Aleksandr Veselovskii's Historical Poetics: Genre in Historical Poetics

Abstract

discovered, interpreted, and translated. More recently, a steady flow of Bakhtinian works has reached the West. Yet any attempts to summarize Russian theory have shown that its various component ideas do not easily fit into a consistent pattern, even when these ideas have been approached in a search for consistency, as happened when structuralism began to lose its grip on the theoretical mind. In his book Structuralism in Literature, written to open up new poststructuralist perspectives, Robert Scholes dedicated the greater part of chapter four (Towards a Structuralist Poetics of Fiction) to Russia, where he located the source of considering literature as a self-regulated system,1 and went even further in his statement that there is hardly anything in current Anglo American thinking about fictional form that has not been touched on by the formalists and their structuralist descendants (77). Paradoxically, Russian theoretical ideas have persistently been quoted out of their own system and context, even when systematic appraisal is the goal. All attempts to reconstruct them are memorable for their failure. A naive logic deduced from the formalists' precedence encour aged a tendency to enlist each Russian theoretician whose works were discovered in the West later on as another formalist. In due course this happened to Vladimir Propp and Mikhail Bakhtin. Time passed before a simple truth revealed itself: that Propp could be classified as a formalist only in a very loose sense, while Bakhtin remained their convinced opponent, who as early as 1924 rejected the formal method as a material aesthetics and dubbed its creators specificators. And indeed specificators they were in the sense that the formal method began with an effort to resurrect and specify the word in its poetic quality, which almost half a century later led Roman Jakobson to single out a poetic function among other speech functions. At an early