Sergei Tret’iakov Between Literary Positivism and the Pragmatic Turn

Abstract

This article compares Soviet factography (“Literature of Fact”) and logical positivism, arguing that Soviet worker-correspondents’ struggle with the deformation of the facts of socialist life within literature is to be understood as a literary positivism, akin to logical positivism’s struggle with incorrect language use and the metaphysical questions arising. In the late 1920s, factography’s leader Sergei Tret’iakov arrived at a pragmatic turn in his practice of “operative factography”, similar to what occurred later in philosophy of language. Analyzing this self-reflexive and self-critical literary practice from the perspectives of narratology and post-formalist micro-sociology, it is proposed that estrangement (“ostranenie”) is intrinsic to the very act of utterance.