Thirtieth Anniversary Issue || Formalism, Structuralism, Semiotics, Poetics

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Formalism, Structuralism, Semiotics, PoeticsAuthor(s): Barry ScherrSource: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 31, Thirtieth Anniversary Issue (1987), pp.127-140Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/307983 .

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FORMALISM, STRUCTURALISM, SEMIOTICS, POETICS

Barry Scherr, Dartmouth College

The title of this survey may well promise more than the Slavic and East Eruopean Journal has in fact provided over the years. Only a relatively modest number of articles has been devoted to the main schools of critical thought in Eastern Europe or literary theory in general. Part of the explanation for this may lie in the tendency of many Slavists to be less concerned with current developments in literary theory than their counterparts spe- cializing in, say, French or English literature. Still, it is surprising to see a paucity of articles on Formalism or Structuralism, two critical movements that have been widely studied by and that have had an influence on many in the field. More recent developments-semiotics, the writings of Baxtin- have also received scant attention. Perhaps the recent introduction of a Forum (vol. 30) may allow the journal to deal with current issues in a more timely fashion.

However, the picture has been by no means black. While treatment of criticism and poetics was virtually nonexistent during the first decade of the journal's existence, coverage improved dramatically towards the end of the 1960s and has remained respectable if spotty ever since. Yet of the fields discussed here only in one, Russian verse theory, do the articles provide a fair idea as to what Slavists in the West have been doing over the past couple of decades. Most topics have received extensive attention in the book reviews, many of which manage to touch upon broad developments in a given discipline; occasionally, reviews have rivaled articles in the amount of information that they manage to convey. Thus the reviews, more than the articles, chronicle the work done on modern critical movements and on poetics.

There is very little to discuss in the first eight volumes of SEEJ (1957-64). Renato Poggioli's article "Russian Futurism, Xlebnikov, Esenin" (16/2, 1958, 3-21), later to be merged into his book The Poets of Russia: 1890-1930, contains a brief mention of Xlebnikov's linguistic theories and of his efforts to apply those to his poetry (13), but poetic theory is not the main focus.

SEEJ, Vol. 31, Anniversary Issue (1987) 127



128 Slavic and East European Journal

George Ivask, reviewing Johannes Holthusen's Studien zur Asthetik und Poetik des russischen Symbolismus (17/3, 1959, 285-86), finds the study to be "typical of the late (autumnal) period of Russian Formalism." Ivask feels that this formalist orientation is reponsible for the failure to characterize the period fully. As this review indicates, the term formalist could have negative connotations among Western Slavists just as it has had in the Soviet Union, though of course in the West the objections have not been politically charged in the same way. The first item to fall strictly within the purview of this survey did not appear until 1964, and that was a brief review by Hugh McLean of five different volumes of reprints published in the Brown University Slavic Reprint series and by Mouton (8, 1964, 330-31). The books were originally published in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and included at least two classics of Formalist criticism: Zirmunskij's Vopro- sy teorii literatury and jxenbaum's Skvoz' literaturu. This is only the first of many reviews that discuss reprints; sometimes, as here, they are more in the form of a notice announcing the appearance of long scarce works, at other times the reviews offered detailed reconsiderations of individual studies. In either case the attention paid to reprints is itself worthy of note. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and to some extent up to the present, Soviet book publishing practices have made many important studies difficult to obtain. Hence a kind of sub-industry has arisen to meet a perceived need, albeit the Soviet Union's belated signing of the international copyright agreement in 1973 has made reprints of more recent items a problematic matter.

In another early review of a reprint, Edward Stankiewicz, writing on Two Essays on Poetic Language, a small volume of Osip Brik's writings in the series of Michigan Slavic Materials (9, 1965, 193-94), points out the historical and theoretical significance of both essays. In particular, "Zvukovye povtory" (1917) is a typical formalist investigation in the way that it expresses an opposition between ordinary language and poetic language. Yet the attention that Brik pays to the semantic content of sound repetitions seems to take him beyond the earliest formalist positions. Similarly, in "Ritm i sintaksis" Brik goes still further in attempting to establish links between the form and the content at the same time that he shows how rhythmic patterning affects syntactic structure. In the years since Stankie- wicz's review, Brik's essays have continued to hold an interest for Slavists. While a close examination of both reveals them to be long on examples and short on analysis, his interest in formal aspects of verse other than meter and rhyme has found a resonance among recent researchers, who have attempted to extend his findings through the application of methods sug- gested by linguists and literary scholars working in fields other than Slavic.

