Russian Formalism.

1. A brief history of Russian Formalism.

1.1. Literary criticism in Russia before Russian Formalism.
The Formalists quite rightly thought that literary criticism was overburdened with
socio-political issues. In the late nineteenth century literature served as a platform
for debate about other concerns and was not investigated per se. Indeed literature
was one of the principal media of discussion for political and philosophical issues.
Consequently literary criticism was almost exclusively the guarded territory of
journalism. Great critics of the nineteenth century (like Dobrolioubov) were in fact
journalists. Literary criticism was not considered an academic activity. In fact if we
trust Eikhenbaum the academy seems to have been quite unconcerned about these
issues.
Before the appearance of the Formalists, academic research, quite
ignorant of theoretical problems, made use of antiquated aesthetic,
psychological, and historical axioms and had so lost sight of its proper
subject that its very existence as a science had become illusory. There
was almost no struggle between the Formalists and the Academicians,
not because the Formalists had broken in the door (there were no
doors), but because we found an open passage-way instead of a
fortress. (Boris Eikhenbaum, The Theory of the Formal Method,
105)
Russian Formalism also appears as a reaction against Symbolism and Acmeism which
were considered elitist in their concern.
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1.2. The birth of Russian Formalism.
Formalism emerged from the discussions between two small groups of students, the
OPOJAZ group in St-Petersburg and the Moscow Linguistic Circle (gravitating around
Roman Jakobson.) OPOJAZ is a kind of acronym for The Society for the Study of
Poetic Language. OPOJAZ included all the major Formalists, Viktor Shklovsky, Boris
Eikhenbaum, Osip Brik and Yury Tynianov. Russian Formalism later became very close
to Futurism, sharing the same interest for the phonic structure of the verse and the
same opposition to Symbolism and Realism.
Ren Wellek identifies three periods in Russian Formalism (A History of Modern
Criticism: 1750-1950, vol.7, 319):
The early period of self-definition (1916-1921): the prevailing tone is
polemical as the movement sets itself off sharply from its predecessors. The main
focus of attention is on poetic language and prose composition.
The middle period of expansion and consolidation (1921-1928): all literary
problems are re-examined. The major concern is now literary history.
The period of dissolution and accommodation (1928-1935): on the one hand
there is political pressure but on the other hand there is a shift in interest among the
Formalists themselves.
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1.3. The historical context.
Russian Formalism holds a special place in critical theory. Not only did it stand up as
a radical break from the tradition and the contemporary practice of literature and
literary criticism but it was also cut off by the historical turmoil of the 1917
Revolution and its far-reaching aftermath.
It shares with Futurism, with which Russian Formalism was closely associated, a
radical opposition to Symbolism as well as Realism.
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1.4. Russian Formalism and Futurism.

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 Russian Formalism is rather closely linked to the futuristic movement. Futurism was
one of many avant-garde movements which emerged in the wake of the 1905
Revolution (one of its effect being a loosening of censorship). Poets of varying fame
and talent formed small groups which tended to disintegrate faster than they were
formed and new ones would soon emerge. But the term Futurism has become
internationally accepted as a designation for a major aspect of the Russian avant-
garde. (Ren Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950, 261).
The main characteristic of Futurism is its opposition to poetry and to some extent
painting as they were conceived of and practised in the nineteenth century. In fact
the Futurists artistic efforts before the First World War were directed against
decadent bourgeois culture and especially against the anguished soul-searching of
the Symbolist movement in poetry and the visual arts. (Raman Selden, A Readers
Guide..., 8) Futurism is a radical movement which intended to do away with the
past. On the one hand the futurists carried out daring experiments with the Russian
language in their attempt to create a new form of poetry, exploiting the sound
texture of words. On the other hand the movement tends to remain encapsulated in
a strongly oppositional string of slogans.

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 Some Futurist slogans

Only we are the face of our time. The horn of time

trumpets through us and the art of the world.
(quoted in Wellek, 262)
Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy and the
rest overboard the ship of modernity!
(quoted in Wellek, 262)
Eugene Oneguine would have been written even if
Pushkin had not existed
Some of the major Futurists are Vladimir Mayakovsky, Victor Khlebnikov, Aleksey
Kruchenykh and David Burlyuk.

