Aleksandr Veselovskii's Historical Poetics: Genre in Historical Poetics

I

In the second half of the twentieth century, certain Russian literary theorists and aspects of their thinking have become familiar and even influential in the West. First the Russian formalists were discovered, interpreted, and translated. More recently, a steady flow of Bakhtinian works has reached the West. Yet any attempts to summarize Russian theory have shown that its various component ideas do not easily fit into a consistent pattern, even when these ideas have been approached in a search for consistency, as happened when structuralism began to lose its grip on the theoretical mind. In his book Structuralism in Literature, written to open up new poststructuralist perspectives, Robert Scholes dedicated the greater part of chapter four ("Towards a Structuralist Poetics of Fiction") to Russia, where he located the source of "considering literature as a self-regulated system," ¹ and went even further in his statement that "there is hardly anything in current Anglo-American thinking about fictional form that has not been touched on by the formalists and their structuralist descendants" (77).

Paradoxically, Russian theoretical ideas have persistently been quoted out of their own system and context, even when systematic appraisal is the goal. All attempts to reconstruct them are memorable for their failure. A naive logic deduced from the formalists' precedence encouraged a tendency to enlist each Russian theoretician whose works were discovered in the West later on as another formalist. In due course this happened to Vladimir Propp and Mikhail Bakhtin. Time passed before a simple truth revealed itself: that Propp could be classified as a formalist only in a very loose sense, while Bakhtin remained their convinced opponent, who as early as 1924 rejected the formal method as a "material aesthetics" and dubbed its creators "specificators."

And indeed "specificators" they were in the sense that the formal method began with an effort to resurrect and specify the word in its poetic quality, which almost half a century later led Roman Jakobson to single out a poetic function among other speech functions. At an early stage of the formal method, specification shaped itself as an urge to fence off a territory owned and dominated by students of literature. In 1921, opening his book on Velimir Khlebnikov, Jakobson drew an epoch-making distinction between literature and literariness ("that which makes of a given work a work of literature") and expressed his regret that "literary scholars up to now have often behaved like policemen who, in the course of arresting a particular person, would pick up, just in case, everybody and anybody who happened to be in the apartment, as well as people who happened to be passing on the street." ²

Six years later the same idea was echoed by Iurii Tynianov, who turned to a spatial metaphor: "Within the cultural disciplines literary history still retains the status of a colonial territory. On the one hand, individualistic psychologism dominates it to a significant extent, particularly in the West, unjustifiably replacing the problem of literature with the question of the author's psychology, while the problem of literary evolution becomes the problem of the genesis of literary phenomena." ³

The source both of an idea and of a metaphor lay beyond the formal method--in the passage opening the "Introduction to Historical Poetics" published by Aleksandr Veselovskii in 1893. "The history of literature calls to mind a geographic territory, which international law has consecrated as res nullius and where only the historian of culture and aesthete, the man of erudition and the seeker of universal ideas travel in order to hunt. Each bears forth from this territory what he is able to . . . ." The metaphor was memorably followed by the definition given to the history of literature as "the history of public thought poetically experienced in images and embodied in forms." But it is often disregarded that the definition of the whole domain served Veselovskii only as a pretext to specify within the transparent boundaries...