“Somehow, I Wasn’t Drawn into The Editorial Office of Novyi Mir”: Digital Approaches to the Literary Environment of Late Socialist Journals

Abstract

Boris Eikhenbaum’s 1927 essay on the literary environment (literaturnyi byt) marks an important conceptual turning point in the formalist approach to the study of literature, shifting the focus from immanent analysis of the text to what he called “literature’s social mode of being.” This article revisits Eikhenbaum’s approach as a point of departure for the study of late socialist literature. It explores literary periodicals in the 1960s through the lens of a bibliographical dataset which was developed as part of the digital humanities project Soviet Journals Reconnected.11The digital humanities project Soviet Journals Reconnected was developed during a year-long fellowship at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton and I am indebted to Natalia Ermolaev, Jean Bauer, Miranda Marraccini, Tom Mazanec, and Claude Willan for their support and feedback. I would like to thank Marijeta Bozovic for including me in this special issue and the two anonymous reviewers from Russian Literature for their suggestions. This project was made possible by Indiana University Library’s generous agreement to share the raw data of the digitized ‘Letopis’ zhurnal’nykh statei’. Applied to this data, quantitative methods reveal the emergence of centrifugal forces and a fragmented mode of literary production during this period. By providing a detailed discussion and documentation of computational methods and putting them into a dialogue with studies of the literary environment in the vein of Eikhenbaum, this article highlights the connections and potential research uses of digital humanities approaches for the Slavic field.