unmotivated events, appearing solely in the interest of the
narrative). He brought out the merits of the "difficult form" that demands a certain effort
of understanding from the reader and thus makes him grasp the sense of the work
better. The effort to find a new form and the hope of producing an impression of novelty
leads to the adoption of a foreign perspective on familiar, and even well-known things, in
order to describe them in an original way (for which Shklovskii coined the neologism
ostranenie): so, for example, Guy de Maupassant sometimes describes peasant life as
if it were a completely unknown world; so too Tolstoy describes the Council of Fili [in
War and Peace, Book 11, ch. 3] through the incomplete understanding of a little girl
(compare too [Tolstoy's] "Kholstomer," where the writer seeks not only to evoke the
horse's psychology, but to describe human life from a new viewpoint). These are some
of the notions connected to the study of plot development as an essentially aesthetic
device, entirely unaffected by the elements that figure in the story.
[4. Beyond form and content]

8
The new method's name ("Formal Method"), though often disclaimed even by its
practitioners, brings us to a third problem that found itself was thrust forward. The
traditional school usually based its work on the rather vague distinction between "form"
and "content," and it was believed that a writer's oeuvre had been exhausted when
these two aspects of it had been studied. What was called the "content" was the sum of
the work's ideas, feelings, and themes, as well as its subject--in short the intellectual
[idal] element; by "form" was meant language, rhythm, etc.--in short the material
element. It is all too easy to understand that, under these conditions, criticism frequently
neglected the material in favor of the spiritual, and that it tended to interest itself only in
the analysis of ideas. It directed all its attention toward the objects mentioned by the
author, and it studied these objects as so many realities without any concern about their
literary incarnation; it moved, without realizing that it was doing so, right past the work
itself, having no idea of what to do with facts of an aesthetic order, indifferent to the
constructive principles of poetic creation. It is to the Symbolist school that we were
indebted for the rehabilitation of pure art within the study of literature. The critical and
historical essays of Andrei Belyi,6 V. V. Ivanov, and Valerii Bryusov drew our attention to
the element that the traditionalists left in the shade.
The "Formalists" denied the utility, from the methodological viewpoint, of this opposition
of "form" and "content." They still accepted the opposition of material to form, but in
doing so treated both elements of the work, ideas as well as rhythm, as artistic factors,
active [in the work] for this reason alone, and consequently deserving to be studied as
such. Above all they concerned themselves, in a natural reaction, with what their
predecessors had ignored. Hence the impression that they studied "form" at the
expense of content, due to the traditional opposition of these two terms. Besides this,
confusion with the linguistic school of Fortunatov (the Formal school) also favored
"Formal Method" as a name; some practitioners of OPOIAZ seized upon it, others
attempted somewhat timidly to decline this characterization. But the name stuck and,
unfortunately, was not without some influence on the popular stereotype often
associated by the public with the new school's work.
To the opposition of practical language and poetic language corresponds the
opposition of prose and poetry. Prose, devoid of aesthetic qualities, has automatized the
means of expression. Poetry is an essentially aesthetic phenomenon, in which
everything has its own value, and which should be felt and appreciated as an immediate
object of aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience comes down to a formula: the aim
is nothing, the means are everything. It is necessary, to understand a work of art, to
revivify the act of its creation not as arising from the author's individual psychology, but
as a process of his art, "his craft" as it was put. 7 It is necessary to concentrate our
observations upon the wholly artificial object that is the exercise of this craft. The literary
work is the sum of the artistic devices that the poet has put into the service of his
creation and that have been stamped upon it.
This notion--rather vague, it must be admitted--of an artistic "means" or "device" (priem)
plays a large role in Formalist studies. The new generation understood this term rather
broadly: sometimes as a simple technical device, sometimes as any constitutive
element of the work. They wanted above all to define in one word the viewpoint that