The first article dealing with Russian verse theory appeared in the very next issue (9, 1965, 281-94) and was, appropriately enough, concerned with



Formalism, Structuralism, Semiotics, Poetics 129

the origins of Russian syllabo-tonic poetry. John Bucsela's "The Birth of Russian Syllabo-Tonic Versification" does not, especially from today's perspective, offer a new interpretation of the period, but it does provide a judicious introduction to the main issues that were, and to some extent have continued to be, the focus of scholarly debate: the relative importance of the roles played by Trediakovskij and Lomonosov, the sources of the ideas in Trediakovskij's original essay, and the possible role of two Ger- mans, Paus and Gltick, in introducing syllabo-tonic poetry to the Russians (Smith 1977). At the time no good summary of this crucial period for the history of Russian metrics was available in English, and the article thus filled a very real lacuna in the field.

After this small flurry, little of direct relevance to poetics appears over the next couple of years. Felix Oinas reviews Karl-Heinz Pollok's Studien zur Poetik und Komposition des balkan-slawischen lyrischen Volksliedes, I: Das Liebeslied (10, 1966, 330-31) and points out that most of the major works on Yugoslav folklore have in fact been written by foreigners. As has not infrequently been the case with reviews of German studies, Oinas praises the study of the poetics and structure of Balkan songs more for its thor- oughness and organization than for its originality or insight. Robert W. Simmons, in his review of the Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, a volume that has since become a standard reference work, points out that Slavic, like other non-Western European literatures, is slighted (10, 1966, 231-33). To be sure, there are some excellent articles on the individual national literatures, but articles on general topics or on specific literary terms barely mention the Slavic literatures. The Encyclopedia is of course not unique in this regard; if Western Slavists have not always shown a strong interest in current theory, then in the past at least many theoretical studies published in the West seem more extreme in their ignorance of Russian and the other Slavic literatures.

Consistent coverage of topics in literary theory begins only in 1968. Among the reviews that year is the first of several that have been devoted to works by Roman Jakobson. His Selected Studies IV. Slavic Epic Studies (rev. Felix Oinas, 12, 219-22) contains four articles that deal with the metrics of folk verse; essentially, Jakobson's work in this area, Oinas points out, concentrated on Russian bylina meters and on the deseterac of the South Slavs. Jakobson eventually concluded that the decasyllabic line of the Slavic epic derives from an Indo-European counterpart. As in many other fields, Jakobson's work in this area was to prove seminal; thus the subsequent studies of Russian folk meters by James Bailey, some of which were to appear in SEEJ, owe a great deal to the works mentioned here. (Two of the most productive appliers of modern versification principles to folk verse are Bailey and M.L. Gasparov; Bailey is preparing what promises to be a pioneering study of Russian folk meters.) The other two reviews both cover




translations of major Formalist writings: Robert Hughes, in discussing Rus- sian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (12, 1968, 367-69), points to the existence of numerous errors and inconsistencies in what should have been a more reliable volume; Morris Halle, in a review article devoted to the English version of Zirmunskij's Teorija stixa (12, 1968, 213-18), uses the occasion to put forth an alternate view of Russian syllabo-tonic meters, which is, perhaps not coincidentally, analogous to the generative approach to English metrics pioneered by Halle and Samuel Keyser ("Chaucer and the Study of Pros- ody"). Generative metrics, which inspired a wave of theories and counter- theories during the late 1960s and 1970s among English prosodists, has never quite established a foothold in Russian verse studies. However, the reviews of these last two volumes point to an interesting phenomenon of the time: the more important studies of the 1910s and 1920s were now thought to be not only worthy of reprinting, but also of translating. The audience was broadening from established scholars and graduate students to include undergraduates and perhaps even those in fields other than Russian.

A relevant article in the 1968 volume is James B. Woodward's "Rhythmic Modulations in the dol'nik Trimeter of Blok" (12, 297-310); it was followed in 1969 by James Bailey's "Blok and Heine: An Episode From the History of Russian dol'niki" (13, 1-22). Woodward discusses 31 three-stress dol'nik poems by Blok, 24 of which were written between October, 1902 and March 1903. He points out the major features of Blok's dol'niki: the tendency to avoid binary (iambic or trochaic) lines but to use many ternaries (anapests, amphibrachs, or dactyls), the relative infrequency of omitted stresses (in contrast to his successors), and his frequent use of a variable anacrusis. Bailey, after showing that nineteenth-century translators of Heine into Rus- sian tended to use ternary-based dol'niki or ternary verse as an equivalent for Heine's binary-based dol'niki, goes on to note that Blok, whose own original dol'niki were closer to ternary verse, nonetheless imitated Heine's rhythmic structures almost exactly in his translations. Both articles are significant for pointing to the importance of Blok for popularizing dol'niki, which have become a mainstay of Russian poets, and for creating among American scholars a greater awareness of dol'niki. Although the term has been around for some time, a systematic investigation of the meter began with two studies, one a revision of the first, by the Russian scholar M.S. Gasparov ("Statistideskoe obsledovanie russkogo trexudarnogo dol'nika" and "Russkij trexudarnyj dol'nik XX v."). From the late 1960s on studies of Russian dol'niki by Western Slavists became frequent. Another article from 1969, Dina Crockett's "Margak's Children's Verses Through a Com- puter" (13, 78-86), is perhaps most significant for illustrating what has not happened in Slavic studies. The article contains some interesting data about the categories of words in Margak's verse, as well as on his rhymes and meters. However, computer-aided literary studies have proved to be a rarity




