Editorial: Workshop on European formalisms (Germanic countries and Eastern Europe) Formalism’ as an epistemological fact.

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The notion of ‘postimperial formalism’ accounts of the interconnectedness of Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish variants of formalism, whose distinctive character is contingent on the dialectics of liberation and subjugation (or autonomy and heteronomy) operating in the multinational entity of the Russian empire. Specifically, the theory of poetic language – the pars pro toto of early literary theory – carries with itself the survivals of the conditions of the multinational empire. This is most eloquently expressed in the writings of Polish and Jewish-Ukrainian populist activists turned ethnographic researchers, who prepared a theory of poetic language to which the formalists could have recourse. I first map the dimensions of the Ukrainian investment into the formulation of the theory of poetic language. Secondly, I describe the role of the constructed Ukrainness – under the guise of the so-called Ukrainian school of Polish romanticism – in the emergence of Polish formalism.
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Ukraine as the Hub of Postimperial Formalism. Ukrainness, Revolutionary Populism, and the Theory of Poetical Language ‘in’ Russia and ‘in’ Poland

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The article examines the multifaceted activity of Evgeny Polivanov, whose contribution to the formation of new linguistics and the formal method continues to provoke debate. The specificity of Polivanov’s main ideas and principles, in comparison with the mainstream formalists (Shklovsky, Tynianov) consisted in the reliance on the heritage of positivism (Baudouin, historian Kareev), supplemented by a kind of sociological and cultural “relationalism”.
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Yevgeny Polivanov: Beyond Formalism?

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According to many researchers, Russian formalists do not want to recognize the influence of German expressionism on their work. This statement leads to a distinction between both theories in many fields, such as the field of cinema. In this sense, it is common to read nuanced definitions of expressionism and formalism. The present article tends to verify the truthfulness of these definitions and to show that formalism could be an extension of expressionism through an analysis of two reference works: <italic>Expressionism and Film</italic> (<italic>Expressionismus und Film</italic>) (1926) by Rudolf Kurtz et <italic>The Poetics of Cinema</italic> (<italic>Поэтика кино</italic>) (1927).
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The Formalist Cinematographic Theory: a Refined Thinking of the Expressionist Film Conception?

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This study deals with folkloric research object within Germanic and Russian Formalism, it shows why folklore and ornament have become an ideal research object of the European formalist current in Germanic and Slavic areas.
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Ornament as a formalist object

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This article argues that Viktor Shklovsky and his allies’ theory cannot be duly appreciated and understood without accounting for their engagement in journalism. The latter was both practiced and theorized by Shklovsky’s group of the Russian Formalists, which stood out as a then rare combination of rigorous theory and extreme performativity. Accordingly, there was disagreement among the Formalists of Shklovsky’s group. On one hand, they did not want the kind of criticism that is published in periodicals and holds sway over contemporary writers to be naïve banter—the Formalists would rather criticism recognize the literariness of literature and hew to the patterns and laws they discovered. On the other hand, the Formalists applied these literary patterns to their own writing, creative or not, which is why Shklovsky wrote that he was both a fish zoologist and a fish. Hence the Formalists’ desire to make their scholarship and criticism performative. The conflict between rigor and performativity could be resolved only in a periodical, and while the Formalists, as this article explains, had a problem with issuing one fully of their own, Shklovsky’s literary magazine <italic>Petersburg</italic> was a short-lived exception. This magazine is as little studied as it is largely important—for both the history and theory of Russian Formalism, as well as journalism per se, which in 1920s Russia was recognized as a new modus vivendi of literature in the Formalists’ theory of factography (<italic>literatura fakta</italic>). The leading genre of factography was the feuilleton, and it is from this genre’s standpoint that the article analyzes Shklovsky’s Petersburg, and, in the second part, compares it with another literary magazine—the famous <italic>The Library for Reading</italic>, run by Osip Senkovsky, one of the prominent feuilletonists of the nineteenth century. The comparison of Shklovsky with Senkovsky as editors of these magazines makes it possible to appreciate both not as vivid exceptions but the very rule—a particular canon with its unique approach to culture that became relevant with the advent of fragmentation in our civilization and remains so to this day.
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Russian Formalism as Journalistic Scholarship; or, When Criticism Recognized Itself as a Genre 

