5 = 100: Long Live the "filologicheskaia Revoliutsiia"

In his pamphlet 5 = 100, published in Knizhnyi ugol in 1922, Boris Eikhenbaum looked back at the first few years of Formalist activity in parallel to the recent social and political upheavals, and compared the deep renovation that the OPOIAZ (Obshchestvo izucheniia poeticheskogo iazyka) circle was bringing about in the field of literary studies to the revolutions that had shaken and transformed the country in 1917. He defined the emergence of the Formal method as a filologicheskaia revoliutsiia. The correlation was not just a seductive metaphor, and not only did it gesture at the principle of the scholar as a public figure - one that the Russian Formalists, with their active participation and transformation of the cultural scene of their city and country, fully embodied. With this essay I aim to unpack Eikhenbaum's concept of filologicheskaia revoliutsiia in its manifold declensions - on the one hand, I will foreground the profound connections between the political turmoil of the late 1910s and the powerful recasting of methods and approaches that the Formalists brought about in the field of cultural studies; on the other, I will highlight the permanent revolution that their theories have set in motion by exploring their rich heritage a hundred years after 1917.