9
they took rather than any precise object. But it was very much the artist's devices, as
they appear in a given work, and as the reader perceives them, which was to be the
true object of literary criticism.
[5. Literary evolution]
Traditionalist literary historians hardly considered a work of art in itself or as such.
They were content to hold forth propos literature; they never talked about literature
properly speaking. The study of artistic devices would have made them grasp the
relation that exists between various elements of a work and the secret of their
equilibrium; but, in the absence of this study, they perceived only simple phenomena,
which seemed neutral to them, as well as being "determined" by the writer's "ideas"
alone, a matter of choice in which the free will was virtually sovereign. Thus literary
evolution proper escaped them, and they rejected the very notion of it. For them
literature was only an amorphous object, and for the study of it they substituted, quite
innocently, that of external influences, manners, social conditions, or milieus, as if they
could find there the first causes explaining the origin and development of [literary]
themes and stylistic elements.
From the moment that we realized the necessity of recognizing interior
correspondences among the different elements of a poetic creation, the conclusion that
followed was that, on the one hand, the poet is not as free as one might assume to
distribute elements in his work, where each detail is subject to the whole, and each
entails others, to the extant that the writer does not choose his artistic devices
separately, but in combination--and, on the other hand, the various systems of these
devices are subject to spontaneous evolution, since, through use, they are automatized,
worn out, and thus lose their aesthetic function, their dynamism.
This notion of internal motivation, joining with external influences to cause the
spontaneous evolution of literature, along with the concomitant assertion that the age of
literary devices indicates the extent of their aesthetic power, naturally tended to orient
[Formalist] researchers toward literary history, whereas it was theoretical speculations
that had absorbed them until then. They had to work out a historical conception of
evolution, and here the ideas of Ferdinand Brunetire were in some respects an
influence.
Traditionalist literary historians had contented themselves with tracing the
"dominant" line in literature across the centuries. They studied only the recognized
figures, the "masters." In place of the idea of evolution, they put that of succession.
Lermontov succeeded Pushkin, and Nekrasov Lermontov, just as in French poetry Hugo
succeeded Voltaire, and Leconte de Lisle Hugo, etc. In their analysis they hesitated
between the notion of "influence" and that of the absolute and hence incomparable
individuality of the poet's work. This latter tendency aside--and it led to nothing less than
a denial of the possibility of pursuing the historical study of literature!--there at least
remained the notion of influence, an influence always positive and based securely upon
the idea of the indefinite perfectibility of the human species. Every "master" (and
traditionalist history, once again, was only interested in masters) was the universal
legatee of his predecessors; he ascended the throne of his ancestors in order to gather

10
their heritage to him and to conserve, develop, and protect their work. One had eyes, in
the literary arena, only for the winners; one only spoke about the losers to make a joke
about them (as was done in France, before Romanticism, with poets of the sixteenth
century).
Against this official history of perpetual peace in literature was opposed a history
rich in warfare, or at least in struggles and conflicts. To positive influence, by attraction,
was opposed negative influence, by repulsion. A common formula was: "the nephew's
inheritance from the uncle." This implied that the primary motive of literary evolution was
"repulsion," that is, the tendency to react against the dominant literary forms of the
period. Romanticism was not the direct inheritor of Classicism: it was its adversary. It is
not from father to son, in literature, that the crown passes. No doubt each new school
has its precursors; the Romantics had Chnier, and today we are quite familiar with the
pre-Romantic era as a preparatory period. But "precursors" are never the masters in
their domain. They always appear first as constituting a minor branch, as the
misunderstood younger brothers of the dominant school. The appearance of a new
school is often only the canonization of the work of writers neglected during the
preceding era. Lesser literature passes into greater, as for instance French melodrama
engenders Romantic drama, or as Maiakovskii's poetry is the daughter of comic forms
of Russian verse.
The study of various literary groups, their mutual antagonisms, and their conflicts
thus became the order of the day. Attention was no longer reserved for masters alone; it
was extended to secondary representatives of literature, to minor genres, and to
popular movements. Care was taken to examine in detail polemics between groups, to
fix the true position of literary facts in relation to milieu, to evoke the often muchneglected testimony of contemporaries, and to study journalism, as well as
correspondence. A group of studies resulted moving toward the authentic reconstruction
of the literary conceptions of a given era, and this led quite naturally to taking the same
interest in the literary tendencies of our own times, observed using the same method; a
somewhat deterministic view of literary evolution was also a consequence.
Contemporary literature is a field rich in data, and presents a complete whole,
whereas the reconstruction, the restoration of a panorama of the past in its totality from
scattered testimony presents the historian of more or less remote eras with a singularly
difficult task. Contemporary literature also has the advantage of facilitating, so to speak,
one's experience of it: here criticism is an eyewitness, which can view the mechanism of
literary activity first-hand. Of course it does not follow that the study of the contemporary
is the only place, or even the easiest place, to find a totality. It involves, for example,
difficulties of a kind from which purely historical studies are exempt: lack of perspective,
and ignorance of the future (whereas the past is always clarified by knowledge of later
eventualities). Nevertheless the fact remains that literary history only stands to gain
greatly from the comparison of past facts with present facts, and that, notably,
knowledge of the latter provides the means to introduce, into the complete
reconstruction of an era, necessary corrections to historical testimony.
The trend toward the discovery of an internal determination of literary history is
attested by the great number of studies oriented toward the inventory of causes and

