Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics

Persistent Forms

Introducing Historical Poetics

History, Experience, Form

ILYA KLIGER AND BORIS MASLOV

Theory vs. history; form vs. content; artistry vs. ideology; close reading vs. contextualization: these dichotomies are intrinsic to the way literary scholars have come to think of their subject, especially within the—now globally influential—U.S. academy. This volume explores a critical tradition, known as Historical Poetics, that offers a way of negotiating between these familiar oppositions, blending literary theory, history of poetic forms, cultural history, philosophy of history, and (often less overtly) philosophical aesthetics. In the following chapters, this exploration is undertaken on four different fronts—new translations that make available important theoretical work from the past, contributions to the history of literary theory, new critical-theoretical work, and literary-historical case studies that illustrate and take further the evolving paradigm of Historical Poetics.

Originating with Alexander Veselovsky’s work from the 1860s to the 1900s and variously continued by Mikhail Bakhtin, Olga Freidenberg, and Mikhail Gasparov and many others in the twentieth century, Historical Poetics is, first and foremost, a Russian scholarly tradition that approaches literary form as a recursive and mediated response to historical processes.¹ This tradition had a major and under-appreciated influence on the Russian Formalists, as well as on some members of the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, and one of the ambitions of this volume is to place Historical Poetics more squarely on the intellectual-historical map, thus filling in significant gaps in Western engagement with Russian theory.² More urgently, however, we hope to enrich and reinvigorate this tradition by confronting it with like-minded but independently developing understandings of both literature and history, and in the process, to set to work some of its fundamental categories and most productive insights in the context of contemporary humanistic studies. In this mode, Historical Poetics can be construed not only as a body of completed work or an established practice but also as a project, an active paradigm, which constantly realigns and expands its own inheritance. We envision it here, then, not so much as a separate line of thinking about literature developed by Russian and Soviet scholars but rather as a living contributor to the great dialogue (Bakhtin) of humanistic thought about history, experience and meaning, especially as it crystallizes around literary works.

As such, what can Historical Poetics offer to us today? In broadest possible terms, three things. First, it offers a rich tradition of searching for a concept of history that would be adequate to the specific historicity of literature. This search brings Historical Poetics into contact with Marxist and other conceptions of universal history; with theories of subaltern nonsynchronicity; and with the self-consciously expansive notions of history (as big history) informing some recent work in world literature. In particular, it is incumbent on Historical Poetics, as we envision it, to challenge and supplement contemporary historicism with conceptions of cultural persistence and the historical longue durée.³ The first section of this introduction, dedicated to the exposition of this problematic, poses the question of the meaning of history in Historical Poetics.

Second, Historical Poetics provides us with a way of understanding literary practice (or, more broadly, verbal art) as not only a response to, but also a constitutive factor in, history. In other words, Historical Poetics uncovers the ways in which the literary interpolates historical experience by perpetuating conceptual, affective, and behavioral schemata across space and time. This ambition opens the exploration of literary texts to cultural semiotics, to theorizations of affect as well as social and political theory and anthropology.⁴ Thus, the second section of this introduction concerns the question of the relationship between literature and life.

Finally, the third major contribution of Historical Poetics that we would like to highlight here (section 3) concerns its tendency to link the notion of poetics to the specifically verbal dimension of the literary while at the same time conceiving of this verbal activity as neither merely technical nor reflexive or cognitive, but rather as essentially poetic, that is, creative or practical.⁵ In this sense poetics functions here as a third term, whose import is stabilized by—and can only be grasped after—the elaboration of the meaning of its predicate historical (section 1) and its relation to life (section 2).

1. HISTORICISM, NONSYNCHRONICITY, AND THE LONGUE DURÉE

One of the foundational gestures of Historical Poetics involves a disentanglement of verbal art from philosophical aesthetics. The poetry of the word, writes Veselovsky, cannot be defined with the help of the abstract concept of beauty, and it is always created in the sequential correlation of these forms with the systemically changing social ideals.⁶ Literature, then, is best understood as a historical phenomenon. What history means, however, and precisely how it relates to verbal art, needs to be further specified. In fact, within the tradition of Historical Poetics, at least three prominent conceptions of history have been operative. These conceptions are distinct and themselves belong to different intellectual-historical conjunctures, but in Historical Poetics they overlap and enter into relations of complementarity and tension. Already in Veselovsky, traces of all three can be detected.

Objecting to overhasty generalizations and a priori claims prevalent in contemporary thought on literature, Veselovsky argues that a sufficiently rigorous, scholarly endeavor requires painstaking attention to detail: If you study an epoch and wish to develop your own, independent view of it, you must acquaint yourself not only with its major phenomena, but also with those everyday trivia which conditioned them; you will attempt to trace the relations of cause and effect between them; for the sake of convenience you will begin to approach the subject by parts—from only one point of view at a time; each time you will come to some conclusion or to a series of conclusions.⁷ To grasp the meaning of a work, in other words, we need to reconstruct its historical context to the smallest possible detail. Veselovsky conceives this historical context as making up something like an epoch, at least in principle a delineable and distinctly characterized segment of world history. The epoch, in turn, is accessible to us through the inductive movement from part to whole, a movement that strives to avoid imaginative and deductive leaps. This is a positivist historicism that does not smuggle in assumptions about what constitutes the beautiful or, for that matter, how a given author expresses the spirit of his age.

