fledgling civic and professional discourses – the quasi-public speech of salons, theatre foyers, student circles, meetings of medical societies, scholarly gatherings, jubilee anniversaries for famous artists or scientists, lawyers at public jury trials.4 This growing professional class adored literature and relied on its heroes and themes to authenticate their public statements. The respect was often not returned: literary authors, in their fiction, continued to portray “group” and public speech either satirically – or criminally. It would appear that many creative writers
considered civic speech, mediated by institutions and a rising corporate consciousness, an unwelcome rival.
Although intellectual freedom in the public sphere constricted at times to the choking point, Russian thought about literature broadened and became more systematic in the twentieth century. Russian theories burst upon the world, with ambitions of being applied to the world. Russian Formalists in the 1920s made claims about the nature of
Three major approaches to literary expression achieved currency beyond Russia’s borders in the twentieth century: the Formalist, the Dialogic, and the Structuralist-semiotic. From each of these schools I have chosen one concept to help focus our literary juxtapositions and link them up into a more coherent national narrative.
From the Formalists, in particular Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) and Yury Tynyanov (1894–1943), comes the idea of “respectful” parody. The idea grows out of the Aesopian defense discussed above. Many authors and critics in the latter half of the nineteenth century believed that a protest literature, one that exposed social ills and assigned blame, was the only morally justified position for a writer. But by the century’s turn a reaction had set in against this civic-minded – and usually stridently materialist – mandate, first among Symbolist poets and critics seeking a more mystical reality, then among a group of Petrograd literary scholars, known as the Formalists, who sought to defend the autonomy of art against all such ragged, ill-formed obligations to “real life.” Formalists did not preach “art for art’s sake.” They acknowledged that art and life were interdependent. Shklovsky stressed this symbiosis in his twin ideas of “estrangement” and “automatization,” by which he meant the duty of art to “make everyday objects strange” so that our habitual perceptions would be
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jolted out of their drowsy rut and we would wake up to life anew. As he put it in 1916: after viewing nature – or people, or ideas – through the lens of art, “the sun seems sunnier and the stone stonier”; without art, our automatized life would “eat away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, at our fear of war.”5 This is definitely art in the service of life. Overall, however, it was not the “wake-up” function that the Formalists advocated for verbal art as much as a higher degree of autonomy.
Literature, they insisted, was a profession and a craft. It could even become a “science” (in Russian, the word for science,
In a 1921 essay on Dostoevsky and Gogol, “Toward a Theory of Parody,” Tynyanov insisted that parody is not the same as satire, travesty, farce or burlesque. All those forms involve a struggle against outdated behaviors and forms, to be sure. At some level all strive to make us laugh. But parody need not imply any mean-spirited disrespect. Within the tightly laced spiral of the Russian tradition, the old was understood as essential to appreciating the new. The early Dostoevsky “parodied” Gogol but worshipped him and could not have existed without him. The novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov (1891– 1940), writing a century later, perceived himself as a direct heir (indeed,
almostacontemporary)ofboth Gogol and Dostoevsky. The best Decadent and Symbolist-era novels, such as Fyodor Sologub’s
The Dialogic school is represented by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). Bakhtin was a profound student of parody, in which he heard a rich “double-voicedness” and thus the potential for achieving that most difficult human virtue: responsible, or answerable, freedom. His readings of Dostoevsky from this perspective are highly provocative. Respectful parody also permeates the Bakhtinian idea of carnival as open-ended, two-way or reciprocal laughter. More central than freedom or carnival to our discussions, however, will be Bakhtin’s less flashy, more workmanlike notion of the chronotope. Bakhtin adapted this neologism (“time-space”) from Einstein’s insights in physics and then applied it to the life sciences – where, in Bakhtin’s capacious view, literature should probably be classified. Verbal narrative resembles a living organism of a highly advanced type. It regulates itself internally on the basis of responsive feedback (from its author, its readers, and the fictive characters within itself). It respects laws