among Western Slavists, even though they would seem to be a natural development for investigations of style. (An exception is Geir Kjetsaa's recent book Prinadlelnost' Dostoevskomu; see also Kjetsaa 1974.)

Several reviews at this time by Victor Terras speak of the continuing interest in reprints of classical studies by the Russian Formalists (13, 1969, 402-3; 14, 1970, 75-76; 14, 1970, 373-74). New books under review included Jurij Lotman's first monograph on Structuralism, Lekcii po struktural'noj poetike: Vvedenie, teorija stixa (13, 1969, 251-53). Interestingly, even at this relatively early date Lotman's strong orientation toward semantics made the reviewer, James Bailey, uneasy, as did Lotman's rejection of the statistical approach to the study of Russian verse. From the start, therefore, not all Slavists were totally won over by Lotman's ideas.

Among American Slavists, Rimvydas Silbajoris published his Russian Versification: The Theories of Trediakovskij, Lomonosov, and Kantemir (rev. Mark Suino, 13, 1969, 242-43). In some ways this work too is a translation, but, as Suino notes, the extensive commentary and the explanations of spe- cial terms make these old studies much more accessible to modern readers. Also speaking to the intensified interest in formalism was Krystyna Pomor- ska's Russian Formalist Theory and Its Poetic Ambiance; in her review (14, 1970, 224-26) Ewa Thompson felt that the effort to connect Formalist theory with the practice of the Futurists was ultimately too one-sided an approach. Attention to the prosody of literatures other than Russian has been rare, but Marianna Birnbaum's detailed review of Rhythm and Metre in Hungarian Verse by Petr Ralkos (14, 1970, 114-16) includes a discussion of some major issues in Hungarian prosody and also notes some similarities to the prosodic system of Czech.

In his article "Literary Usage of a Russian Folk Song Meter" (14, 1970, 436-52) James Bailey explores the structure and history of the "5 + 5 form," a folk line that was popularized by the nineteenth-century poet Kol'cov in numerous songs. The general interest in the poetics of folk verse can be seen as well in the appearance of two books reviewed by Bailey: Brigitte Stephan, Studien zur russischen eastulka und ihrer Entwicklung (15, 1971, 82-83) and Roy G. Jones, Language and Prosody of the Russian Folk Epic (17, 1973, 324-27).

As is the case with poetics, literary theory that has appeared in Eastern European countries other than the Soviet Union has not received extensive coverage, but one exception is the collection Art of the Word, 1957-1967, which contains seventeen articles by fourteen critics from the Zagreb School of literary criticism. As Anthony Mlikotin notes (15, 1971, 391-94), despite the different approaches taken by individual critics the collection as a whole appears to be in the tradition that stretches back to Russian Formalism. Equally rare, as noted above, are reviews of general theoretical works. Zbigniew Folejewski notes that Warren Shibles, in his Metaphor: An Anno-




tated Bibliography and History, virtually ignores Slavic bibliographical coverage (16, 1972, 250). Essentially, the problem is the same as that noted by Simmons in his review of the Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. On the other hand, Versification: The Major Language Types, ed. W.K. Wimsatt, does include an article (by Edward Stankiewicz) on the Slavic languages; at the same time James Bailey mentioned that the article by Halle and Keyser on English verse, in which their generative appoach is again described, would have benefitted from employing some of the techniques developed by Russian metrists (17, 1973, 471-74); several Russianists have attempted to apply the linguistic-statistical method: see Bailey 1975, Tarlinskaja 1976.