Historicism, however, does not exhaust the historiographic imagination informing the tradition here at issue. Rather, it is complemented by a competing historico-philosophical paradigm, that of universal history. In Veselovsky, this takes the form of a post-Hegelian or Spencerian assertion of the general movement toward human emancipation and individuation with concomitant changes on the level of forms and institutions of verbal art. Among other things, this conception of universal-historical development underpins Veselovsky’s poetics of plots. In a late and unfinished work on the subject, Veselovsky relies on the notion that societies pass through a number of stages as they evolve from primitive communality to individualistic modernity, generating certain poetic formulas, character types, and motifs in response to each stage of development. Thus, forms of poetic parallelism arise in the context of the primitive totemism of hunting societies; societies undergoing a transition from tribal to national life tend to respond by generating the type of an idealized hero, miraculously born and nearly invulnerable; the rise of historical consciousness within a single tribe is associated with the emergence of legends about encounters between representatives of distinct ages of the world, such as giants and humans, or older and younger warriors. It is this conception of history—which Viktor Zhirmunsky, a major proponent of Veselovsky’s work in the Soviet Union, calls the unity and systematic nature of historical development as a whole⁸—that underwrites the congeniality between Historical Poetics and certain forms of Soviet and Western Marxist literary scholarship.⁹ In particular, Zhirmunsky repeatedly pointed to the likelihood of similar motifs emerging in different cultures due to similar sociohistorical conditions rather than to literary borrowing.¹⁰ Blending Soviet internationalism and a stadial vision of universal history, Zhirmunsky also insisted that the study of comparative literature must reach beyond major (Euro-American) national literatures and include traditional and transitional literary cultures.¹¹

As it makes its way into the twentieth century, the universal-historical paradigm, especially in its Marxist instantiation, undergoes an important modification with the emergence of the discourse of uneven development or nonsynchronicity. This tendency is detectable already in Veselovsky, whose notion of the persistence or survival of verbal-artistic forms complicates the more straightforwardly linear narrative of evolution from primitive community to complex civilization. Thus, in a lecture published under the title From the Introduction to Historical Poetics (1894), Veselovsky writes:

Popular memory has preserved sediments of images, plots, and types, which were once alive, evoked by a famous individual’s activity, by an event or an anecdote that excited interest and took possession of sentiment and fantasy. These plots and types were generalized, the notion of particular individuals and facts could fade, leaving behind only common schemas and outlines. These exist in a dark, hidden region of our consciousness, like much that we’ve undergone and experienced [perezhitoe], apparently forgotten, but then they suddenly overwhelm us as an inexplicable revelation, as a novelty that is, at the same time, an outmoded antique, something we cannot fully account for, because we are often unable to define the essence of the psychic act that unpredictably renewed in us these old memories. The same holds true in the life of literature, both popular and self-consciously artistic: old images, echoes of images, suddenly appear when a popular-poetic demand has arisen, in response to an urgent call of the times. In this way popular legends recur; in this way, in literature, we explain the renewal of some plots, whereas others are apparently forgotten.¹²

Employing Edward Tylor’s concept of the survival of rudiments of earlier social forms in later and even properly modern societies, Veselovsky argued that manifestations of verbal creativity do not disappear with the stage of social development that gave them life but persist and can be suddenly reanimated when the socio-psychological demand for it arises again.¹³ This notion presupposes a nonlinear model of history, traversed by traces of the past, with which we are ultimately never done.¹⁴

It is worth noting that the closest analogue to Veselovsky’s discovery of cultural nonsynchrony comes not from the domain of contemporary literary study but from that of art history, in the work of Aby Warburg a generation later. Warburg’s commitment to social history and the longue durée, his interest in noncanonical works and in aspects of art production that had been overlooked by traditional art history, and his attempts to trace the migration of classical traditional images and imagistic formulas—all find their counterparts in Veselovsky’s work. Perhaps most important, the two of them share the recognition, Tylorian in inspiration, of the nonlinear, nonsynchronous historicity of cultural phenomena.¹⁵ It is due to a set of historical contingencies that Veselovsky did not become for Western literary scholars the kind of founding figure that Aby Warburg represents for art historians.¹⁶ Regardless, Veselovsky’s perezhivanie, much like Warburg’s Nachleben, marks the point of nonconvergence between the recursive temporality of culture on the one hand and the progressive conceptions of historical time on the other. Veselovsky’s reflections on nonsynchrony date from the last period of his work and are thus roughly contemporary with Warburg’s. Moreover, these like-minded attempts to think the untimely resonate with a number of familiar early-twentieth-century figurations of memory as spontaneous, pure, or unconscious, grounding the narrative representation of time (Proust), metaphysics (Bergson), and the individual psyche (Freud). Within the domain of historiography in particular, Lev Trotsky proposes the notion of combined development (a combination of archaic and highly modern modes of production and ways of thinking) to account for the revolutionary situation in Russia in the early 1900s. Somewhat later but in a similar spirit, confronted by the rise of Nazism and the need to rethink history in terms that would still be Marxist but no longer straightforwardly progressive, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch suggest the concepts of the now-time (Jetztzeit) and noncontemporaneity (Ungleichzeitichkeit) respectively.¹⁷

Within the tradition of Historical Poetics itself, Veselovsky’s early hints receive their most striking development in Bakhtin’s hypothesis of genre memory, put forward in the second edition of his book on Dostoevsky (1963). Bakhtin’s contribution to Historical Poetics and, in particular, the concept of genre memory, is treated in greater detail in Chapter 8. For now, we might recall that something like this notion is also implicit in Fredric Jameson’s attempt to rehabilitate genre as a category of literary analysis in the 1980s by adopting a more sophisticated understanding of universal history as uneven: In its emergent, strong form a genre is essentially a socio-symbolic message, or in other terms, that form is immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its own right. When such forms are reappropriated and refashioned in quite different social and cultural contexts, this message persists and must be functionally reckoned into the new form. […] The ideology of the form itself, thus sedimented, persists into the later, more complex structure as a generic message which coexists—either as a contradiction or, on the other hand, as a mediatory or harmonizing mechanism—with elements from later stages.¹⁸ At least in general outline, both Veselovsky and Bakhtin would agree (see Chapter 3).

This historical vision of genre as a persistent form that manifests itself in texts whose design may carry a different intent invites an understanding of literary text that is at odds with the holistic presumptions of aestheticist literary criticism (see section 3). From this perspective, texts appear as intrinsically hybrid entities, whose semantic layers speak in different voices, which may be audible or silent at various moments in the text’s reception, entering into new or recurrent constellations that are largely outside authorial control. The recognition of the workings of cultural sedimentation, in effect, demands that we not only learn to stratify texts as we read, but also that we inquire into the ways in which textual hybridity is manifested, suppressed, or promoted within historically variable cultural spaces.

