“The Methodology of a World without Connection” Formal method as a symptom of a revolutionary situation and principle of cultural construction

This article puts forward a hypothesis regarding the paradoxical nature of Russian Formalism’s influence on early Soviet cultural policy. The early manifestos of Russian Formalism, with their calls for the autonomization of literary theory and the study of the specific principles of “plot construction” outside of social and biographical contexts, can be viewed as a symptom of the revolutionary situation. According to Viktor Shklovsky’s later assessments, early formalism was an expression of a peculiar nominalism that perceived isolated “things” and did not raise the problem of the unity of the world. However, it was precisely this distinction between “cultural” or “superstructural” and “infrastructural” series that could be used to study the principles of cultural evolution, an understanding of which was required for early Soviet linguistic and national construction. This idea is illustrated by an example from the works on linguistic evolution by one of the founders of OPYAZ, the linguist and student of Baudouin de Courtenay, Evgeny Polivanov, who became an active participant in Soviet linguistic and cultural construction. Polivanov, like Shklovsky, argued that it was impossible to establish a direct correlation between linguistic evolution and social development. According to the hypothesis put forward in the article, this kind of formalist methodology was well suited to the tasks of early Soviet language and cultural building taking into consideration institutional transformation and the political context of historical moment.

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