2. What is Russian Formalism?

2.1. Formalism and the Formal method.
The term Formalism was coined by opponents to the movement and has become
the name tag for it. The Formalists themselves have tended to see it as reductive and
have especially been opposed to references to the Formal method as they claim to
have precisely not had a dogmatic approach to literature. On the contrary, they have
tried to keep a dynamic and evolutionary attitude to literature. Theirs is not a
methodology but a science of literature.
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2.2. The purpose of Russian Formalism.
The purpose of Russian Formalism is to put literary studies on an independent
footing, and to make the study of literature an autonomous and specific discipline.
(Ann Jefferson, Russian Formalism, 25). In fact the Formalists advocate a scientific
attitude towards literature in strong opposition to the journalistic dilettantism of the
previous century. As Boris Eikhenbaum puts it, we =the Formalists are
characterized only by the attempt to create an independent science of literature
which studies specifically literary material. (The Theory of the Formal Method,
103) The Formalists insist that their theory is neither a methodology nor an
aesthetic.Their first task is necessarily an attempt to define clearly the object
studied, that is literature.

3. Russian Formalism in 11 definitions.

LITERARINESS. The Formalists exclude the non-literary from literature, seing life and
art as mutual opposites. The Formalist definition of literature is differential,
oppositional. Literature is constituted by what differentiates it from other orders of
facts. And what differentiates literature from non-literature is its literariness.
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POETIC VS. EVERYDAY LANGUAGE. Sound is the key difference between poetic
language and everyday usage. The autonomy of the poetic word is to be achieved
through sound texture. This will attract attention to the word itself. Jakobson
contends that poetic form is the organized coercion of language. (Boris
Eikhenbaum, The Theory of the Formal Method, 127) Surprisingly enough the

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 Formalists position themselves in an Aristotelian tradition in which poetic language
must appear strange and wonderful. (Shklovsky, Art as Technique, 22) Leo
Jakubinsky demonstrates that poetic language is roughened. This roughening is
both phonetic and rhythmic. Behind the notion of roughened language lurks the
idea of defamiliarisation.
Should the disordering of rhythm become a convention, it would be
ineffective as a device for the roughening of language. (Shklovsky, Art
as Technique, 24)
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DEFAMILIARISATION (or making strange). Shklovsky thinks that art defamiliarises
things that have become habitual or automatic (through the process of
automatisation). In a way art is a perspective on things, a way to see things. Form
becomes a focus of Formalist attention deriving directly from their preoccupation
with the specificity of literariness. The object in itself is not important. The object is
merely a pretext for art.
[A]rt 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. (Shklovsky, Art
as Technique, 12)
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AUTOMATISATION. This is the logical corollary of defamiliarisation. Automatisation is
the inevitable process by which any artistic object becomes habitual, banal and loses
its power as an artistic object. Automatised devices are the necessary background
against which new or renewed devices can stand out as non-ordinary. Thus
automatisation and defamiliarisation provide a new and dynamic definition of the
relationship between form and content in terms of material and device.
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DEVICE. A device is a compositional feature of the literary work. Some are
foregrounded or made strange (see defamiliarisation) in order to renew artistic
perception while others are automatised, i.e. they have become habitual.
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FUNCTION. This is the necessary complement of the device. The device becomes
automatised, whereas the function doesnt. In other words a device is defamiliarising
not by its mere existence but by virtue of its function.
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MATERIAL/DEVICE VS. CONTENT/FORM. Russian Formalism reacted against the
deeply-rooted notion that content is superior to form which is merely seen as a
recipient. In the first phase of Russian Formalism form is synonymous to literariness
and thus is granted an essential status in the definition of literature: actually it is
what made literature literature. However, the later view of Russian Formalism takes
into account the automatisation of the perception of literary devices and thus the
opposition material/device tends to collapse. An automatised or habitual device has
more to do with material than with form. The dynamic principle implied in the
material/device distinction means that elements of form itself can be included in the
concept of material. (Ann Jefferson, Russian Formalism, 36).
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FABULA (or story). A term belonging to the study of prose, fabula designates the
raw material which will be processed to become a narrative. The story is the purely
chronological series of events, which will be recounted, in the order in which they