11
forces that affect this evolution. The idea is that the number of programs adopted by
various groups, of victories and defeats, are the expression of vitality in a given literary
form, and that this vitality is determined by the correspondence between the literary
problems that an era sets itself and the solution that it finds for them. The dominant
literature of this era will be that which finds the most acceptable solution to problems
posed by the literature of the preceding era.
This notion of the internal determination of literary evolution has particularly
attracted researchers' attention toward national factors in literary revolutions; this has
led to some neglect of foreign influences. International relations are the object of
scrupulous study, but in describing the transmission of ideas and literary facts from one
country to another, the main preoccupation is to clarify what national factors have led to
a recourse to foreign models. For example, the study of Shakespeare's influence on
French drama during the Romantic period should be based on the study of the national
development of tragedy in France: it is the crisis of the latter that decided dramatists to
borrow selected elements of tragedy from the English; the evolution of French theater,
in other words, itself spontaneously determined a borrowing that had become
necessary. Thus the influence of Dostoevskii and Tolstoy on the French novel is a
problem in the national evolution of the French novel, and not at all a fact imposed from
outside that turned French literature from its natural course. The assimilation of foreign
elements is essentially an act of preliminary adaptation. Literary translation should
therefore be studied as a constitutive element of the literature of each nation. Alongside
the French Branger and the German Heine there existed a Russian Branger and
Heine who responded to the needs of Russian literature and who, no doubt, were rather
remote from their Western namesakes.
[6. System and function]
Thus in the investigations of the new school, history and doctrine--or "poetics," as
the Russians say--have intersected, and influenced each other. Poetics oriented itself
toward the study of the historical function of artistic devices. History recognized the
necessity for a preliminary description of the internal architecture of the work studied.
Monographs concerned with technique characterized the first stages of the path
along which the Formalists were bound. Separate studies were devoted to rhythm,
language, verse melody, systems of imagery, lyric composition, rhyme, versification, etc.
Worth recalling in this connection are Zhirmunskii's studies on the composition of lyric
poems, his comparative analysis of the poetry of Pushkin and Briusov, a study
elaborated by Boris Eikhenbaum on the melody of lyric poems, and numerous
investigations of verse rhythm,8 Iurii Tynianov's study of poetic semantics, the fruitful
investigations of Viktor Vinogradov into the prose stylistics of Gogol and Dostoevskii,
etc. The goal was to find the dominant elements constituting a work's originality and to
establish their hierarchy, and it was to this that attention was particularly devoted, while
the rest was ignored to an extent. The workers were anxious to specify the boundaries
separating poetics from linguistics, and questions connected to these two domains of
philology almost always held the largest place in their studies.
But little by little there was a turning back toward problems involving the conception of

12
the work in its entirety: monographs on various writers were dedicated to this return.
The aim was to move from the study of fact and discrete groupings [of facts] to that of
whole systems in which the elements [previously] studied piecemeal were to be found
combined. Henceforth observation focused on artistic devices as a function of their
relative value to the system that represents a writer's integral work. The notion of "poetic
function" emerged in all its importance. After the purely descriptive studies of the
preceding period came "functional" studies that connected particular observations to
general conceptions. Little by little the mechanism of literary evolution was worked out
as follows: it appeared not as a succession of forms in which some were replaced by
others, but as a continual variation of the aesthetic function of literary devices. Each
work finds its orientation within a literary milieu, and each element within a whole work.
Any element with a particular value in one period will change function completely in
another period. Grotesque forms, considered during the Classical period to be comic
techniques, became, during the Romantic period a source of the tragic. It is in continual
changes of function that the true life of a work's elements manifests itself. Nothing
returns in its primitive form or function. A repeated word is no longer identical to itself: it
suffices to recall its first utterance to modify its import.
[7. Prospects]
It would be difficult to trace the development of the new school's doctrine much
further. Mustered for combat, its practitioners marched in ordered ranks for as long as
that combat lasted. Today, after the cessation of polemics, each practitioner has gone
on to his own work, to his particular study. It is hardly possible to get a clear view of
unconnected projects or ideas still in the process of formation. Today it is better to think
of the people involved as forming a school rather than as constituting an intellectual
unity. Contemporary literary historians can be classified, according to their relations with
the new school, into three groups: the orthodox, the independents, and the students [les
influncs].
The orthodox are those faithful to OPOIAZ. They represent the extreme left of
Formalism. The best-known among them are Shklovskii, Eikhenbaum, and Tynianov.
The independents took part in the creation of the school, and contributed to its work; but
they do not conform to the school's program, and have chosen to follow a separate
course: e.g., Zhirmunskii and Vinogradov. As for the students, it would be delusory to
attempt to enumerate them. Although there is no agreement as to the value of the ideas
of Formalism and of the work of its disciples, one fact is incontestable: their influence
has been fertile and stimulating. And this influence has two causes. The first is of a
social order: the younger generation has carried Formalist doctrine out of academic
sanctuaries into the street; the Formalists' discussions have mobilized young people,
and awakened interest in literary questions among a great many readers; the word
"poetics," that is, "the doctrine of poetic art," so pedantic-sounding twenty years ago,
has entered into the instructional vocabulary, and the new generation is better prepared
than its elders to judge literary questions knowledgeably. Besides--and this is the
second reason for the influence of Formalism--the Formalists have produced a critical
oeuvre that will matter: their reexamination of ideas transmitted by tradition have revived