Throughout the early 1970s the review pages attested to a growing interest in Formalism, Structuralism, and semiotics. One of the early monographs from what is generally called the Moscow-Tartu school, Boris Uspenskij's Pobtika kompozicii, has become one of the more frequently reviewed studies in the history of SEEJ: first the original Russian publication (16, 1972, 339-41), then the English translation (18, 1974, 191-92), and finally a paperback revised edition of the translation (28, 1984, 554). As with Bailey's review of Lotman's Lekcii po struktural'nojpoetike, a certain coolness marks the initial attitude on the part of American Slavists to works from that school. Perhaps significantly, the most recent review, by Alice Nakhi- movsky, which finds the work interesting but not groundbreaking, is the most positive; the first two, by Ludmila Foster and William Harkins, remark that the book contains interesting comments regarding point of view, but find it to be an uneven and not always very profound work. Similarly, Victor Terras, in reviewing a collection of articles by both East and West European Slavists, Structure of Texts and Semiotics of Culture, expresses serious doubts about precisely those articles that seek to develop the theoretical positions of the Moscow-Tartu school and seems in broad agreement with one of Jan M. Meijer's contributions, which contains a critique of Lotman's Struktura xudolestvennogo teksta (18, 1974, 192-96). Two books reviewed by William Harkins go back to the Formalists themselves (16, 1972, 337-39); Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska are editors of the volume Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, which added significantly to the already available texts in English. Ewa Thompson's Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism, which finds that the similarities between the two school are outweighed by the differences, marks another effort to indicate the philosophic orientation of the Formalists and thus recalls Pomorska's Russian Formalist Theory and Its Poetic Ambiance, reviewed by Thompson in 1970.

Two articles in one issue dealt with the rhythmic qualities of pre- nineteenth century Russian literature. Riccardo Picchio's "On the Prosodic Structure of the Igor Tale" (16, 1972, 147-62) is a practical attempt to apply the "isocolic principle," which he feels was the organizing rhythmic feature




behind much Old Russian literature. Essentially, he finds series of word groups with equal numbers of stresses; these series form the basis for the work's rhythm. This article represents only part of a large project by Picchio; a work published elsewhere,"The Isocolic Principle in Old Russian Prose," provided a more detailed exposition of his thesis. In an article that shows him continuing to work in the same period as that of his book (reviewed some three years earlier) Rimvydas Silbajoris examines "Rhythm and meaning in Kantemir's 'Letter to Prince Nikita Jur'evi6 Trubeckoj"' (16, 1972, 163-72). Perhaps his most interesting finding is that 29 of the 32 lines in this work by a poet who remained an adherent of syllabic verse can in fact be scanned; that is, in his practice Kantemir sometimes used more tightly organized verse than his theories would seem to have required.

With James Bailey's "The Verse of Andrej Voznesenskij as an Example of Present-Day Russian Versification" (17, 1973, 155-73) coverage of Rus- sian prosody leaps two centuries forward. Bailey's technique for examining Voznesenskij's poetry is based closely on that used by Kiril Taranovsky in his "Stixoslolenie Osipa Mandel'Stama" (1962). Indeed, Bailey's advocacy of what he calls the linguistic-statistical approach to metrics is influenced most heavily by the seminal writings of Boris Tomagevskij and of Tara- novsky. Here Bailey examines each of the main metrical types and discusses both the rhythm and the unusual features that distinguish Voznesenskij's poetry. Despite the radical nature of Voznesenskij's rhythmic experiments, Bailey concludes that he has extended tendencies introduced earlier rather than pioneered true innovations.

Bailey's most thorough explanations of the linguistic-statistical method in SEEJ are to be found not in his articles but in two reviews in which he defends the method against attacks by the Soviet critic B.P. Gon6arov. In a review of Gon6arov's Zvukovaja organizacija stixa i problemy rifmy (17, 1973, 217-22), Bailey points out that Gon6arov considers stress-which most metrists would regard as the primary prosodic element in Russian-a secondary element while elevating intonation and rhyme to the status of primary elements. Bailey's review article, "The Russian Linguistic-Statistical Method for Studying Poetic Rhythm" (23, 1979, 251-61), contains a com- parison of Gon6arov's approach with that of the linguistic-statistical method as practiced by M.L. Gasparov, whom Gon6arov had attacked in a review article of his own. Bailey's point is that the linguistic-statistical method, which has had a great influence on nearly all American Slavists who have dealt with versification during the past two decades, in fact can offer much more solid results than Gon6arov's subjective interpretations. The book that Gon6arov attacked, Gasparov's Sovremennyj russkij stix, a compilation and extension of Gasparov's important work of the previous decade, was itself reviewed (much more favorably than by Gon~arov) (19, 1975, 454-59).

Bailey, Gasparov, and many other scholars are represented in the collec-




tion Slavic Poetics: Essays in Honor of Kiril Taranovsky, which was reviewed by Daniel Laferriere (20, 1976, 486-89). As he notes at the end of his review, the fifty-one articles in this volume, which deal not just with metrics, but also with rhyme, prose rhythm, subtexts, and several more general themes, offer a good picture of the state of scholarship on Slavic poetics during the early 1970s.

