The theoretical innovation of V. N. Peretz in the field of methodology for studying the history of literature. To the 150th anniversary of the birth of the researcher

Abstract

The article analyzes the methodological views of the academician V. N. Peretz, an outstanding Russian researcher and teacher. Refusing to follow the canons of the cultural-historical school of Russian literary criticism, in his works “From Lectures on the Methodology of the History of Russian Literature” (Kiev, 1914) and “A Brief Essay on the Methodology of the History of Russian Literature” (Petrograd, 1922) the researcher tried to find new approaches to the analysis of literary works. He believed that “the history of literature examines and studies the formal side of the works of verbal creativity, its evolution, leaving the cultural historian to study the content, the ideological side of the monuments of the past as such.” Peretz’s judgments were similar to those adopted by the followers of the OPOYAZ school (The Society for the Study of Poetic Language), and even had a certain influence on the development of formalism at the initial stage. This circumstance was noted by such researchers close to this research community as V. M. Zhirmunsky and its active members like Roman Jakobson. The relationship of Peretz’s theoretical positions with the methods of the Russian formalist school caused criticism from the followers of “Marxist” methodology in the 1920s. In the disputes between the formalists and the “Marxists”, Peretz clearly sympathized with the former believing that they were trying to “resurrect philology.” Peretz himself characterized his “Methodology” as “not Marxist” and had faint hopes for the possibility of its publication, although he continued to work on it. However, he never finished and published the extended version. His “Short Sketch” was reprinted twice abroad before being printed again in his homeland in 2010, 88 years after the first edition.