Less broadly known than Bakhtin’s are the uses of a nonsynchronous conception of history in the work of Russian Formalists. In a joint statement, a kind of manifesto summarizing the theoretical achievements of the movement and outlining its future tasks, Roman Jakobson and Yuri Tynianov insist that pure synchronism now proves to be an illusion: every synchronic system has its past and its future as inseparable structural elements of the system: (a) archaism as a fact of style, the linguistic and literary background recognized as the rejected, old-fashioned style; (b) the tendency toward innovation in language and literature recognized as a renewal of the system.¹⁹ The late Formalist demand that both literature as a whole and individual works of literature be grasped in their dynamism, as a process, requires attention to residual and emergent tendencies within the present. Indeed, from this point of view, the present moment in literary history is simply incomprehensible without reference to the future and the past. But Jakobson and Tynianov go still further: The concept of a synchronic literary system does not coincide with the naïvely envisaged concept of a chronological epoch, since the former embraces not only works of art which are close to each other in time but also works which are drawn into the orbit of the system from foreign literatures or previous epochs. An indifferent cataloguing of coexisting phenomena is not sufficient; what is important is their hierarchical significance for the given epoch.²⁰ It is not the immediate past alone that matters inasmuch as it helps to foreground what is innovative in a given work; it is rather any given past that could be reawakened by the work, entering into a relationship of productive tension with it. This dynamic of course significantly complicates not only the vision of stadial universal history but also one of the linchpin notions of historicism, the isolated, self-contained, separable epoch or context.

Another member of the group, Boris Eikhenbaum, offers the most explicitly philosophical (most likely, Bergsonian) elaboration of literature’s nonsynchronous predicament:

To study an event historically does not at all mean to describe it as an isolated instance which has meaning only in the conditions of its own time. This is naïve historicism which renders science sterile. It is not a matter of simple projection into the past, but of understanding the historical actuality of an event, of determining its role in the development of historical energy, which, in its very essence, is constant, does not appear and disappear and therefore operates outside of time. […] Nothing repeats itself in history precisely because nothing vanishes but only mutates. Therefore, historical analogies are not only possible but even necessary; and the study of historical events outside the historical processes as individual, unrepeatable self-contained systems is impossible because it contradicts the very nature of these events.²¹

The anti-historicist pathos of this passage is evident. Historical energy is Eikhenbaum’s name for what allows forms to persist and have effects beyond their time. To progress, he opposes mutation; to unique and unrepeatable historical ages, analogies. Notably, some of the more recent attempts at conceptualizing the distinctive space/time of world literature similarly insist that even the most distant past does not go out of existence but is perpetually brought back in re-articulated form in the present; that it is not annihilated by the present, but in Formalist language, deformed by it. This insistence, along with the stress on the importance of analogies, is in evidence, for example in Wai Chee Dimock’s attempt to conceptualize American literature on a planetary spacio-temporal scale. Thus, she argues that the continuum of historical life does not grant the privilege of autonomy to any spatial locale; it does not grant the privilege of autonomy to any temporal segment.²² Dimock suggests, therefore, that we must transcend the categories of both nation and period and conceive a given moment in literary history as traversed by multiple pasts, the distance from each of which is not measurable in terms of homogeneous empty time. In one of Dimock’s examples, we have Thoreau influencing Gandhi and himself influenced by the Bhagavad Gita in a kind of global civil society that connects people and ideas across great expanses of space and time. The map of the world that Thoreau lives in, Dimock writes, is probably not one that we recognize. As far as he is concerned, the Ganges River is in direct contact with Walden Pond; he owes his intellectual genesis to the mixing of the two. Concord, Massachusetts, might be an American locale, but it is irrigated by an ancient text from Asia. Swept by that text and its torrents of time, Walden in turn flows outward, circumnavigating the globe, gliding past Europe and Africa on its way back to India.²³

The danger of this approach, as Bruce Robbins warns in his essay on the Uses of World Literature, is that we succumb to an ahistoricist fallacy that sees sameness everywhere. It seems likely, he writes, that world literature is going to breed more discussions of what we used to call ‘themes’ like beauty and death, which come to seem permissible, though they are dangerously close to the atemporal universals that they were understood to be a century ago, simply because they are too large to fit the nation-state.²⁴ Though its roots reach deep into the nineteenth century, Historical Poetics largely eschews this danger by emphasizing simultaneously the longue durée and the conjunctural in history. At its best, it remains firmly historical and materialist, in the sense of being committed to understanding literary works in the context of specific social-practical conditions within which they arise, while at the same time appreciating the expansive life span of genres, motifs, and character-types. It demands that we combine, in a single analytic effort, close reading of particular texts with distant reading that radically cross-cuts preconceived historical linkages. Bakhtin puts this clearly: A literary genre, by its very nature, reflects the most stable, ‘eternal’ tendencies in literature’s development. Always preserved in a genre are undying elements of the archaic. True, these archaic elements are preserved in it only thanks to their constant renewal, which is to say their contemporization. A genre is always the same and yet not the same, always new and old simultaneously.²⁵

New and old simultaneously—this is the logic of history in Historical Poetics as we construe it. What it explicitly opposes is the sort of historicism that traps its object at a safe remove from us and pretends that it does not invade the very perspective from which it is being examined. Eikhenbaum suggests that we replace this historical objectification of a work, a genre, a device with a more dynamic conception of historical actuality (in the sense that its existence is not that of an object but that of an activity) or energy, something that cannot be confined to its location, something that can act at a spatial and temporal remove. Bakhtin pleads along similar lines: If it is impossible to study literature apart from an epoch’s entire culture, it is even more fatal to encapsulate a literary phenomenon in the single epoch of its creation […]. We are afraid to remove ourselves in time from the phenomenon under investigation. Yet the artwork extends its roots into the distant past. […] Works break through the boundaries of their own time, they live in centuries, that is, in great time and frequently (with great works, always) their lives there are more intense and fuller than their lives within their own time.²⁶

