The Word is Not Enough: Thinking Russian Formalism Beyond Literary Theory

Abstract

Building on a review of Galin Tihanov’s The Birth and Death of Literary Theory (2019) and Jessica Merrill’s The Origins of Russian Literary Theory (2022), the paper examines how the widespread characterisation of Russian Formalism as the originator of modern literary theory has constrained our assessment of its role in 20th Century intellectual history, both by marginalising literary theory itself and by distorting the crucial notion of the autonomy of form. In response, a double shift in perspective is explored. Firstly, the Formalists’ focus on literary autonomy is framed as a specific but nonetheless integrally co-dependant facet of the multilateral, dialogical intellectual context usefully designated as “Russian Theory” by Zenkin (2004). Secondly, the function of Russian emigration as a transversal vector of the historical transmission of the entire, entangled context of Russian Theory to interwar Central and post-war Western Europe is highlighted. As a result, Russian Formalism and its defence of the autonomy of form appear not as an ultimately failed attempt to ground a specific type of discourse on literature, but as an essential contribution to a broad process of intellectual transfer—from 19th Century Germany through Russian Theory to French Theory—that conditioned the development of the whole breadth of the European human sciences and was predicated on the in- and outflows of Russian emigration.