Verse studies both in the Soviet Union and in the West dealt largely with questions of meter and rhyme throughout the 1960s; major studies of rhyme began to appear more regularly in the 1970s. This change was first reflected in SEEJ by Ian Lilly's review of David Samojlov's Kniga o russkoj rifme (18, 1974, 85-86). Lilly notes that the book (which appeared in a revised and expanded edition in 1982) provides a good typology of the different rhyme types and is valuable not just for indicating the historical development of Russian rhyme but also for showing how Russian exact and approximate rhyme can be found in various folk genres. Within the United States the first scholar to look closely at rhyme was J. Thomas Shaw. In "Large Rhyme Sets and Pulkin's Poetry" (18, 1974, 231-51) he offered a detailed explanation of the rules for rhyming that were employed by Pugkin and other poets of his day. He then goes on to describe the large rhyme sets (that is, when a rhyme involves not a pair of words but several or even many) in Pulkin and their structural function in some of the poems. This article is only one part of a major effort to offer a thorough description of rhyme in the poetry of Pulkin and his contemporaries. The project has already resulted in several major publications: a dictionary of Pulkin's rhymes (rev. Ian Lilly, 19, 1975, 323-29) and, for both Batjulkov and Bara- tynskij, a dictionary of the rhymes and a concordance to the poetry (rev. 20, 1976, 77-78 and 21, 1977, 536-37). A concordance to Pugkin's poetry has been recently published but as of this writing has not yet been reviewed by SEEJ.

During the mid-1970s the importance of the "Prague School," both as a successor to the Russian Formalist tradition of the 1920s and as a precursor of modern day structuralist and semiotic investigations, became increasingly evident. In his review of Hans Gtinther's Struktur als Prozess: Studien zur A'sthetik und Literaturtheorie des tschechischen Stukturalismus, Paul Trensky points out that in Germany there had been a strong interest in Czech Struc- turalism since the 1960s (20, 1976, 326-28). Giinther in fact is primarily concerned with the most prominent of the Czech Structuralists, Jan Muka- fovsk', and he depends heavily on Czech scholars in formulating an interpretation of the various essays. In her extensive review of Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Roberta Reeder notes Todorov's apparent reliance on Mukafovskf's concept of the domi- nant in his structural analysis of the fantastic (20, 1976, 186-88). Todorov, as Reeder also remarks, had already played an extremely important role in




translating and popularizing the works of both the Russian Formalists and the Czech Structuralists; indeed, Todorov's advocacy of their work among his colleagues in France was ultimately to have a strong influence on English-speaking critics, who at about this time were finally becoming aware of theoretical writings from Eastern Europe. John Burbank and Peter Steiner edited two collections of essays by Mukariovsk,,

which appeared only about a year apart. The article "On Poetic Language" had come out in a separate publication reviewed by John Fizer (21, 1977, 140-42); in discussing The Word and Verbal Art (22, 1978, 232-33), which contains that article, Fizer does not repeat his previous comments but tries to discuss the significance of each item in the collection, noting in particular the manner in which Mukaiovsk' often anticipated subsequent trends in critical thought. The other collection, Structure, Sign, and Function, contains essays on aes- thetics and on the arts other than literature, which was the subject of the previous volume. In his review Rimvydas Silbajoris again notes the pivotal role of Czech Structuralism in the line of critical thought that goes back to Russian Formalists and suggests that Mukafovsk 's major contribution may be in viewing all aesthetic concepts and entities in terms of dynamic inter- actions (22, 1978, 404-5).

During the late 1970s a great deal of attention was devoted to semiotics, though once again mostly in the review section. The sole article from the period devoted to this topic is Ewa M. Thompson's "Jurij Lotman's Literary Theory and Its Context" (22, 1977, 225-38). Among other things, she looks at the promise of a growing integration between various scholarly disciplines that could result from the links between communication theory in the sciences and semiotics in the humanities. Lotman is seen as having been more successful than most in applying the concepts and procedures of communications theory to literature through judicious modification in the ways that certain terms are defined and used. Still, like most scholars, Thompson stops short of totally accepting Lotman's theories, ending with a number of problems that his formulations do not appear to resolve.

