Between practice and theory – the case of the Russian avant-garde

Abstract

The article is concerned with Russian avant-garde literature and modern literary theory in its „heroic” period between World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917. It analyzes selected works by and biographies of the Russian Futurists and the literary theorists who sympathized with them, i.e. the founders of the so-called Russian formalist school gathered in OPOYAZ („Society for the Study of Poetic Language”) in St. Petersburg and Moscow Linguistic Circle in Moscow. The article shows that the revolution in art which they proclaimed and the resulting negation of the academic and literary tradition (especially the rejection of Russian symbolism) was rather superfi cial. It was a consequence of a generational change on the Russian literary scene as well as in the modernist literary studies.