Readings in Russian Poetics

Formalist and Structuralist Views

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Edited by Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorksa,

Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns

Dalkey Archive Press

Due/Published June 2002, 306 pages, paper

ISBN 1564783243

This collection of essays by and about the major Russian theorists includes Boris M. Ejxenbaum's "The Theory of the Formal Method," Viktor Sklovskij's "The Mystery Novel: Dickens's Little Dorrit," Roman Jakobson's "On Realism in Art," Mikhail Bakhtin's "Discourse Typology in Prose," and Osip M. Brik's "Contributions to the Study of Verse Language." Investigating the relationship of form and structure to the production of meaning in literature, these theorists laid the groundwork for the development of literary theory as a scientific discipline. A new introduction by Gerald L. Bruns provides a context for understanding why these works remain as important and influential now as when they were first written.

Review

In the last thirty years, a variety of schools of literary criticism have emerged and reemerged from all over the world. In 1971, the publication of Readings in Russian Poetics brought scattered and, in many cases, obscure texts of the Formalist school to the attention of Western readers. Received with great excitement and immediately influential, the collection and Russian formalism in general have faded a bit from the literary world. Now thirty years later, a reissue of this collection that documents the methodological struggles of Russian theorists during the 20s and 30s, reminds us of Formalism's continuing relevance for literary studies. While Russian formalism helped lay the groundwork for literary theory as a scientific discipline and approached the text as a closed system, it is not merely concerned with form. In many cases, Russian formalism, particularly the writings of Bakhtin, is interested in literature's relationship to the social world and how social interactions condition and shape the form of literature. Readings in Russian Poetics is not a dry, distant, doctrinaire collection of texts from authors with difficult to pronounce names, rather, it is a diverse and engaging exploration of the relationship between form and structure, theories of communication, the nature of poetic language, the novel, and specific novels.

Essays include "The Theory of the Formal Method," Boris M. Éjxenbaum; "On Realism in Art," Roman Jakobson; "On the Boundary between Studies of Folklore and Literature," Roman Jakobson and Petr Bogatyrev; "Fairy Tale Transformations," Vladimir Propp; "Contributions to the Study of Verse Language," Osip M. Brik; "Reported Speech," V. N. Volosinov; "Discourse Typology in Prose," Mixail Baxtin (Mikhail Bakhtin); "The Mystery Novel: Dickens's Little Dorrit," Viktor klovskij; "Russian Formalism in Retrospect," Krystyna Pomorska