«The Enigma of Similarities: Discussing the Form/Content Relationship in Soviet Intellectual Circles in the 1920-30s»

Abstract

This paper explores the semiotic quarrel which occupied an important space in the Soviet intellectual culture of the 1920-30s: is the relationship necessary or arbitrary between form and content, sign and referent, words and things? This parallel set of oppositions is in no way specific to Russian thought, as it has been at the heart of philosophical discussions in Europe since Plato’s Cratylus and the Stoics in Greece. But what is peculiar for Soviet Russia of the time is that German Romanticism, Humboldt, Hegel, Marx are perceived through an underground Byzantine tradition, silent but over-present, of denying the autonomy of the sign.