or Values). in Cohin3 du mt>lllk nusr ttsolitlf{ll< 8: 223-43. (A realiog analysis, using an:bival sour=)

Kelly, A. (1981) 'Empirioeritiasm: A Bolshevik Phil0$0ph)"l' in Cahicrs du mondc rus!< ct soviC tique 22 (I): 89- 117. (A richly documented argu-men1 for an affinnative ao~er.)

Kline, G. (1968) "'Nietzschcan Marxism" in Ru..U.' . . tn BOJton Colltgt Studies in l'hllo>vphy II: Dc-nrytho/OfiZillg Marxisn The Hague: Nijboff. (The Nicu.schean clements in Bogdanov tt a/.)

Kolakowski, L. (1978) Main Currrnts of Mar:dsm /1: 1M Goldm A&

RUSSIAN LIT E RARY FORMALISM

establish the distinction betwten practical and poetic language; from 1919 to 1921 it investigated the usc of poetic language in particular literary worb; and from 1921 until 1929 it examined literary works as responses to pm1ow literary history. The movement began as part of the avantgardc experimentation in the arts in the )'ears surrounding the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. I ts practitioners formed l\1.'0 groups: the Moscow Linguistic Circle, which included Roman Jakobson. J>Ctr Jlogatyn:v. N. Trubctskoi and Grigorii Vinokur. and its sister group in St Peters-burg. the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Opoiaz), whose members included Osip Brik, Boris Eil:henbaum, !.

polemical stance and emphasis on form with Russian Futurist poetry. whK:b emphasized sounds in isola lion from meaning; the sctf-va.luablc' word; neologisms; and shock \'alue. Shklovskii's widely publicized slatcmcnt. art is the sum of its devices'. was an example of the polemical nature of Formalist utterances, as were his assessment of L:lurencc Sterne's Tristram Shandy as the most typic:al novel of world Jilerature. and his catcsorical statement that a literary work is nothing but form.

In spite of such catchwords and slogans, the Formalist emphasis on form in no way dismissed meaning. Eikhcnbaums study of verse intonation in his book Mlodika russkogo lirlcheskogo stlkha (Melody in Russian Lyric Vme) (1922) examined the interaction of lc.1:ical meaning a.nd syntax in dozens of poems, showing that titerary interpmation rested on the blend of the semantic and the formal. Formalism sought to displace the wual explanation of content as a reflcc;tion of lhc non-lilcrary world, n:placin.g it \\;th au approach to content as u literury component of a work. What the Formatisu objected to (like the American New Critics afier them) was the attempt to paraphrase a work's content, extracting it from the '"'rbal blend. The problem with the content- form dichotomy was that it implicitly equa-ted content with meaning.

With the dislinction between poetic and praclical language in place, the Formalists began to examine the workings of poetic language in rnogo ia=yka (Prob-lems of Verse Language) (1924) tbeorizod that the pw.ailing clement in this struggle deformed the others.. Tynianov introduced the term 'constructhc principle' to refer to the relationship betv.lXIJ the dominanra and the other elements in a work. ShlciO\skWs catchphra.se art is the sum of it.~ devices' was now sho~A-n to be an oversimptiration: an was far more than the mere sum of its pans. because the

RUSSIAN LIT ERARY FORMALISM

meaning of each part was dependent on the whole context created by the work. Each dement served to place the others in relief.

To view the literary v.'OriC as a 'syttcm' was to see it as a self-created world rather than an imitation of outside reality or referent. In this the formalist concept of the literary work paralleled the work of FerdillllDd De SAussuoe (2) on the sign. SauMure's sign. which cons-isttd of mental concept (signified) and word (signifier), took no account of the referent, which was completely ouuide the sign. Similarly, for the Formalists 'content". like rt'fercnt, w;u completely outside the literat) work~ which consisted of acsthe-. ticizcd meaning- the interctction or an compone-nts or the literary work.

