Soviet Semiotics and Literary Criticism

VOLUTION, wrote Tynyanov, does not go by plan but by leaps and bounds; it is not a development, but a dislocation. For nearly a generation from the end of the 1920s there was no speculative or theoretical thinking about literature in the Soviet Union. The great debates of the twenties were stilled. The formalist theoreticians turned to textual scholarship (Eikhenbaum, Tomashevsky, Vinogradov), to the cinema and journalism (Shklovsky, Osip Brik), or to the novel (Tynyanov). Socialist realism had won the day, and its doctrine lay like a heavy stratum over the once rich and varied seams of independent speculative thought. The decade up to the war did, however, produce some isolated works of originality and brilliance (from the scholars who worked with the linguist N. Ya. Marr), and the great tradition of stylistics continued, putting into the practice of Pushkin scholarship the theoretical insights of the previous decade. Bakhtin, too, worked on, though his major works of this period were not to see the light until many years later. Evolution, said Tynyanov, is an interrupted line. The evolution he had in mind, the sudden flowering of Russian literature in the nineteenth century, was an organic process that owed little to outside pressures. The evolution of Russian literary theory in the twentieth century, however, has suffered its jolts, interruptions, and dislocations at the hands of a Stalin, a Zhdanov, or a Suslov; it is a process deliberately thwarted and, for a time at least, wholly suppressed. The reemergence of literary theory in the early sixties came about in a quite unexpected and uniquely Soviet way. If certain areas are sensitive to investigation, or even taboo, the energy of speculative thought will be deflected into areas which are neutral, perhaps scientific, or even technologically useful. It was by such a deflection into science and technology that a whole new and original school of literary semiotics came into being in the Soviet Union. In the vacuum left in Soviet intellectual life after the death of Stalin

Art · Criticism · Linguistics · Literary criticism · Literary science · Literature · Semiotics · Social semiotics · Sociology · Philosophy · Soviet and Russian History

• Culture Research in The Recent Work of Itamar Even-Zohar

  Open Access•Harry Aveling•Wacana Journal of the Humanities…•2007

  Add to list

• Schemata as the primary modelling system of culture

  Open Access•Jui-Pi Chien•Sign Systems Studies•2014

  Add to list

• Iuri M. Lotman y la Escuela Semiótica de Tartu-Moscú

  Open Access•Manuel Cáceres Sánchez•Signa Revista de la Asociación…•2022

  Add to list