Reviewed by Anne Dwyer
This review was originally published in the Slavic and East European Journal 65:1 (2021) and is reprinted here by permission of the SEEJ editorial office.
It is difficult to imagine a serious literary discussion among Slavists that would not eventually invoke the name of Yuri Tynianov (1894-1943). And yet, in notable contrast to his flashier Russian Formalist colleague Viktor Shklovsky, Tynianov’s writings have still been only spottily translated into English. Many of Tynianov’s ideas—especially but not only concerning parody, literary evolution, and the dynamism of center and periphery—have lost none of their currency today. The belated arrival of such a careful and well annotated translation is worth celebrating. Slavists should welcome this opportunity to share more than snippets and anthologized essays by this major twentieth-century thinker with students and Anglophone colleagues in literary, film, and cultural studies.
For readers of Russian, Tynianov’s scholarly work is best encapsulated by the posthumous 1977 collection Poetics, History of Literature, Cinema (known in Russian by the abbreviation PILK). The editors, Evgeny Toddes, Aleksandr Chudakov and Marietta Chudakova, provide annotations that rival the author’s own writing in insight, as well as in ideological tight-rope-walking, a point made by this volume’s editor-translators Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko. Permanent Evolution includes about one third of PILK: there are the “greatest hits,” including such conceptually rich essays as the early “Dostoevsky and Gogol (Toward a Theory of Parody),” the later “Literary Fact,” “Interlude,” and “On Literary Evolution,” along with writings on cinema. The translators also tackle a few lesser-known works and venture outside the boundaries of PILK with short essays on Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky, as well as the important “Problems of the Study of Literature and Language,” the theses Tynianov co-authored with Roman Jakobson during his visit to Prague in 1928, and which are often identified as the last salvo of Russian Formalism.
Permanent Evolution highlights Tynianov as a historical thinker—and not one oriented toward progress or teleology. Morse and Redko discuss Tynianov’s lexicon in the translators’ introduction, offering the noun “shift” (smena) as one example of how a recurring key term may carry multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings: smena conveys a sense of space and time, referring both to change/alteration and to a length of time; the accompanying verb (smeshchat’/smestit’) can mean to displace/supplant while also invoking a temporal succession. Daria Khitrova’s introduction further underscores the spatial organization of Tynianov’s historical thought, outlining “an evolution that does not move along the axis of time; it is a redistribution of values, a geographic approach to history” (13). Once the reader notices Tynianov’s geographic thinking, it is hard to unsee: functions of literary texts “migrate” (78) in “The Ode as an Oratorical Genre”; the spatial device of the close-up contributes to the specificity of cinematic time in “Foundations of Film” (250). Then then there is the opening to “On Literary Evolution”: “Among the disciplines that study culture, literary history continues to languish in the position of a colonial territory” (267). Tynianov understands both scholarship and the literary field itself as dynamic—full of breaches and invasions of established epistemological and aesthetic systems.
Khitrova’s introduction—polemical in the spirit of Russian Formalism—makes a strong case against the instrumentalization of literary theory; the volume buttresses the significance of Tynianov’s writing for literary and cultural history. The essays—which form a remarkably coherent whole—are rather a way of thinking through a series of dynamic literary questions. Tynianov’s analysis always remains rooted in the details of literary language; it is by attending to the literary text and the literary “function” that Tynianov is able to explore literature’s richborders with its “many neighboring series” (276).
One of the pleasant surprises of this volume is the inclusion of the early study “Tiutchev and Heine” (1920/21). The essay places a high premium on the place of translation in literary evolution, perhaps a nod by our editor-translators to take their work seriously, too. (It is, indeed, remarkable that an essay that analyzes the “poetic texture” of German and Russian verse would hold up so well in English!) Tynianov argues here against a straightforward model of literary influence, according to which nineteenth-century Russian poets simply adopted Western models. Instead, he distinguishes between “tradition” (the immanent laws of literary development within a single literary system) and “genesis,” or the impulses that come from the outside only to be reworked by the tradition: “The genesis of literary phenomena belongs to the transient realm of crossings between languages and between literatures, whereas tradition is rule-bound and circumscribed by a given national literature.” Even in such a specific study, Tynianov makes broader theoretical claims about the borderlands and the interstices where culture percolates and changes—and about the reabsorption and appropriation of these elements by the broader system. In this essay, Tynianov dwells on actual translations from one language into another; elsewhere the “foreign” influence is more purely systemic, as when extra-literary genres move in on the existing literary system and change the valence of the literary fact.
As concerns the translation, this English-language Tynianov is certainly less stodgy than his predecessors. He enjoys active verbs and makes any number of small jokes and sly remarks. But Morse and Redko’s lighter tone is not overdone and never undercuts the seriousness of Tynianov’s ideas. The translators are careful to retain and explain some of Tynianov’s more cumbersome neologisms. The apparatus includes a glossary of names and key terms; notes are thorough but not overwhelming; footnotes often direct the reader’s attention to themes and concepts that recur in multiple essays. Herein perhaps lies the real promise of this volume. For the first time, the Anglophone reader will be able to trace the development of some of Tynianov’s key concepts over the short but intense decade of the 1920s. With any luck, these ideas will resonate for new readers in the 2020s much as the Pushkin era resonated for Tynianov himself.
Tynianov. Yuri. Permanent Evolution. Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film. Translated and edited by Ainsley Morse and Philip Redko. Academic Studies Press, 2019.
Anne Dwyer is Associate Professor of German and Russian at Pomona College. She is the translator, from German, of Oksana Bulgakowa, Sergei Eisenstein: A Biography (Potemkin Press, 2001).