Since the goal of poetic language was to renew familiar, automatized language, and since what was familiar changed o~r time. it followed that what constitUied poetic language in one epoch would ttase to be poetic in the nex.L Poetic lnnguagc itself was su$0Cptible to automatization through rqx:ated usage in different works, therebY losing iu poeticity. Writers trying 10 overcome the automatized oc:m\'CTltions of their literary ~rathers' would turn to works by their 'grandfathers' or 'uncles' for device,s that might revitalize cxbawtcd goo= In 'Noveishaia rwskaia poCziia' (Modem Russian Poetry) (1919}, Jakobson stated 1hat new literary fonns arise to replace pte\'ious literary forms that have become exhausted. This position. for wbich the Formaliu found precedent in the work of lhe nine.teenth-a:ntury Russian ethnogrnpher Aleksandr Vcselovslc.ii, contnlSted with tbc wide1y held view of tbe ninctcc:nth-

RUSSIAN LITERARY FORMALIS M

colliding allowed the Formalist.~ to cballcuge accepted interpretations of major literary works, c:spcciaUy those widely char.tctcriud as examples of realism. Eikhcnbaum"s seminal anicle on Gogol''s short story The Overcoat' called into question the constnsual interpretat ion of that story as a portrayal of the humble man didaincd by his coll

was incompatible with the notion of a base n:Occted in a superstructure.

\Vith the rigid controls imposed on literature. philosophy and theory at the clo

R USSIAN MATERIALISM: 'THE 1860s'

and evolution; ch. 2 e.umines relationship of Russian Folllllllism with the Prague Sehool.)

Tynianov. lu. ( 1924) Problemy stlkhor.-orrwgo lazyka; trans. M. Sosa and 8. Harvey, Probltms of Vtrst Language, Ann Arbor, Ml: Ardis, 1981. (Distin guisbcs literary criteria for poetry vetsU$ prose.)

- (1927) '0 literatumoi tvoliutsii '; trans. C. Luplow, 'On Literary Evolution', in L. Matejka and K. Pomorslcn, (eds), Reading1 in Russian Poeric.s: Formalist aruJ Structw-alist Vlcw.t, Cam bridse. MA: MIT Press. 66-78. (T heoretical discussion of bow new literary genres c\-entually become automatized.)

CAROL ANY

RUSSIAN MATERIALISM: 'THE 1860s' No tradition of philosophical moterlali:J11l ext.ted In Russia until the }'-tars com-mtionall)' called 'the J860.s' - roughly, tlu: puilxlfrom the dc:lth of Tsar Nidwlas I in 1855 to the attempttd assassination of Tsar Altxondu II in /866. During thot time philosophical freethinking. under the delayed influence of the Frtnch Enlightt>nmenr and the rontnnporaneous influence of po.Jt .. Ht>gt!lian Guman nwtcriali.Jm. came rogetMr with polit ical radicalism to crtatt a major soda/ and inttlkttuol nto~tment with a br01ully nratuialist philo-ophical foumlation.

TM thtoretical underpinnings of tlz~ mo-rmr~nt "K'"t

of 'tlu! 1860s' M"t"rt' honoured in Russia as great philosoph~rs and important precursors of Afarx.

I lnttlltduallilltagt l Plollosoplllc:al contml 3 Soc:ioeuhJnl sipi{'laUICO

I lnttlltdual U...gc

Although So,'ict Marsist historians of philosophy laboured for decades to find a nat.i\"C materialist tradition in Russian philosophy extending back to the eighteenth century. no such tr.adition is discernible until the mid-nineteenth. The influence of the Frt:nch Enlightenment, encouraged in Russia for u time by Catherine the Great, can be seen in the thought of Alelcsandr Radishchev (1749-1802) and the ' Russian Voltairians', but none of tbem actually advanred a materialist ontology or significantly influenced the later Russian thin.ters "ito did. and the same is true of othe-r allcted early 'matt:rialisu' such as Mikhail Lomonosov (1711 -65) a nd the theoreticians of the aboni,e Decembrist uprising of 1825. Tbe eighteenth a:ntury Enlightenment affected only a small stratwn of Russian society and did little to change the overall religiou~ idealistk direction of Russian philosophical thought - a direction 1hat was reinforcxd "'ith a ' 'engeance by the rtpressive measures of Nicholu 1, the 'Tsar-disciplinarian'. upon bjs accession to the throne in 1825 (see E NLIOIITGNMENT. R USSIAN).

Materialism came to Russia in the nineteenth century as it had come to ~nnany - as a reaction against Gennan Idealism; and in both countries the

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