The reviews during the late 1970s are frequently devoted to the numerous anthologies of articles on semiotics and structuralism that had begun to appear in the West. These were not so much collections of articles in the original Russian as translations of previously published items. Ewa Thomp- son reviewed two of these. In writing on Semiotics and Stucturalism: Read- ings from the Soviet Union, (ed. Henryk Baran), she devoted most of her attention to the article on "Myth-Name-Culture" co-authored by Lotman and Uspenskij. She finds the distinction between mythological and meta- phorical thinking to be valuable, along with their contention that myths are asemiotic, or not translatable into a metalanguage. At the same time she is bothered by the authors' zealous insistence on "binariness" and by the seemingly unfinished quality of the article (21, 1977, 395-96). The collection




Readings in Soviet Semiotics, ed. Ladislav Matejka et al., seems to her more of an encyclopedia than an anthology; it covers an extremely wide range of topics in its thirty-odd articles. While Lotman's attempts at a semiotics approach to the study of culture are singled out for praise, Thompson is bothered once again by the constant use of binary oppositions, which are sometimes provocative but do not always appear to be necessary (23, 1979, 296-97). Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology, ed. Daniel Lucid, overlaps somewhat with the Baran volume, but on the whole contains studies of more specific questions. In his review G. Koolemans Beynen also describes a 2000-item Subject Bibliography of Soviet Semiotics: The Moscow-Tartu School, compiled by Karl Eiermacher and Serge Shishkoff (22, 1978, 545- 46). Yet another translation is devoted to a single, much older piece than the articles in these anthologies. In discussing the English version of P.N. Medvedev's and M.M. Bakhtin's The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, Patricia Carden notes the tricky question of the book's authorship, the work's importance as providing both a critique of and an alternative to the formalist approach, and the volume's stylistic and terminological complexities, which are not handled totally successfully in the English rendition (23, 1979, 411-12).

Film and painting were also the subject of several semiotic studies. An English translation of Jurij Lotman's Semiotics of Cinema is reviewed by Gerald Pirog, who, in agreement with others who have reviewed many of Lotman's writings on semiotics, finds the Tartu scholar's insights to be valuable and highly suggestive even if they do not represent a fully developed theory (22, 1978, 230-31). In his review of Jurij Tynjanov's Poetika, Istorija literatury, Kino Herbert Eagle shows that Tynjanov in fact anticipated a semiotic approach to film (and discusses the importance of several theoretical articles on other topics that are published here for the first time) (23, 1979, 280-82). Alan Birnholz is less enthusiastic about Boris Uspenskij's The Semiotics of the Russian Icon, which, he finds, does a good job of clarifying the language that we use to discuss icons but-despite the semiotic approach-ultimately says little that is new about icons themseves (22, 1978, 231-32).

One of the few new theoretical approaches attempted by an American scholar is E.C. Barksdale's Daggers of the Mind: Structuralism and Neuro- psychology in an Exploration of the Russian Literary Imagination. As Lauren G. Leighton comments in his review, Barksdale tries to combine neuropsy- chology and structuralism; the approach is then applied to works by a half- dozen major figures from nineteenth-century literature (24, 1980, 295-98). While the theory does not seem to offer an entirely feasible approach, it nonetheless suggests different and at times fascinating ways to look at works of literature. Lena Lenek, reviewing the collection entitled Modern Russian Poets on Poetry, comments that it contains a fine selection of works on




the poetic craft, but finds the scholarly apparatus to be of mixed value (22, 1978, 100-2). Several other volumes dealing with Russian poetry were reviewed by the author of this article. Efim Etkind's Materija stixa offers a wide ranging discussion of poetic composition; as the title of the work indicates, he focuses on the material out of which poetry is created and how the various arrangements and juxtapositions on different levels come to affect the whole (23, 1979, 537-39). Wladimir Weidl6's Embriologija poezii: Vvede- nie v fonosemantiku poeticeskoj reYi, like Ekind's book, covers a great deal of territory in an effort to define the essence of poetry. Weidl6 expresses strong reservations about both formalist and structuralist approaches to poetry, and prefers to see poetry as based on a particularly close relationship between sound and meaning (phonosemantics) (26, 1982, 353-55). Quite different is Mixail Gasparov's Russkoe stixosloienie XIX v.: Materialy po metrike i strofike russkix poetov, which results from a long-standing project to create "metrical handbooks" for the major Russian poets. This volume contains exhaustive descriptions of both the meters and the stanzaic forms employed by nine Russian poets and thus provides the raw material for future studies of poetry (25, 1981, 108-10).

