A Writer's Handbook

Abstract

OCTOBER 118, Fall 2006, pp. 78–94. © 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Written by Nikolai Chuzhak as an introduction to the 1929 collection The Literature of Fact: The First Anthology of Documents by the Workers of LEF, “A Writer’s Handbook” is a messy and unsystematic piece of writing: its rhetorical structure is circular and repetitive, its idioms are bizarre and capricious, its style is aggravatingly desultory, and its numerous contemporary references are glib yet opaque. All of this gives the impression of a thoroughly occasional and improvised text. This very ephemerality is indeed the primary lesson of the “Handbook,” a user’s guide with no intention of reducing its subject to a series of axiological tenets, but which instead provides only probative “points of orientation” to serve as theoretical impulses for a factographic practice which, as it announces about itself, must proceed inductively. If factography’s pragmatist epistemology only recognizes knowledge that is synthesized through its own effectuation, an introduction to its mutable methodology must by nature be fugitive and, to use one of Chuzhak’s favorite words, provisional. Chuzhak characterizes the historical logic that subtends this mutability as the “dialectic of devices.” It is a dialectic that has two sources in Russian Formalist thought: first and most obvious is Viktor Shklovsky’s understanding of aesthetic form as a dynamic operation— “art as device,” rather than art as a stable ontic category; equally influential upon the “Handbook” is Iurii Tynianov’s understanding of genre and medium as precipitates of the metabolic exchange between the instrumental forms of everyday communication and the canons of autonomous literary-aesthetic discourse. Like Tynianov, Chuzhak proposes here that aesthetic evolution be conceived as a ceaseless exchange between the two systems of quotidian discourse and major canonical forms. Although prose, for example, was once situated outside the canon because of its mundane character, with the exhaustion and automatization of other aesthetic forms that were previously dominant (such as the lyric), in the eighteenth century, it came to be recognized as a major literary form, and the genre of the novel was born. When this epic form, whose function in the nineteenth century was to interpellate