Rereading Russian Formalism at the End of the Soviet Union: An Ethnography of a Literary Theory

This article draws attention to a curious paradox in the history of Russian Formalism: Yuri Tynianov, one of the most imaginative theorists of the early Soviet period, has been consistently marginalized, overlooked, and ignored in both Russophone and Anglophone scholarship. Despite numerous attempts to revive Tynianov’s legacy, his works continue to alienate scholars of literary theory and history. By exploring early volumes of The Tynianov Collection, the conference proceedings of the biennial conference The Tynianov Readings, this article traces a series of engagements with Formalism in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. As it demonstrates, the active and sustained process of rereading Formalism resulted in an impressive archive of cosmogonic accounts. These accounts explained the genesis and development of history, culture, society, and the self; they offered a particular vision of time and space; they outlined crucial elements and relations that constitute the universe; and they pointed to the processes that are responsible for organizing these elements and relations in particular ways. More specifically, the article maps the epistemic kinship of various concepts and interpretations in order to reconstruct the analytical moves and explanatory frameworks through which a group of talented, informed, and unorthodox late- Soviet scholars who sought to reactivate, but inadvertently deactivated, the dynamic impulse of Tynianov’s work.