2. LITERATURE AND/AS LIFE

In sum, Bakhtin and the Formalists agreed on this: that (literary) history needs to be understood as both radically continuous (in the sense of positing an unseverable connection between the experiences of the past and those of the present) and nonsynchronous (in the sense that the links cannot be organized in homogeneous progressive or teleological time, but must be conceived in time that is stratified with memories, analogical, and infinitely traversable). This insistence on the insufficiency of traditional historicism may very well have something to do with the peculiarities of the rise of modern literature in Russia and the role it quickly came to play as a repository of meanings for the public sphere.²⁷ Literature was predominantly understood as something of a textbook of life or a theory of life, and the process of autonomization of the literary-aesthetic field from those of politics, society, and the broader culture that was in evidence in western Europe throughout the nineteenth century seems to have never—neither in the nineteenth nor in the twentieth century—quite gotten off the ground in Russia. As a result, whereas the evolution of form-oriented approaches to art and literature finds parallels in the West, the specific conditions of Russian historical development stimulated an understanding of literature as intricately woven into the fabric of sociopolitical life.²⁸

Certainly Veselovsky did not think of himself as a literary critic whose purpose it was to explicate a given work in light of its relevance to his own time. But his theorization of literature’s relation to social life avoids not only aestheticism (the treatment of literary works as objects of disinterested pleasure), but epistemologism (their treatment simply as evidence of the worldviews of particular epochs) as well. Instead, he understands literary phenomena (both individual works and genres) dynamically as responses to socio-psychological demands. For Veselovsky, whether he is writing about primitive verbal art or sentimentalist psychology, form is a reaction to need, an attempt at meaning in the face of its historically urgent lack. In short, form reenacts, in various contexts and on various levels of complexity, the originary syncretic ritual performed with the belief that the symbolic recreation of what is desired influences its actualization.²⁹ Worldviews are thus encoded in works only as it were in action, not as passive reflections or models of the social sphere. Art and ritual are meaning-making activities that respond to an imperfect world, a dance over the abyss of desire and lack.

The centrality that Veselovsky accords to (active) ritual in contradistinction to (reflective) myth anticipates the Cambridge Ritualists; both were inspired by British ethnography, epitomized in Frazer’s Golden Bough.³⁰ Moreover, both were suggesting developments in their respective disciplines that went parallel with the continental philosophical movement of Lebensphilosophie. Just as philosophers from Nietzsche to Simmel demanded that cultural forms be understood as imbued with the urgency of life, so Veselovsky, in his late study of Russian Sentimentalism, deploys the term perezhivanie to refer both to a tradition that persists (survives) through texts and to everyday experience (often prompted by an emotional response to a text). The term serves to foreground the affective power with which cultural perceptions articulated in poetic texts can shape the experience of an individual.³¹ This approach to poetics and experience is continued in Zhirmunsky’s early work on German Romantic mysticism, in which an adherence to Veselovsky’s Historical Poetics goes alongside a direct influence of Lebensphilosophie.³²

The impact of Lebensphilosophie can also be traced in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. In his very first publication from 1919, the short essay Art and Answerability, Bakhtin formulates the principle of connectedness between art and life that will guide much of his later work: The Poet must remember that it is his poetry which bears the guilt for the vulgar prose of life, whereas the man of everyday life ought to know that the fruitlessness of art is due to his willingness to be unexacting and to the unseriousness of the concerns in his life.³³ Literature for Bakhtin is not an autonomous domain but a mode of authoring, of a meaningful organization of experience, an activity without which—in the Kantian spirit—experience itself is rendered inconceivable. As Bakhtin goes on to suggest in Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity (written in the early 1920s), literary works are part of the continuum of meaningful finalization, of which the lowest, most fundamental stage is the primitive choral ritual performance. Furthermore, for Bakhtin, those literary works are most precious, most properly literary, which display the greatest tension between the labor of finalization and the experience that is being finalized, thus reminding us of literature’s essential link to language and other sense-making mechanisms operating in the historical everyday.

Bakhtin’s vision of the continuum of finalization finds an unexpected echo in the mature Formalist notion of deformation, which Yuri Tynianov understands as the major mechanism in the evolution of literary systems: The uniqueness of the literary work lies in the way the constructive factor is applied to the material, in the ‘formation’ (i.e., in effect, ‘deformation’) of the material. […] And it goes without saying that the ‘material’ is not at all opposed to the ‘form’; it too is ‘formal,’ because outside the constructive principle the material does not exist.³⁴ For our purposes it is crucial to observe that deformation occurs at every level, all the way down to the impossible limit of pure material. The literary genre or individual work is thus best understood by taking stock of its relation (orientation) to the proximate mode of the formation of experience (see Chapter 3). Thus, for example, in Tynianov’s own account of the eighteenth-century Russian ode, the literary genre is revealed as structured through and through by its relation to the act of courtly oratory, which is, in turn, an explicitly political act, making sense of (or de-forming) scenarios of royal power, which in turn, de-form political institutions, and so on.³⁵

Even the Formalists, then, whose battle cry was the creation of an autonomous discipline of the study of literature and who felt themselves to be swimming against the current of the great Russian literary-critical tradition (from the radical critics of the 1840s and ’60s to Veselovsky himself, whose notion of socio-psychological demand they found inimical)—even they ultimately conceived of verbal art as possessing an intimate relation to life. Indeed, from the moment of its inception with Viktor Shklovsky’s Art as Device (1916), which posits for literature the goal of an ethical reanimation of the experience of life, and to its most systematic elaboration in the works of Tynianov in the late 1920s, Formalism offers an activist (rather than autonomous or reflective) vision of the literary process, one that is not so much an effect of historical change as a full-fledged participant in it.