Beginning in 1980 SEEJ again has published several articles on versification, perhaps reflecting the growing interest in this field on the part of scholars in the West. G.S. Smith, in "Stanza Rhythm and Stress Load in the Iambic Tetrameter of V.F. Xodasevi6," shows that at least in one type of stanza (iambic tetrameter quatrains, with an AbAb rhyme scheme) the amount of stressing on each line tends to fall from the beginning to the end of the stanza (24, 1980, 25-36). Ian Lilly's "On Adjacent and Nonadjacent Russian Rhyme Pairs" continues his study of Russian rhyme: here he shows that for eighteenth-century poems employing a particular ten-line stanza the rhyme partners in adjacent lines show a greater similarity than do rhymes in lines that are not adjacent (24, 1980, 245-55). Both articles are notable for suggesting new problems of verse theory that are worthy of study. In "Verse as a Semiotic System: Tynjanov, Jakobson, Mukariovsk', Lotman Extended" (25, 1981, 47-61), Herbert Eagle tries to define the minimal structural principle that distinguishes poetry as an art form and finds the key feature to be the presence of verse typology that is in addition to and opposed to the typology provided by the structures of everyday language. An English rendering of Tynjanov's main work on poetic theory, The Problem of Verse Language, was reviewed in the next issue (26, 1982, 107-9).

"Cohesion in Russian: A Model for Discourse Analysis," by Cynthia Simmons, represents an interesting attempt to apply a theory developed for English (see Halliday and Hasan) to Russian literature (25, 1981, 64-79). Essentially, the method involves describing an author's style of discourse by looking at "non-structural" devices of cohesion, which in Russian consist of reference, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion.




The tendency to translate important Russian theoretical works for an English-speaking audience is reflected in two 1982 reviews. Albert Wehrle, writing on Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist's The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, remarks upon both the importance of the essays themselves as well as the high quality of the translation and the commentary (26, 1982, 106-7). As Gerald Pirog states in his review of Her- bert Eagle's Russian Formalist Film Theory (26, 1982, 492-93), the volume not only contains translations of the articles that comprised the 1927 volume PoBtika kino, but also an extensive introductory essay by Eagle that shows the relationship between the essence of Formalist thought and the ideas expressed by the most creative Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s. Eagle himself reviews Kristin Thompson's Eisenstein's 'Ivan the Terrible': A Neoformalist Analysis, which owes much to the significance that ?klovskij places on ostranenie and zatrudnenie in the way that art alters and renews perception (27, 1983, 278-80). While Thompson's introductory essay also makes reference to American New Criticism and French Structuralism, her work shows that some of the basic concepts introduced by the Formalists retain their validity for the study of film.

Some of Roman Jakbson's late work is covered in two other reviews. Savely Senderovich, in discussing Selected Writings III: Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry, discusses the significance of the two most famous papers in the collection ("Lingusitics and Poetics" and "Poezija grammatiki i grammatika poezii") and deals more briefly with some of the other papers, most of which are from the 1960s and 1070s (27, 1983, 1.27-29). Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time (rev. Michael Sosa, 30, 1986, 433-34), repub- lishes material from a 1980 issue of Poetics Today; the contents overlap somewhat with Selected Writings III, but the volume does include three articles by other scholars on Jakobson's legacy and in general provides a good introduction to Jakobson's work.

Two studies-one theoretical, the other dealing with the history of criticism-are also the subject of recent reviews. L. Michael O'Toole's Structure, Style, and Interpretation in the Russian Short Story is seen by D. Barton Johnson as providing "a codification of 'traditional' structural analysis of literary texts." As Johnson points out, recent critical theory has tended to move in new directions, though he finds O'Toole's book to be quite useful for showing how theory can be applied in practice (27, 1983, 385-87). F.W. Galan's Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928-1946, reviewed by Michael Sosa, offers a description of the Prague School's contribution to literary theory by closely examining the work of four prominent scholars: Roman Jakobson, Jan Mukariovsk',, Felix Vodi6ka, and Rene Wellek (30, 1986, 278-79).

Amy Mandelker's "Russian Formalism and the Objective Analysis of Sound in Poetry" (27, 1983, 327-38) deals with a problem that is of both




historical and theoretical interest. After distinguishing the Formalist concept of sound in poetry from that of the Symbolists, she goes on to describe two main approaches among the Formalists. One group of critics-which includes ?klovskij, fjxenbaum, and Tynjanov-rejected Belyj's direct association of sounds with specific images but nonetheless spoke of the "sound gesture," in which the articulation of sounds itself becomes significant. The other approach, followed by Kulner and Brik, was to suggest that sound patterns could serve the non-semantic function of focusing on certain key words; it is the latter of these two approaches that has proved to be most productive for contemporary researchers.

The most recent of the articles on Russian verse theory is Ian Lilly's "On Adjacent and Nonadjacent Russian Rhyme Pairs, II" (29, 1985, 188-97). Here he expands the evidence for concluding that adjacent rhyme partners tend to be more similar than nonadjacent pairs by examining certain features in groups of poems, such as consonant enrichment in poems with alternating AbbA and aBBa quatrains.

