The work of Russian formalists has often been defanged, mobilized in service of a quietist political project over and against the “excesses” of Stalinist cultural politics. In this conversation, Anna Aydinyan's Formalists against Imperialism promises a corrective, analyzing Iurii Tynianov not just as a formal innovator, but also as an important thinker on Orientalism and empire in Eurasia. The book convincingly argues that Tynianov's novel on Alexander Griboedov in the 1820s, The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar (1929), might be read as an anti-imperial text. It is perhaps a mark of how generative this topic is that the book leaves many questions unanswered.
Formalists against Imperialism comprises eight chapters and a conclusion, most of which place close readings of the novel in conversation with its intertexts in the Russophone literary tradition. Ch. 2, for example, situates The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar in a long tradition of Russian literary travelogues, from Aleksandr Radishchev to Viktor Shklovskii. Ch. 3 analyzes Tynianov's parodic response to the work of Gavriil Derzhavin and Vasilii Zhukovskii, while the entirety of Ch. 4 focuses on Aleksandr Pushkin's “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray,” with a brief detour into Isaak Babel's Odessa Tales. Ch. 5 offers a deep dive into Stenka Razin as a key figure in the early Soviet avant-garde's perspective on Persia, from Velimir Khlebnikov to Marina Tsvetaeva. Aydinyan departs from the Russian focus in Ch. 6, which discusses Montesquieu's Persian Letters, and Ch. 8, which argues that Vazir-Mukhtar can be read “as a parody of a spy novel” (150), with particular reference to Rudyard Kipling's Kim.
At their best, these analyses illuminate parodic resonances that would otherwise be inaccessible to most contemporary readers. At times, however, they read more like an encyclopedic collection of all Tynianov's possible interlocutors, with unclear relevance to Aydinyan's argument. Is it really of interpretive significance, for example, that Tynianov uses the word patka to describe a character's hair and that Griboedov also used the word in an unrelated letter to a friend (118)? Is the title of Zinaida Gippius's chapbook Pushkin and Christianity really a dead ringer for Pushkin's formulation of “the samovar and Christianity” (49)? Elsewhere, the accumulation of intertexts risks a certain conceptual muddiness. For example, Aydinyan sees a consistent through-line between what she terms Radishchev and Tynianov's “anti-imperialist convictions” (57). One wonders, however, if the term can equally be applied to Radishchev's anti-authoritarian critique of serfdom and Tynianov's denunciation of Russian imperialism in the Caucasus.
Perhaps no intertext is more important for Tynianov—or for Aydinyan—than Pushkin. This case also introduces a suggestive open-endedness. Does Tynianov “exonerate Pushkin by showing that his Orientalism was ironic” (49)? Or should we read Tynianov's parody of Pushkin as a condemnation of the latter's imperialism, as Aydinyan suggests elsewhere? There are many ways to square this circle: perhaps Tynianov is inconsistent, limited by his affection for Pushkin; perhaps his anti-imperialism harbors some blind spots. Aydinyan offers no conclusive reconciliation of the two angles.
In its references to the hit parade of the Russian literary canon, Aydinyan's approach is conventional for Slavic studies, but the book departs from precedent in incorporating close analyses of primary sources from the 1820s and 1920s, utilizing Russian, Armenian, and Persian. The sheer linguistic and generic diversity of these sources shows the author's impressive range, although some of this material feels out of place. Although Aydinyan insists in Ch. 1 that it is necessary for our understanding of Tynianov that we also understand the writings of nineteenth-century Armenian thinker Khachatur Abovian, she does not convincingly explain why. Elsewhere, in Ch. 7, Aydinyan analyzes a Persian bureaucrat's narrative of his visit to St. Petersburg that Tynianov could never have accessed. These sources would be valuable in a historical treatment of Russo-Persian relations in the 1820s and 1830s, but here they are a little out of place, especially given Aydinyan's lack of substantial engagement with the historiography of inter-imperial competition in the nineteenth-century Caucasus. Although the ostensible topic of the book is The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, the book might even have taken the form of a short book on Tynianov and several free-standing articles on Griboedov and his time.
The book engages robustly with historical primary sources, and in so doing raises important historical questions. Aydinyan convincingly argues that The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar might be read as a condemnation both of imperialism in Griboedov's time and of neo-imperialism in Stalin's. In making this argument, however, the text sometimes elides the historical differences between the 1820s and the 1920s, a dynamic that the book's concluding section, on a 2010 film adaptation of Vazir-Mukhtar, only exacerbates. Is Tynianov in fact implying that Russia is trapped in an irredeemable vicious cycle of imperialism and authoritarianism? Certainly Aydinyan suggests so when she speaks of the “historic recurrence of autocracy tied together with imperialistic expansionism” (164). The book raises but does not conclude an inquiry into the shifting historical conditions that have produced and re-produced imperial dynamics in Eurasia—in the 1820s, the 1920s, and now, again, in the 2020s—or the historically contingent ways that Russian culture has engaged them. Hopefully, Aydinyan's timely book is but an early foray into a much bigger line of inquiry.