In On Psychological Prose, Lydia Ginzburg, one of the few students of the Formalists who were able to produce important theoretical work in the postwar Soviet period, proposed that the aesthetic finalizing principle can at times be extended beyond literary works proper to human documents such as diaries and letters and indeed to everyday behavior and individual psychology, whereby historical actors fashion their personalities as quasi-literary artifacts.³⁶ A still more striking conceptualization and demonstration of literature’s participatory role in the historical process came out of the work of the semiotician, literary theorist, and historian Yuri Lotman. In his article The Decembrist in Everyday Life, Lotman proposed the category of behavior-text as a completed chain of meaningful acts that runs between intention and result.³⁷ A behavior-text is Lotman’s term for the way in which one’s everyday actions may be guided and interpreted with reference to assimilated literary plots and topoi. When it comes to the Decembrist movement, Lotman argues, a dominant mode of literary emplotment came from the culture of Romanticism (Russian and western European alike), with its own accumulated cast of representative characters and plots. "Just as the gestures and acts of the nobleman revolutionary had meaning for himself and for those around him insofar as their significance was expressed in the word, so any series of acts would become a text (acquire significance) if it could be illuminated by association with a literary plot. The death of Caesar, the heroism of Cato, the preaching of a denunciatory prophet […]—these were the plots which gave meaning to particular chains of everyday acts.³⁸ Thus, the literary dimension interpolates itself into the world of everydayness and raises mundane acts to the status of meaning-giving rituals. Literary models allow the Decembrists to feel like actors on the stage of world history, with the eyes of their descendants constantly on them. In this way, we are able to speak of the poetics of everyday behavior"—a notion that proved influential in the conceptualization of New Historicist methodology.³⁹

None of this is to deny fundamental divergences within the tradition of Historical Poetics. In their time, Bakhtin and the Formalists could not agree on very much. Nor did Bakhtin see eye to eye with Lotman (though Lotman did not conceal his debt to Bakhtin). As for Veselovsky, he was now and then respectfully invoked, but, with the exception of Zhirmunsky and Freidenberg, was approached as a founding figure rather than as an active interlocutor by the second- and third-generation theorists here at issue. Still, when we see their work as comprising an overarching paradigm, we are afforded a view of far greater continuity than is usually acknowledged. Particularly vivid is the dominant, though variously inflected, conviction that literature is a special form of transformative human activity, a response to the world’s insufficiency and an effective means of endowing individual and collective experience with sense. We may take it as a further indication of the convergence of Historical Poetics and contemporary Marxism that, in a recent work, Fredric Jameson has expressed a congenial understanding of literature as something we do to reality, and its resultant transformation is no less real than the objects on which it is performed.⁴⁰

3. PHILOLOGY INTO THEORY: FOLKLORE, LINGUISTICS, POETICS

Poetics as a field of knowledge is a notably incoherent entity. In English, the term usually refers either to normative, prescriptive texts—manuals and manifestoes—put forward by poets or critics, or to studies of a particular work of art crafted by the poet. Accordingly, American literary scholars, by and large, understand poetics to refer to either normative poetics or to what one may call authorial poetics, that is, to the principles of construction of a text that, although reconstructed ex post facto by the scholar, are taken to emanate from a poiêtês, the author-creator.⁴¹ In the Russian critical tradition, beginning with Veselovsky, poetics is construed more broadly, as a study of verbal art (encompassing both prose and poetry) that inquires into its constructive principles, while bracketing the individual author.⁴² There can thus exist a poetics of the novel and a poetics of French medieval literature, a poetics of plot and a poetics of genre.

The banishment of the poet, combined with a rejection of the organic unity of the work of art in favor of a messier, stratified vision of the text, is one of the inaugural gestures of Historical Poetics. Yet here, the author as the primum movens of verbal art is not replaced by an abstract grammar of literature, analogous to Saussure’s langue or cultural discourse; establishing such a synchronic system was of course the ultimate aspiration of the Structuralist project. Historical Poetics, while sharing with Structuralism an orientation toward linguistics, is instead concerned with diachrony. It is thus committed to a quest for those constructive principles of literary discourse that have a historical (rather than cognitive or psychological) nature, while falling outside the individual author’s control.

The category of genre, construed historically rather than normatively or idealistically, is essential to Historical Poetics precisely because it fulfills these requirements.⁴³ Beyond genre, one may cite Veselovsky’s effort to construct a historical account of inherited plots, Bakhtin’s notion of chronotopes (space-time configurations) propagated by literature, or Mikhail Gasparov’s work on intricate thematic associations of stanzaic and metrical patterns in lyric.⁴⁴ Poetics as inquiry into verbal art succeeds when it reaches phenomena that lie beyond authorial poetics. A historical poetics grasps these phenomena as having a history (participating in the history of forms), responsive to history (produced by a particular historical conjuncture), and formative of history (defining present and future historical experience and practice).

Historical Poetics thus assigns to literature a qualified autonomy. Literature’s constructive principles evolve along with the society that generates, receives, and recycles them. It is therefore not surprising that many proponents of the methods of Historical Poetics studied folklore, which is traditionally denied properly artistic or high literary qualities.⁴⁵ The wide cross-cultural dissemination of genres such as lyric, epic, or tale in a preliterary form that defies both individual authorship and aesthetic organicism crucially informed the basic premises of Veselovsky and his followers. Yet what does it mean to extend these premises beyond folklore? According to a definition given by Veselovsky in his last, unfinished work, The Poetics of Plots, the task of Historical Poetics is "to ascertain the role and boundaries of inherited tradition [predanie] in the process of individual creativity."⁴⁶ The question of what separates a popular song, in which genre reigns supreme, and an authorial lyric text, in which the poet claims utter originality, is central to the paradigm, and it clearly demands not only extensive reference to comparative history of verbal art, but also theoretical conceptualization (see Chapter 8).

The problem of assessing the distance between oral tradition and authorial literature is perhaps nowhere as pressing as in the study of Greek literary history, epitomized by the so-called Homeric Question (see Chapter 15). Milman Parry’s study of South Slavic living epic traditions, inspired by the pioneering work on Turkic epic by the German-Russian scholar F. W. Radloff, helped to personify the anonymous composers of Homeric epics, while shifting the focus away from their literary characteristics. As Veselovsky remarked already in 1870, the pendulum between a popular and a literary Homer had been swinging since Herder; it will probably continue to swing in the future.⁴⁷ The achievement of Parry and Lord, however, in part served to occlude the fact that other Greek genres of discourse (literary and philosophical) also originated in folklore.⁴⁸ Olga Freidenberg’s work from the 1920s to the 1950s, discussed in Chapter 10, drew on Veselovsky’s legacy in attempting to elucidate the preliterary roots of ancient literatures.

