The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

16 The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

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, nauka, refers not only to empirical hard science but to all scholarship, and to systematic or methodologically consistent thinking in general). Literary creativity – or as the Formalists preferred to call it, “literariness” – had an arsenal of techniques and devices for achieving its effects. Writers cared about life’s problems, of course, but mostly they cared about learning how to write. For this to happen, they needed to master the tools of their trade. Some Formalist critics, like Boris Eikhenbaum (1886–1959) in his study The Young Tolstoi (1922), went so far as to claim that Tolstoy’s obsessive “self-improvement lists” and periodic condemnations of his own behavior in his diaries, as well as his elaborately public, exaggerated confessions later in life, were tasks more intrinsic to “literariness” than to conscience. Diaries of the sort Tolstoy produced were designed to experiment with various literary forms of punitive self-exposure, not really to combat, or repent of, the actual sins being recorded – which often continued unabated. This skeptical verdict on Tolstoy’s spiritual quest was an extreme Formalist position, and Eikhenbaum himself later backed off from it. Mostly the group sought to understand the role of formal strategies or “devices” in a literary tradition. Apprentice writers studied devices for portraying character, plot, imagery, and emotional tone that had been developed by their predecessors. In their own creative writing they worked subtle changes on these earlier formulas, expecting their readers to recognize when an old, worn-out, automatized device was being brought to the surface and replaced by something else. To “lay bare” an old device was one of the tasks of parody.

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,