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 took place, which is not necessarily the order of the narration. The fabula will be
organised into siuzhet to become a narrative.
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SIUZHET (or plot). The siuzhet is the narrative counterpart of the fabula or story
before it is being told and like fabula refers to prose. The siuzhet is purely literary. It
is an artistic construct, whereas fabula is the chronological string of events. Siuzhet
organises fabula using delays, digressions, chronological disruptions, etc. In fact
defamiliarisation is the key concept: the siuzhet is the defamiliarising narrative
version of the fabula.
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THE PROBLEM OF REALITY: one of the axiomatic principles of Russian Formalism is
that literature is derived from other literatures and not from any non-literary source.
(Revealingly enough, the figure of the author is desacralised: he/she is relegated to
the rank of craftsman merely arranging pre-existing material in an innovative way.)
The renewed perception of formal devices is an essential aspect of
literariness, and the criterion of verisimilitude is irrelevant to the
Formalist project. The Formalists evaluate literary form for its
perceptibility and not for its mimetic capacity. (Ann Jefferson,
Russian Formalism, 30)
The subtext is that what literature says is not really important; what is primordial is
how literature says it. In fact the issue of meaning is central to Medvedev/Bakhtins
critique of Russian Formalism.
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THE PROBLEM OF LITERARY HISTORY. As Ren Wellek puts it: Formalism was at first
deliberately and definitely antihistorical. (A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-
1950, 323). However, as a consequence of the refinement of the Formalist approach,
a theory of literary evolution had to be elaborated to account for the historical
dimension of literature. For the Formalists literary history entails a distinction
between automatized and perceptible forms within literature itself.
Literariness is a product of the deformation of the canonised or
automatised elements, in other words of precisely those factors which
constitute a tradition. Form is made perceptible against a background
of existing literary form, and the function of a device is determined not
just by the structural hierarchy of a particular work, but by its place in
the literary system as a whole. The principle of defamiliarisation
simultaneoulsy undoes the idea of tradition and reintroduces an
historical dimension in the relationship between individual literary
device and the overall system. Discontinuity replaces continuity as the
basis of historical progression. (Ann Jefferson, Russian Formalism,
41).

4. The Critique of Russian Formalism, based on

Medvedev/Bakhtins The Formal Method in Literary
Scholarship.
4.1. The problem of an apophatic approach.
The Russian Formalists base their definition of literature on negation.
Medvedev/Bakhtin affirms that [t]here is not a single scientific abstraction which
exists by means of bare negation. Quite on the contrary, [i]n every scientific
abstraction, negation is dialectically joined with assertion. (Medvedev/Bakhtin, The
Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 91).

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 Similarly, the Formalists define poetic language in opposition with everyday
language. If for example communication is the most essential element of everyday
language, then poetic language is totally devoid of communicative purposes. In fact
poetic language becomes the converse of everyday language. In denying the word
its full meaning, the Formalists not only deprive themselves of all possibility of
progress, but also fall back into dogma. (Medvedev/Bakhtin, The Formal Method
in Literary Scholarship, 91, passim)
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4.2. Nihilistic tendency.
Medvedev/Bakhtin argues that the basic Formalist concepts of the early period, such
as defamiliarisation, device, material all partake of a nihilistic tendency because the
novelty and strangeness of the word originates in the loss of its previous meaning and
not in the enrichment of the word with a new and more constructive meaning.
Medvedev/Bakhtin attacks this by reintroducing the notion of moral value.
Thus, an object is not made strange for its own sake, in order that it
be felt, in order to make a stone stony, but for the sake of something
else, a moral value, which against this background stands out all the
more sharply and vividly precisely as a moral value.
(Medvedev/Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 60)
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4.3. The nature of poetic language.
In Medvedev/Bakhtins opinion Russian Formalism is wrong in conceiving poetic
language as a dialect, that is more or less as a different language. On the contrary
what differentiates poetic language from everyday use is poetic assignement.
Language acquires poetic characteristics only in the concrete poetic
construction. These characteristics do not belong to language in its
linguistic capacity, but to the construction, whatever its form may be.
The most elementary everyday utterance or apt expression may be
perceived artistically in certain circumstances. Even an individual word
may be perceived as a poetic utterance. (Medvedev/Bakhtin, The
Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 84)
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4.4. Material, device, siuzhet and fabula: the problem of form and content.
Even if the relationship between material and device is dynamic, material and device
are completely determined by their polemical juxtaposition to content and
form. (Medvedev/Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 79) In fact
they become their converse. By analogy siuzhet and fabula as elements of
poetic construction become mere reflections of the basic opposition on which rests
much of Russian Formalism: poetic vs. everyday language.