The close adherence of the Russian tradition of Historical Poetics to the study of language and folklore has itself a historical explanation: its origins in the discipline of philology. Philology is called forth by the opaqueness of the object of study, its impenetrability to the first reading, be it an ancient language, a medieval legend circulating in different manuscript redactions, or a popular song in a substandard dialect. Historicism—at least in its inductive variety—is essential for philology, whereas it is largely irrelevant to literary criticism or philosophically informed work on literature. While throughout Europe philology has originally been informed by an interest in classical or medieval antiquity, in the Russian scholarly tradition, a peculiar development took place: philology was extended to the study of modern literatures.

One reason for this development was that literary criticism proper [literaturnaia kritika] has taken over the functions of social commentary, and, in the Soviet period, was seen as thoroughly ideological. This meant that literary scholars sought for a more complex synthesis of social and literary analysis within an ostensibly scholastic philological tradition. It is not a coincidence that the central figures in the Russian tradition of Historical Poetics have had extensive experience as philologists (Veselovsky started out as a medievalist and a Renaissance scholar; Freidenberg and Gasparov were Classicists; Propp and Zhirmunsky studied folklore as well as the Middle Ages).

While in many ways a product of German philology, Historical Poetics, ironically, never had a true counterpart in Germany. In fact, the manner in which German influences were assimilated in Russia ultimately reveals the divergences between the two national critical traditions. Major components of the paradigm were imported at various moments from Germany to Russia, but evolved differently in the center and the periphery, in part because Russian scholars were more receptive to other influences (e.g., to British ethnographic comparativism), and in part because some borrowed features that were eventually neglected in Germany were conserved and entered into new syntheses in Russia. In the remainder of this section, we attempt to define the distinctive constitution of Russian poetics of verbal art by tracing some of these intellectual influences: a mild version of Hegelian universal history, the Herder-Grimm tradition of the study of folklore, Scherer’s call for a poetics founded on philology, and form-oriented approaches to art and literature in the early twentieth century.

In 1862, two Russian students, Alexander Potebnya and Alexander Veselovsky, were sent to Berlin on a study abroad mission sponsored by the Russian Ministry of Education.⁴⁹ Both adhered to a post-Hegelian idealist vision—mediated by their Berlin teacher Heymann Steinthal—that literary forms evolve in a way that is more or less uniform across cultures, thus making possible systematic comparative inquiry into literature. At the same time, both parted with received notions of idealist aesthetics. Aware of the keen interest German scholars were taking in Slavic oral traditions, Potebnya and Veselovsky followed the previous generation of Russian scholars (F. I. Buslaev, A. N. Afanas’ev) working in the tradition of Herder and Jacob Grimm, in making indigenous folklore a central resource for their work.⁵⁰ Finally, both approached literature as a distinctly verbal art.⁵¹

In contrast to Potebnya, however, Veselovsky extended his interests beyond both the study of folklore and the study of poetry as an autonomous domain of discourse. Under the influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Potebnya focused on the constants of literary form, which he derived primarily from folklore and saw as products of the mythical phase of culture. Veselovsky, while similarly intent on the evolution of literary phenomena from primitive roots, strove for an account of literature’s incremental responses to historical change and privileged borrowing over cultural inheritance. The granting of the ultimate explanatory value to the mythical (mythopoetic) consciousness appeared unacceptable from this perspective.⁵² In this regard, Veselovsky’s difference from Potebnya also amounted to a departure from the dominant line of German thought on literature and myth represented by their common teacher Steinthal.

Another feature of contemporary German scholarship that seemed unsatisfying to Veselovsky consisted in the privileging of the history of ideas—and of the high discourse of poetry as its putative vehicle—over concrete sociohistorical factors. For example, in a short essay entitled "From the History of Naturgefühl," Veselovsky took issue with Alfred Biese’s book on the evolution of the views of nature among the Greeks.⁵³ According to Veselovsky, historical periods when nature becomes an object of particular fascination, reflected in a variety of cultural phenomena including the rise of landscape painting and the contemplative individual trips to nature, are distinguished by an extreme, sometimes morbid development of individual consciousness and a decline of the religious-social system.⁵⁴ This implies both that the difference between the modern and the mythical attitudes toward nature is a question not of essence, but of degree and that particular literary influences are secondary to developments in social consciousness. It is therefore incorrect to see Petrarch’s inauguration of modern sentimentality, world grief, and disunity as a matter of the influence of Roman poetry. By contrast with Biese’s internalist interpretation, Veselovsky would opt for a historical-psychological explanation of the slow evolution of sentimentality as a response to the conditions of modern life.

Veselovsky’s distrust of mythologism was aided by his involvement in the burgeoning study of motif migrations pioneered by Theodor Benfey; this, along with the impact of British comparative ethnography, contributed to his movement away from Romantic ethnocentrism. Veselovsky’s vision of cultural and literary history stressed contact between cultures as an important impetus of a nation’s development, while allowing for the spontaneous generation of similar forms in societies in the same historical phase; the assimilation of foreign forms crucially depended on the receptivity of the importing culture (see Chapter 12). This dialogic approach to cultural development was continued by Yuri Lotman’s work from the 1970s to the 1980s on the interaction of center and periphery in the global cultural network.⁵⁵ Lotman’s theory of the semiosphere, in fact, furnishes a notable alternative to some world-systems approaches to the study of world literature.⁵⁶

Meanwhile, in twentieth-century Germany, the conflicted idealist and Romantic heritage of the study of literature was subjected to severe ideological testing. Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1946) and Ernst Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), both rooted in the German tradition of Romance philology, represent the last flowering of German literary Geistesgeschichte. Whereas Auerbach’s opus magnum operates with a Hegelian, starkly teleological version of universal history that appears to stay immune to modernist notions of nonsynchronous time, Curtius’s emphasis on inherited forms is in some ways akin to Veselovsky’s (see Chapters 4 and 7).⁵⁷ Curtius believed that his historical tropology effectively overcame the contemporary polemic between philology and idealism in Germany; however, his notion of a European cultural unity harbors an ahistorical, politically tendentious agenda.⁵⁸