The final items to be discussed appear in SEEJs first Forum. Gary Saul Morson's "The Baxtin Industry" (30, 1986, 81-90) discusses several recent publications on Baxtin as well as Caryl Emerson's new translation of Prob- lems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. His piece is followed by I.R. Titunik's "The Baxtin Problem: Concerning Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist's Mikhail Bakhtin," in which he states particular objections to one chapter in their book ("The Architectonics of Answerability") and again raises questions relating to the authorship of texts originally attributed to V.N. Vologinov and P.N. Medvedev (91-95). Then Clark and Holquist, in "A Continuing Dialogue" (96-102), are given the opportunity to respond to issues raised by both Morson and Titunik. The give and take of the three pieces creates a liveliness that has not often been found in SEEJ.

Perhaps more importantly, the Forum offers just that-a forum for discussing current trends in criticism. As this survey has indicated, American Slavists have become more interested in contemporary literary theory than was the case some thirty years ago. For that matter, perhaps due in no small part to the efforts of Tzvetan Todorov, mentioned above, American scholars in disciplines other than Slavic have become much more curious about the theorists of the 1920s and contemporary East European writing (see Martin 1986). The two trends have been reflected in the review section, which has paid attention to several theoretical studies by Western scholars as well as to numerous translations of critical works, both old and new. However, besides the handful of articles devoted to verse theory, it is possible to find only the merest sprinkling of articles dealing with theory, and the majority of those are of a historical nature. The hope is that through the Forum or perhaps among the articles SEEJ will come to reflect current theoretical issues as effectively as it has long done in its review pages.




WORKS CITED

Bailey, James. "The Metrical Typology of Russian Narrative Folk Meters." American Contri- butions to the Eighth International Congress of Slavists, I: Linguistics and Poetics. Ed. Henrik Birnbaum. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1978. Pp. 82-103.

Bailey, James. Toward a Statistical Analysis of English Verse: The Iambic Tetrameter of Ten Poets. Lisse, The Netherlands: Peter de Ridder Press, 1975.

Gasparov, M.L. "Russkij bylinnyj stix." Issledovanija po teorii stixa. Ed. V.E. Xolgevnikov. Leningrad: Nauka, 1978. Pp 3-47.

Gasparov, M.L. "Russkij trexudarnyj dol'nik XX v." Teorija stixa. Ed. V.E. Xolgevnikov et al. Leningrad: Nauka, 1968. Pp 59-106.

Gasparov, M.L. "Statistibeskoe obsledovanie russkogo trexudarnogo dol'nika." Teorija verojatnostej i ee primenenija, 8 (1963), no. 1:102-8.

Halle, Morris, and Keyser, Samuel J. "Chaucer and the Study of Prosody." College English, 28 (1966), no. 3:187-219.

Halliday, M.A.K. and Hasan, Ruqaiya. Cohesion in English. London: Longman, 1976. Kjetsaa, Geir. "Lomonosov's Sound Characteristics." Scando-Slavia. 20 (1974):77-93. Kjetsaa, Geir [Gejr Xetso]. Prinadleinost' Dostoevskomu: K voprosu ob atribucii F. M. Dostoev-

skomu anonimnyx statej v turnalax Vremja i Epoxa. Oslo: Solum Forlag A. S., 1986. Laplina, N.V., Romanovi6, I.K., and Jarxo, B.I. Metrieeskij spravoenik k stixotvorenijam A. S.

Pulkina. Moscow-Leningrad: Academia, 1934. Martin, Wallace. Recent Theories of Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986. Lotman, Ju.M. Struktura xudolestvennogo teksta. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1970. Picchio, Riccardo. "The Isocolic Principle in Old Russian Prose." Slavic Poetics: Essays in

Honor of Kiril Taranovsky. Ed. Roman Jakobson, C.H. van Schooneveld, and Dean S. Worth. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. Pp. 229-31.

Poggioli, Renato. The Poets of Russia: 1890-1930. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. Smith, G.S. "The Reform of Russian Versification: What More is There to Say?" Study Group

on Eighteenth-Century Russia Newsletter [Norwich, England], no. 5 (1977):39-44. Taranovsky, Kiril. "Stixoslolenie Osipa Mandel'gtama (s 1908 po 1925 god)." International

Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics, V (1962):97-125. Tarlinskaja, Marina. English Verse: Theory and History. The Hague: Mouton, 1976. Tomagevskij, B.V. "Strofika Pugkina." Pufkin: Issledovanija i materialy, 2 (1958):49-184.



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Thirtieth Anniversary Issue || Formalism, Structuralism, Semiotics, Poetics