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“Formalism” in Polish Literary Scholarship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
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In discussing the contribution of the Polish “Formal” or “Integral” School to the development of literary research, one of the difficulties is whether to view it mainly as an echo of Russian Formalism or as a scholarly movement in its own right. There is no doubt that the often strikingly suggestive theoretical slogans and undeniable practical achievements of the Russian Formalists—such as Shklovsky's insights on the theory of the novel, V. I. Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, M. A. Petrovsky's Morphology of the Short Story, and the research of Boris Tomashevsky, Viktor Zhirmunsky, and Roman Jakobson in the field of poetry—all greatly attracted those Polish scholars who were looking for a coherent, strictly literary set of criteria, discouraged as they were by the inflation of biographism and psychologism in literary research. Yet the impact of Russian Formalism was limited in scope and in many respects rather indirect. On the one hand, the reaction against the one-sidedness of the psychological school came in Poland independently, and in some ways even earlier than in Russia. For this the Polish scholars did not need to go to Russia—they had both ancient (Aristotle) and more modern sources (German, Italian, French, and others). On the other hand, many of the Polish scholars did not even know the Russian language, though they knew some Western languages very well. (The scholar who was to become the foremost promoter of Formalism, Manfred Kridl, knew very little Russian when he came to teach at the University of Wilno. It was under the influence and with the help of a group of students that he became familiar with the writings of the Formalists.)
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1972
References
1. See, for example, Kogan, P. S., “Literaturnyia napravleniia i kritika 80-kh i 90-kh gg.,” in Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky, D. N., ed., Istoriia russkoi literatury XIX v., 5 vols. (Moscow, 1908-11), 5 : 61-100.Google Scholar
2. Published in Sprawozdania Z posiedzeń Towarzystwa Naukowego Warszawskiego, Wydzial językoznawstwa i literatury, 7, no. 2 (1914) : 5-36.
3. Lednicki, Waclaw, Przyjaciele Moskale (Cracow, 1935), pp. 99-108.Google Scholar
4. Kridl, Manfred, “The Integral Method of Literary Scholarship : Theses for Discussion,” Comparative Literature, 3, no. 1 (1951) : 18-31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar,
5. As a journalist and as a literary critic Zawodziński was much less rigorous— especially avoiding the too-narrow scope of his formal analysis of poetry, which was limited to the investigation of problems of sound and rhythm and excluded the thematic aspects.
6. In this category, for example, are some of the volumes in the series “Z dziejów form artystycznych w literaturze polskiej” published by the Institute of Literary Research under the editorship of Maria Renata Mayenowa. She also edited the impressive multivolume Poetyka, devoted to the main problems of Polish poetry. Strong affinities to Formalism and Structuralism can be seen in the symposium Poetyka i matematyka (Poetry and Mathematics), published on the occasion of the Sixth International Congress of Slavists (Warsaw, 1968).
7. This is clearly in line with the situation in the USSR. It is interesting to note that Structuralism fared a little better in Poland, for an anthology of Structuralist writings, Praska szkola strukturalna, 1926-1948, was published in 1966 (ed. M. R. Mayenowa). Of course, officially no formal or structural method is permitted. There are constant reminders to that effect in both Poland and the USSR. In a recent, somewhat “popular” excursus in Novyi mir (1970, no. 12) with the telling title “Kamo griadeshi?” (“Quo Vadis?ȁ), the author, Dr. Iu. Barabash, in speaking of French Structuralism, once more reaffirms the official “anti-idealistic” position : “Outwardly structuralism is very matterof- fact [delovit], pragmatic; any mysticism, any idealistic crust [shelukha] seems alien to it. But on a closer look it is not difficult to detect the clear marks of idealism. Fetishism of structure, devoid of any objective material foundation, the interpretation of reality as only the sum total of ‘pure relations’—all this leads us far away from objectivity” (p. 224).
8. However, it is only now, thirty years later, and long after Victor Erlich's pioneering study (Russian Formalism : History-Doctrine, The Hague, 1955), that these writings are gradually appearing in America (in the Michigan, Brown, Nebraska, and other series) —thus witnessing to the vitality of these ideas. Similarly, in France the wave of French “New Criticism” in the sixties has not been without some connection with Formalism. See, for example, the anthology edited by Todorov, Tzvetan, Thèorie de littèrature (Paris, 1966)Google Scholar. Indeed, the adherents of the “Lansonian” school claimed that the entire Nouvelle critique was mainly the extension of Russian Formalism. “S'il y a une ‘imposture* de la ‘nouvelle critique’ francaise,” says R. Fayolle in his review of Raymond Picard's Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture, “elle est peut-ètre là, dans cette pretention (naive?) de proposer comme nouvelles des idèes dont un bon nombre ont ètè depuis longtemps formulees par des critiques russes ou anglo-saxons” (Revue d'Histoire littèraire de la France, 67, no. 1 [1967] : 175).