A different line of intellectual development in Germany, following Kant’s rather than Hegel’s lead, sought to consider poetic form as an aesthetic phenomenon. There is a further irony in the fact that while the Russian Formalists in some cases saw themselves as following on these form-centered methodologies, the intentions of contemporary German scholarship ultimately proved inimical to the task of constructing a specialized discipline of verbal art.⁵⁹ In 1925, Boris Eikhenbaum noted in his diary: An odd impression: it seems as if the Germans are behind us. They busy themselves with old, useless problems; How everything’s different among them! ‘An aesthetic direction’ (Walzel, Strich, Gundolf)—that is something we’ve outlived.⁶⁰ One of the greatest achievements of the Formalist moment in Russia was Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928), which inspired French structuralists to attempt to construct universal grammars of narrative.⁶¹ It is symptomatic, however, that Propp’s masterpiece, while gesturing back to Goethe’s morphology and stressing Veselovsky’s precedent, has no relation to contemporary German thinking on general aesthetics. Up until the arrival of Structuralism, aesthetics remained paramount in German thinking on literature, as the work of the Frankfurt school and Hans-Georg Gadamer and his followers demonstrates. It is notable that when Hans Robert Jauss put forward a historical aesthetics of reception—a paradigm that is in many ways congruent with Historical Poetics—he founded his critique of Gadamer’s normative aesthetics on the work of the Russian Formalists.⁶²

There is an intriguing possibility that German literary studies already in the late nineteenth century could have taken a different course, one closer to the kind of historically-inflected aesthetics proposed by Jauss in the 1970s. In fact, an important impetus for Veselovsky’s thinking on Historical Poetics was provided by Wilhelm Scherer’s posthumously published Poetik (1888). Scherer’s work, in Veselovsky’s description, was a formless fragment of an undertaking conceived both with talent and on a grand scale as well as with the same objectives as Veselovsky’s own project, ongoing since the early 1860s.⁶³ Both spoke of the need for a poetics that would sprout from philology, founded on a historical and comparative investigation of diverse phenomena of verbal art rather than on the preconceived notions of Western aesthetics.⁶⁴ Following on a sympathetic discussion of Scherer’s work, Veselovsky points out that in the wake of Kant’s Third Critique it would be ludicrous to uphold an objectively given standard of beauty.⁶⁵ The implication is that it may be possible to historicize Kant’s universal-subjective understanding of aesthetic experience by positing a historically and geographically changeable subjectivity, a culturally or epochally specific way of organizing experience through the faculty of the Imagination. We might say that the eventual Historical Poetics emerges as a synthesis of the philological tradition and this project of the historicization of the aesthetic realm.

It is suggestive that the resuscitation of poetics as a term that has dominated twentieth-century literary theory dates back to Veselovsky’s engagement with Scherer’s Poetik. While Scherer’s work had no visible impact on German scholarship,⁶⁶ Veselovsky’s adoption of the term poetics for his own works made it the proper term for the new specialized field of literary studies. This is how the word was used by the Russian Formalists, and Roman Jakobson, a member of this group, disseminated this usage beyond Russia. French and Soviet Structuralism, which saw the Russian Formalists as pioneers of their method, have aided in the further propagation of this term. The success of the Jakobsonian poetics marked the period when literary studies had the largest impact on neighboring fields, including the study of the other arts. As Haun Saussy points out, Oddly, the moment in the history of comparative literature that saw it dwelling most insistently on the characteristics of its chosen object was also the moment at which it radiated outward, under the loose name of ‘theory,’ its strongest interdisciplinary energies.⁶⁷

The new poetics of verbal art, encompassing both folklore and literature, pledged absolute loyalty to the study of linguistics; Jakobson, in his later work, would even demand that poetics become a subfield of that discipline.⁶⁸ In this sense, the analogy between literature and language played an important role in the provisional bracketing of the social, which allowed the development of literary studies as an autonomous discipline.⁶⁹ On the other hand, as we mentioned earlier, Tynianov and Eikhenbaum insistently placed literature in the context of history and society; the inquiry into folklore also went alongside the study of society. In this light, the analogy between literature and language buttresses a view of literature as a system or praxis, affecting—and reciprocally affected by—other systems within culture, rather than as a self-contained, autonomous whole.

It is perhaps a timely reminder that the original deployment of the modern term poetics occurred in the phrase Historical Poetics and that it was intended as a quintessentially comparative venture. Veselovsky understood poetics as a comparative and a historical discipline which, in addition to uncovering the constructed-ness of art, places its principles of construction within a historical series, i.e., relates it both to antecedent works and to changing social forms. The result was a new kind of literary history—one that focused not on authors or poetic schools, but on the evolution of literary forms—as well as a new kind of historicism that considers the literary domain within the unity of a historically specific culture, and beyond, within a global network of dialogically-interlinked cultures.

4. PRACTICING HISTORICAL POETICS

Historical Poetics brings together the study of the historicity of artistic forms and theoretical reflection on cultural continuity and change. Maintaining the ties between philosophy, philology, and history established in nineteenth-century European academy, it has sought to construct a theory of verbal art that would be true both to the specificity of its medium and to the realities of its existence in the social world. In this volume, we privilege a particular aspect of Historical Poetics—its engagement with deep time, cultural memory, and of the longue durée of artistic forms. For this reason, this volume brings together Classicists, comparatists, and Russianists, who join forces to ask the following questions: What does it mean to study literary form as a historical phenomenon today? Can literary studies be reinvigorated by a closer rapprochement with history, without jettisoning literature’s specificity? What aid can different strands in the critical tradition of Historical Poetics provide to such an inquiry?

Each of the four parts of the book juxtaposes classical works in Russian Historical Poetics that have never before appeared in translation (Chapters 1, 5, 9, 13, 14) with new studies, focusing on ancient (Chapter 3, 6, 10, 15) and modern (Chapters 4, 7, 12, 16) literatures. Furthermore, the contributions of Victoria Somoff, Ilya Vinitsky, and Robert Bird specifically comment on the theoretical import of the newly translated works, re-contextualizing them in contemporary scholarly discourses. The volume thus instantiates a dialogue between the ancients and the moderns, brought together on the theoretical common ground of Historical Poetics. The choice of national traditions and theoretical concerns by no means exhausts or delimits the possibilities opened by this paradigm. We anticipate further conversations about the method and its applications, which would draw scholars working in other fields and on other problems.