[E]very element of the story [=fabula], i.e. of the event being

related, is only significant to the extent that it motivates some
constructive device, some object of the tale itself, which is taken as a
self-valuable whole independent of the event being narrated.
From here we arrive at an important basic principle of Formalism: the
material is the motivation of the constructive device. And this device is
an end in itself.
If we look closely at this position, we see that it is the converse of the
assertion which the Formalists began by criticising. According to the
usual, nave point of view, which was formed on a realistic basis, the
content of the work, i.e., the object of the narration [=fabula], was
an end in itself and the narrative devices were only technical, auxiliary

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 means to that end. The Formalists turned this position upside down by
reversing its elements.
But they retained in toto the completely inadmissible division of the
work into technical, auxiliary elements and self-directed elements.
(Medvedev/Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 107)
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4.5. The problem of meaning.

In Medvedev/Bakhtins view conceiving meaning only on the level of poetic
construction is erroneous. Indeed, if the word in itself does not make sense and if the
poetic work is justifiable only in terms of defamiliarisation-automatisation, meaning
only emerges on the level of poetic construction.
On the contrary, for Medvedev/Bakhtin the material presence of the word must be
linked with intrinsic ideological meaning. This connection consists in social
evaluation. Thus Medvedev/Bakhtin reconciles poetic and everyday language.
(Medvedev/Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 118-9, passim)
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 4.6. The problem of reality.
When the Formalists oppose life and art categorically, they are as mistaken as
Russian criticism of the time which takes the representation of life for the actual
reality of life (Medvedev/Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 18,
passim, for the diagnosis of Russian criticism and not for connecting it to the
Formalist conception of life and art.). Indeed, they fail to see the specificity of
literature among the other intellectual activities, in that literature both reflects
other intellectual domains and is a particular intellectual activity itself
(Medvedev/Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 18, passim).
It limited literature to reflection alone; that is, it lowered it to the
status of a simple servant and transmitter of other ideologies, almost
completely ignoring the independently meaningful reality of the literary
work, its ideological independence and originality. (Medvedev/Bakhtin,
The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 18)
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4.7. The real problem of literary evolution.
The alternation of automatised and defamiliarised works of literature as the dynamic
of literary evolution fails to explain why a particular work comes after another and
not before and more importantly does not account for the creation of new works.
Indeed, if we push this argument to its extreme, literary history could be constituted
of the endless alternation of the same two works. Medvedev/Bakhtin attacks this
law of automatisation-perceptibility by saying that it is a very general psychic
law not at all connected with the specific nature of literature. (Medvedev/Bakhtin,
The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 166) Therefore [l]iterary evolution, in
the Formalist conception, is not an immanently literary phenomenon.
(Medvedev/Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 166)

5. The legacy of Russian Formalism to twentieth century

literary criticism.
5.1. A scientific approach to literature: by attempting to define clearly its subject
matter, Russian Formalism granted the study of literature the status of a science.
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5.2. A reevaluation of the literary work: they placed the study of the actual work
of literature at the centre of scholarship and relegated biographical, psychological,
and sociological studies to its periphery. (Ren Wellek, A History of Modern
Criticism: 1750-1950, vol.7, 324)
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5.3. An awareness of the problematic dichotomy of content and form:
although they failed to overcome the dichotomy of content and form, they
defined a dynamic relationship between material and device.
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5.4. A focus on sound patterns: Russian Formalism is a break-through as far as
examining technical and linguistic features of the literary work is concerned.
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5.5. A shift of attention onto reading processes: Russian Formalism demystifies
the figure of the author to the point of considering him/her secondary to the the
work of literature. This results in the emergence of the reader as participant in the
work.

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6. Bibliography.

EIKHENBAUM, Boris, The Theory of the Formal Method, In Russian

Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, transl. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J.
Reis (University of Nebraska P, 1965), 99-139.
JEFFERSON, Ann, Russian Formalism, In Modern Literary Theory: A
Comparative Introduction, eds. Ann Jefferson and David Robey
(B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1986), 24-45.
MEDVEDEV, Pavel N./BAKHTIN, Mikhail M., The Formal Method in
Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics,
transl. Albert J. Wehrle, (The Johns Hopkins UP, 1978), 191pp.
NIVAT, Georges. Russie-Europe, la fin du schisme: tudes littraires et
politiques (LAge dhomme, 1993), 810pp.
SELDEN, Raman, A Readers Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 2nd ed.
(Harverster Wheatsheaf, 1989), 159pp.
SHKLOVSKY, Victor, Art as Technique, In Russian Formalist Criticism:
Four Essays, transl. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (University of
Nebraska P, 1965), 3-24.
WELLEK, Ren, A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950 in Eight Volumes,
vol. 7: German, Russian, and Eastern European Criticism, 1900-1950
(Yale UP, 1991) 458pp.

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