My Guide to Literary Theory: Russian Formalism

Boris Eikenbaum

Russian Formalism and New Criticism very much go hand in hand under the umbrella term of formalism. They share similar qualities in that the focus of their study is on the text itself and dismisses the importance of the author. This school of literary theory came out of the will to reform outdated approaches to literature, in Russia, in the early part of the 1900s. It was Boris Eikenbaum who set about recording the principles of this school of theory in his text Theory of the Formal Method. As with  New Criticism, close reading is the key tool for the Russian Formalists with a heavy focus on language, syntax, grammatical construction and the sounds of words. It is the job of formalist critics to consider how these elements function and contribute to the form of the poem. Remember that the form is not what the poem is saying, but how it is saying it. What the poem is about is of no interest to formalists.

The very basis of Russian Formalist theory is centered around there being a difference between poetical language and practical language. It was Lev Jakubinsky who was the key figure at looking at the differences in these two forms of language. He decided that language functioned in an entirely different way in poetry as it did in everyday use. Practical language is the language we use to communicate, direct or inform, and it is usually used in a functional and efficient way. Jakubinsky believed that poetical language played a very different function. It was enhanced and manipulated to evoke a response out of the reader. This sounds like stating the obvious, but it was the first time that anyone had distinguished between the two. So now the role of the critics was to discover what was happening within that poetical language.

Viktor Shklovsky

Viktor Shklovsky took up that task and he coined the term 'defamiliarisation'. You may be familiar with this term from school and it remains a very prominent term in literary analysis to this day. Defamiliarisation is simply making the familiar less familiar. It is the way in which a text makes that which is known to us fresh, new, strange, or different. In the essay Art as Technique, Shklovsky makes his point very clear:

The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty of length and perception, because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object itself is not important.

He believed that defamiliarisation was essential to making a text literary or artistic. The process of demailiarisation is in the text's form and poetic language. One way in which a text does this is through what the Russian Formalists called 'devices' or better known today as literary techniques. Defamiarisation is happening all the time in poetry and literature so much so that you may take it for granted unless you sit and consider it. For example, if we look at the opening of William Wordsworth's I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.

 I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd, 

A host of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

The scene that takes place in this stanza is one familiar to us it consists of a man on a walk through the countryside who stumbles across daffodils, but it is presented to us through defamiliarisation. Look at how the simile of the opening line compares walking to a floating cloud, or the personification of the daffodils in the last line as they dance in the breeze. These are examples of how devices heighten the experience. Russian Formalism is not interested in content of the poem, but is solely the investigation of how these devices are used and the way in which they function within the text.

Shklovsky also discovered that one of the ways a text is defamilarised is in the order in which it presents the events. He said that the story was separate from the plot. The story or 'Fabular' is the chronological order of events and the plot, or 'Siuzhet' is the way that those events are presented to us in the texts. In some texts these would correlate, but the formalists were far more interested when they do not. They were interested in the way an author would scramble the sequence of events, or pad them, for the sake of storytelling. Shklovsky believed that great literature happened in moving away from story and into plot. For this reason, formalism greatly favoured modernist texts to realist texts.

As with the New Critics, Russian formalism does not concern itself with the author or the historical or political context in which the text was produced. The only thing that they valued is the text itself and its form. Just like the New Critics it is not about what the text is saying, but how it is saying it. Having said that, Russian Formalism does not dismiss all context. The one context it is interested in is allusion. If a text does make an allusion to another text this was considered an important part of the form and they would be deeply interested in investigating how it is functioning including by visiting the alluded to text.

The Russian Formalist school of literary theory was short lived; largely as a result of the rise of Stalinism in Russia during the 1920s. The artsy-fartsy nature of the formalists were deemed incompatible with the totalitarian communist regime of the USSR. Despite Russian Formalism's death, many of the ideas I have outlined above remain highly influential today. Concepts such as defamilarisation and the distinction between fabular and siuzhet are still widely used in literary analysis. By 1940, Russian formalism was well and truly dead, but from its ashes had emerged a new literary theory, the subject of my next blog, Structuralism.