13
literary history and recalled historians to literature considered in itself and for itself.
There is an awareness now that the specific elements of a literary work cannot be
neglected without leading inevitably to gross errors. There is an awareness that the
statement, description, and interpretation of facts can all be carried out with a
methodological precision that guarantees their objectivity. "Poetics"--formerly the
domain of entirely subjective sensations, of almost unconscious personal impressions
inexpressible except through appreciative formulas--has become an object of rational
study, the concrete problem of literary science. It is not an exaggeration to say, looking
at things broadly, that the movement created by the Formalists is, in large part, nothing
less than a movement of rebirth for Russian philology.
Leningrad, February 1927

11. Only the Part III of this work, Thematics, has appeared in English, in two disjoint
translations (Literary Genres picking up exactly where Thematics leaves off). Parts I and II
deal with metrics and other aspects of poetry.
22. A number of the points made generally in the article draw upon more specific discussions
by Tomashevskii. On the pertinence and impertinence of biographical fact, see Literature;
and on the uselessness of philosophical allegorization in the absence of factual study, see
Interpreting.
33.. This article hardly claims to give a complete picture of the work on the history of Russian
literature that has been published in Russia during recent years. Only the so-called
"Formalist" school, and more particularly its representatives in Leningrad, who constitute the
most active group, will be taken into consideration. The school is not unified, but it is
permissible to ignore small divergences in an outline as condensed as this one in order to
emphasize the ideas more or less common to all. It will be noticed, besides, that, since the
evolution of literary conceptions within the group has been so rapid, it would be difficult to
establish what the latest ideas are, and this is why my account will have an essentially
historical cast. I have not thought it necessary to specify the part played by each individual in
the development of our ideas. It need not be added that what is said here belongs only to me,
and not to the group to which I belong.
44.. OPOIAZ has never been a regular organization with a list of members, a central office, or
bylaws. However, during the most productive years, it had the semblance of an organization
in the form of a board that was composed of Shklovskii as president, Boris Eikhenbaum as his
associate, and Iurii Tynianov as secretary. [Obviosly, OPOIAZ is a Russian acronym-TRANS.]
55.. The new school has, from several viewpoints, profited from the ideas of Potebnia and
Veselovskii [several citations omitted--TRANS.]
66.. In his studies in the collection Le symbolisme (1910), Belyi did, in certain ways,
anticipate the Formalists. His studies on Russian iambic verse have greatly influenced later
work. His notion of an "experimental aesthetics" contained a seed of Formalism. However, the
"system" of Belyi's ideas has never been accepted by the Formalists, and his later studies
[citation omitted--TRANS.] have been sharply attacked even by those among them who were
doubtless his students.
77.. The titles of the first studies published by OPOIAZ will be noted: How Gogol's Overcoat
Was Made [by Eikhenbaum, 1919] and How Don Quixote Was Made [by Shklovskii, 1921].
88.. The older school studied rhythm separately from its production. Language was merely a
neutral material placed in the crucible of the musical principle. Our effort bore upon the
elements constituting verse and on rhythmic phenomena. Poetry is not the sum of certain
rules plus the language of prose: it is a language sui generis, having its own laws, which are
other than those of ordinary language; it is born from language itself and participates
essentially in the nature of speech, but it is transformed by aesthetic usage. Hence neither
music nor any abstract principle will reveal to us the secret of verse: it is the art of speaking.