Newly translated classics are prefaced by short introductions. In what follows, we provide a summary of the new studies included in the volume, and a clarification of its overall structure.

The first part of the volume, Questioning the Historical, Envisioning a Poetics, comprises four chapters, which explore the various meanings of historically-minded inquiry into literature. The classic piece From the Introduction to Historical Poetics represents Veselovsky’s tentative attempt to theorize literary and cultural evolution, as he saw them in the 1890s. While Victoria Somoff’s and Leslie Kurke’s contributions place the tradition of Historical Poetics in dialogue with New Historicism, Boris Maslov relates Veselovsky’s historical vision to three non-contextualist approaches to verbal art. Whereas Kurke puts forward an inclusive historicist hermeneutics, both Somoff and Maslov pose the question of the inherent limits of historicization.

In Chapter 2, Victoria Somoff confronts a paradox in Veselovsky’s theory of the persistence of forms, which appears to exclude the possibility of new forms arising. Juxtaposing Veselovsky’s uncomfortably extreme view on artistic innovation and Stephen Greenblatt’s approach to the processes of individual self-fashioning in the Renaissance, Somoff presents a critique of a presumption shared by the two critical paradigms that, inspired by linguistics, chose to prioritize system (or langue) over individual agency (parole). Contesting the primacy of the historical demand, Somoff argues for a need to theorize the phenomenon of forgetting the old form at the moment when a new form appears. From this perspective, she considers Veselovsky’s discussion of the emergence of rhyme from within syntactic parallelism and the rise of representation of consciousness as a quintessential non-referential element in Realist narration. In both cases, the oblivion of an old form and the rise of the new result from a fundamental shift in perception that occurs within the order of verbal creativity and does not lend itself to a historical-deterministic explanation.

In Chapter 3, Leslie Kurke states the need to extend the (neo-)positivist hermeneutic paradigm in a way that would fruitfully combine the insights of New Historicism and Historical Poetics. Focusing on a specific philological problem (a possible intertextual link between Pindar’s Pythian 11 and Aeschylus’s Oresteia), Kurke reveals deep-seated divergences between the poetics of choral poetry (Pindar’s victory odes) and Attic tragedy. To achieve this major objective of a historical conceptualization of genre, she distinguishes between three kinds of historicist hermeneutics: one pertaining to the level of political histoire événementielle, the other (following Veselovsky and Jameson) considering genres as socio-symbolic forms, and the third (following Tynianov) considering these genres’ different orientations with respect to a proximate cultural system, that of religion.

Concluding Part I, Boris Maslov’s contribution comments on three of Veselovsky’s theoretical insights (pertaining to genre theory, motif migration, and the socio-psychological nature of style), each time considering them in light of more recent theoretical developments. In particular, the perspective of Michael Silverstein’s linguistic anthropology helps to shed light on cross-culturally dispersed varieties of text (corresponding to the familiar division between epic, drama, and lyric), thus delimiting and adumbrating the domain of the properly historical consideration of genre. The second case study focuses on different theorizations of inherited elements of discourse (motif, topos) in Veselovsky and Curtius. Finally, the issue of a worldview’s formal correlates, important in Soviet Marxist stylistics, is tackled with reference to the use of free indirect discourse in Pushkin’s Bronze Horseman.

Part II, The Life of Forms: Tradition, Memory, Regeneration, is dedicated to theoretical problems central to Historical Poetics: cultural continuity and change, mechanisms of tradition and their historicity, and the role literature plays in rendering tradition possible, dynamic, and fraught with meaning. Adopting three different approaches, Nina Braginskaya, Michael Kunichika, and Ilya Kliger confront the theoretical task of re-conceptualizing literary history as history not of literature but one that is distinctive of literature’s intrinsic mechanisms. The short piece on the "The Oresteia in the Odyssey" by Olga Freidenberg encapsulates her vision of formal evolution of plots as dictated by semiotic mechanisms observed in ancient cultures.

Extrapolating from Bakhtin, Kliger outlines a theory of the persistence of literary form under the conditions of modernity. Braginskaya describes a dynamic whereby new artistic forms can arise in traditional cultures. Finally, Kunichika discusses the ways in which memory, tradition, and oblivion are brought into a dialogue in the highly self-conscious medium of Russian Romantic lyric. These chapters employ different methodologies—meta-theoretical, typological-comparatist, and literary-hermeneutic—displaying different facets of Historical Poetics as a vital and evolving critical paradigm.

In Chapter 6, Braginskaya turns to premodern traditional cultures to ask a question that was already raised, as a paradox, in Chapter 2: how can new forms arise within a self-consciously traditional culture? Tradition, as Braginskaya shows, has its own interior motor of innovation. It consists in the practices of commentary, often focused on sacred texts central to the given culture and ostensibly aimed at elucidating their true meaning. As the linguistic idiom of the Scriptures grows out of sync with the spoken language and their doctrinal import is increasingly subject to uncertainty and disputation, the task of interpreting them generates a variety of new kinds of discourse. To make sense of the genesis of artistic forms in a traditional society, we therefore need a historical poetics of commentary. Based on a broad survey of diverse kinds of ethnographic and literary evidence, Braginskaya demonstrates that commentary, in different cultural environments, can give rise to genres of dramatic performance, philosophical inquiry, and fictional storytelling. In particular, revisiting Veselovsky’s insights on the origins of theater, Braginskaya points to the cross-cultural diffusion of the hybrid proto-dramatic form that combines an archaic and obscure core with a colloquial and interpretive supplement. In the case of philosophy and narrative, the canonical texts similarly tend to sprout explanatory satellites, which may develop into fictional narratives (in the case of Joseph and Aseneth, an apocryphos that anticipates the Hellenistic novel) or new conceptual syntheses (e.g., Neoplatonism as exegesis of the