V. V. Vinogradov and the Theory of Literary Language in the First Third of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

1. The years 1928 and 1929 were a period of stocktaking and assessment of what had been Soviet poetics' stormiest decade. One after another, books appeared by all its foremost theoreticians of literature—Viktor Zhirmunskii's Problems of the Theory of Literature [Voprosy teorii literatury] in 1928, Iurii Tynianov's Archaists and Innovators [Arkhaisty i novatory] in 1929, and Boris Tomashevskii's On Verse [O stikhe], also in 1929. Viktor Shklovskii had been the first to look back at the recent past with his Theory of Prose [Teoriia prozy], published in 1925; it appeared again in a second edition in 1929, joining the general chorus. Tomashevskii's Theory of Literature. Poetics [Teoriia literatury. Poetika], which went through six editions between 1925 and 1931, also summarized the achievements of the preceding decade. Its author wanted the book to be "simply Aristotle's old theory of literature," but Boris Eikhenbaum later characterized it as "an attempt at uniting all theoretical problems" in "a book of inventory, a list of household effects."1 All these works were collections of articles, but each of them offered a unified conception of prose or poetry—or both.