Critical Theory in Russia and the West by Renfrew Alastair; Tihanov Galin;

Author:Renfrew, Alastair; Tihanov, Galin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Interdisciplinary Studies
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Similarly in her diary of 1927, Lidiia Ginzburg, the literary critic and younger disciple of Tynianov and Shklovsky, observed: ‘The merry times of laying bare the device have passed (leaving us a real writer – Shklovsky). Now is the time when one has to hide the device as far as one can’ (Ginzburg 1989: 59). The practice of aesthetic estrangement had become politically suspect already by the late 1920s; by 1930, it had turned into an intellectual crime. In 1930, Shklovsky renounced Formalism in a public declaration published in Literaturnaia Gazeta under the title ‘A Monument to a Scientific Error’. The genre of this declaration is a peculiar hybrid of the tamed manifesto and the ambiguous parable, with foreign novelistic analogies. To explain his scientific error, Shklovsky uses his favourite device of paradoxical parallelisms. He refers to Jules Romains’s novel Donogoo Tonga about a city built by mistake where the residents decide to erect a monument to scientific error. After a tactical display of quotes from Engels, he presents the Formalists not as ideological enemies of the Soviet Marxists but as absent-minded scientists who built their theory of non-tendentious literary science in error like that imaginary novelistic city. Shklovsky, a veteran of World War I, manipulates the military metaphors frequently used in Soviet public discourse, only instead of pursuing an ideological civil war between those who are with us and those who are against us, Shklovsky speaks about the ‘neutralized areas of the front’, which he equates with non-tendentious art [nenapravlennoe iskusstvo] and criticism. While engaging and estranging the militaristic rhetoric of the Soviet literary discourse of the late 1920s, Shklovsky vows to move forward from the ‘Linnaean’ typology of literary science to a Darwinian-Marxist evolutionary dialectics. Yet instead of practicing the Marxist sociological method, he follows Tynianov’s theory of cultural evolution and his own practice of Lobachevskian parallelisms.

Once again, the text of the declaration can be read as an ambivalent parable of a conditional surrender. ‘A Monument to a Scientific Error’ follows the movement of the knight and presents an oblique apology for the same ‘third factory’ of the ‘non-tendentious’ sphere of critical inquiry: ‘I do not wish to be a monument to my own error’, writes the seemingly repentant Formalist critic. One is struck by the fact that the monument to a scientific error is a very Shklovskian monument strategically positioned on the side roads of history. Is it possible that Shklovsky is actually erecting a monument to Formalism in disguise while covering it up with a few politically correct ready-mades, just like the Soviet ‘Monument to Liberty’ covered up the statue of the tsar?

Shklovsky’s fellow Formalists, Tynianov and Eikhenbaum, did not treat this ‘monument to scientific error’ as treason, but as a survival tactic. The textual ambivalences of the declaration did not escape them. Neither did they escape the attention of Shklovsky’s Marxist attackers. M. Gel’fand published a harsh critique of Shklovsky’s supposed apology in his essay ‘The Declaration of King Midas, or what Happened to Viktor Shklovsky’ (1930).

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