The Polish Formalist School and Russian Formalism by Andrzej Karcz (review)

Abstract

112 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 200g As might be expected, attention ispaid to the full range of theKharmsian oeuvre:prose stories (mini- and longer), poetry, dramatic works, children's writing, lettersand notebooks. Kharms isdiscussed in relation to such themes (inaddition to the absurd) as: anarchism, arithmetic, art (Duchamp, Malevich, Zal'tsman and others), the body (male and female), dandyism, Detgiz, food, the 'image', the ludic,music, political satire, pseudonyms, religion, rhythmics, semantics and (modes of) transport.Among the figures discussed in compari son with, or in relation to, Kharms, we find: Gogol', Kafka, Meyrink, Sukhovo-Kobylin and Lev Tolstoi ? as well as the obvious OBERIU adher ents and a number of more extraneous minor personalities or groupings (such as 'Nepokoi') of the late avant-garde period in Soviet Russian culture. Keener readers will not fail to notice the underlying (or indeed at times surface) current of dispute persisting within the ranks of oberiutovedenie. There is, perhaps inevitably, a considerable degree of both overlap and unevenness within the contributions taken as a whole, and the volume may be said to incorporate certain editorial infelicitiesand peculiarities. Neverthe less, this ample collection certainly does include a number of valuable and interesting items and it is likely to represent a significant landmark in the now burgeoning field ofOBERIU scholarship. School of Modern Languages ? Russian Neil Cornwell Universityof Bristol Karcz, Andrzej. The Polish Formalist School andRussian Formalism.University of Rochester Press and Jagiellonian University Press, Rochester, NY and Krakow, 2002. 203 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?50.00: $70.00. This book is organized into four chapters, inwhich the author traces the development of Polish Formalism from its 'Anticipations' in chapter one to its integration as a scholarly method in chapter four. Chapters two and three are devoted to investigations of critical approaches employed by the founder of Polish formalism, Kazimierz Woycicki, and the critic Manfred Kridl respectively. Karcz begins with an overview of post-positivist critical effortssuch as those ofMaksymilian Kawczyriski, afterwhich he traces the emergence and devel opment of Polish formalism to the publications by Kazimierz Budzyk and Maria Rzeuszka in the late 1940swhen 'the devastations of thewar and the post-war imposition of communist rule in Poland cut short the existence of the school' (p. 181). From this brief overview it becomes apparent that Russian Formalism plays less of a role than the tide of thebook would suggest. Instead of offering a comparative study of two twentieth-century critical schools in different countries, Karcz's book investigates the shift in Polish literary criticism from positivism and its 'utter subordination [...] to the issues of national identity, social ideology, biographism, and psychology' (p. 21) to the objective, scien tificunderstanding of literary texts thatmarks formalist criticism.The various evolutionary steps that the emerging Polish formalistmethod underwent, bear at times a striking resemblance to the Russian Formalist method, as Karcz REVIEWS 113 points out. However, as his study unfolds, Karcz offers littledetail on the development of formalism inRussia (see below). The book's strongest assets are Karcz's insightfulanalyses of the critical works byWoycicki and Kridl. Without a doubt they constitute a valuable addition to the discussion of the history of Polish criticism in the twentieth century. For example: Karcz introduces the evolution ofWoycicki's critical thoughtwith great care, tracing itfrom itspedagogically motivated beginnings (Woycicki was a school teacher looking for a useable method to relate litera ture to his pupils) to itsmost sophisticated development inworks such as Jednosc stylowa utworu poetyckiego' (1914) or 'Z pogranicza gramatyki i stylistiki' (1922). One would have hoped to read more of Karcz's investigation into the evolution of Polish formalistmethods on itsown terms, along with a deeper analysis of concrete textual examples by the critics he discusses, particularly Woycicki. The profiling of these ideas against the backdrop of Russian Formalism could have been more focused and perhaps even reserved for passages where they are absolutely pertinent: in the discussion ofManfred Kridl's later studies and in chapter four, for example. Instead, Karcz gets somewhat mired, particularly in the Woycicki chapter, in his attempt to demonstrate that the Polish school emerged as an indepen dent evolutionary step inPolish critical thought, rather than under the influ ence of Russian Formalism. This perhaps...