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One of the central points of the sociolinguistic conception of Lev Iakubinskii (1892–1945) became the thesis about the differentiation of language in accordance with the social structure of society, leading to the formation of class dialects. The basic ideas of this conception were formulated by Iakubinskii in a series of articles published in the journal “Literary Studies” in 1930–1931 and in the collection “Essays on Language” (1932). In these works, Iakubinskii considers language as a heterogeneous formation, consisting of the languages of certain class groups (the language of the peasantry, the language of the proletariat, etc.), and also addresses the question of the formation of a united national language. The present article examines the origins and components of Iakubinskii’s sociolinguistic conception and considers to what extent his engagement with this topic was influenced by the complex political and ideological context of the early Soviet period.
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Between Linguistics and Ideology: Lev Iakubinskii on Social Dialects

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An important part of Viktor Shklovsky’s legacy remains neglected by scholars of formalism and questioned for political reasons: his controversial critical and political interventions, as well as his work in propaganda on behalf of the Stalinist regime. Personal memories of Shkovsky and whatever is available in his publications from that period all convey a sense of compromising uncertainty. I am suggesting that his work during that period has special value, even though it arises from the shadow of a doubt that surrounds his private and public images as a Stalinist opportunist. Based on his earlier theoretical findings and his practical and critical competence in literature and film, Shklovsky found original analytical tools to reflect temporality, historical experience, and (Soviet) subjectivity under political violence. His profound critical revision of his early theoretical postulates in the light of historical experience gained during this controversial period is relevant nowadays.
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<italic>Motalka</italic>, or Time in Chiasmus: Viktor Shklovsky’s “Revolutionary Choice of the Past”

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This article deals with the fictional worlds semantics (FWS) from the perspective of its relation to structural poetics and some branches of analytic philosophy, while these connections are explored via the general term <italic>meaning</italic>. Three questions are stated: 1.) how does the relation between structural notions and FWS perspective look like and what are possible dissimilarities; 2.) what is the role of analytic philosophy in this relation; 3.) how the meaning is constructed between the (fictional) text and the recipient? Some open problems in analysing the relation between structural concepts of meaning/reference re-construction and their adapting by FWS are thus inquired, especially in connection to thoughts presented by a prominent scholar in the field of FWS, Prof. Lubomír Doležel. Finally, a possible direction for grasping the meaning/reference problem in FWS from the perspective of dynamic semantics and game-theoretical semantics is proposed.
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Structural / Possible / Fictional: A few notes on the shift from structural poetics and stylistics to the theory of fictional worlds in the perspective of Lubomír Doležel’s work

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This article focuses on Juri Lotman’s views of the origins of Tartu-Moscow structuralism. He reconstructed the genesis of the Tartu-Moscow School using the Hegelian model (thesis – antithesis – synthesis). In Lotman’s concepts of the 1960s and 1970s, the role of the “thesis” was always played by the Petrograd Association of Russian Formalists (OPOIaZ). Lotman selected different movements as the “antithesis”. In the 1960s, the productive antithesis to OPOIaZ was, for Lotman, the “semantic paleontology” of Nikolai Marr and his followers (such as Olga Freidenberg). In the 1970s, Lotman assigned this role to the functionalist structuralism of the Prague School (with a special focus on the work of Jan Mukařovský), but he never abandoned his sympathy for the work of Freidenberg.
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Yuri Tynianov, Jan Mukařovský and Nikolai Marr in Juri Lotman’s Concept of History of Humanities

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 6 (2023): Issue 3 (December 2023)

Volume 6 (2023): Issue 2 (September 2023)

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Volume 4 (2021): Issue 3 (December 2021)

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Volume 4 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

Volume 3 (2020): Issue 2 (December 2020)

Volume 3 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020)

Volume 2 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019)

Volume 1 (2018): Issue 2 (December 2018)

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