The Word Made Self: Russian Writing on Language, 1860–1930 (review)

The Word Made Self examines the discourse on language in Russian intellectual thought between 1860 and 1930, focusing on the writings of thinkers who have long deserved closer attention in the field of language studies: the linguist Aleksandr Potebnia, the philosophers Gustav Shpet and Aleksei Losev, and the theologians Sergei Bulgakov and Pavel Florenskii. In addition to demonstrating the influence of this tradition on the ideas and writing of figures far more familiar to students of Russian modernism—including Andrei Bely, Velimir Khlebnikov, Viktor Shklovskii, Lev Vygotskii, Valentin Voloshinov, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Roman Jakobson—Seifrid shows how this seemingly diverse group of thinkers were united in their investigation of language by a common concern for the role of language in the formation and conceptualization of the self, and how this concern can be traced through the more well-known trajectories of the philosophy of language not only in twentieth-century Russian thought, but also in the works of seminal Western thinkers, including Hegel, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Wittgenstein.

Seifrid begins the first chapter ("Potebnia and the Revival of Russian Thought about Language") with an eloquent synopsis of early contributions to the philosophy of language from the classical and premodern Russian traditions, then turns to the thought of Aleksandr Potebnia, arguably the first Russian to write seriously and directly about the nature of language. True to his main thesis with regard to lineages, Seifrid traces two of Potebnia's most important ideas, that of "inner form" and the "word" as discourse incarnate, back through Humboldt to the thought of classical philosophers (especially Philo) and the Church fathers, on the one hand, while at the same time demonstrating the uniquely Russian strain, which stands out not only on account of its Orthodox underpinnings, but because of its close identification of logos with self-consciousness—a link detectable "throughout centuries of Russian culture" (45).

Seifrid proceeds, in chapter two ("Russia's Culture of Logos in the Early Twentieth Century"), to trace the influence of Potebnia's thinking on language and self through the works of Russian symbolists, acmeists, and Futurists, thereby offering an altogether fresh and insightful reading of texts more familiar to students of modernism and showing in particular how Potebnia's redirection of focus in the discourse on language from "language" to "word," together with his identification of the latter with notions of self, essentially laid the foundation for the greater part of the revolutionary thought on language that came out of Russia in the 1910s and 1920s. We see, for instance, how the idea of the "inner form" advanced by Potebnia and Humboldt before him informs Bely's belief that the word is "the only reality of which we have a sure grasp, an island of ontological certitude in an ocean of hypothesis and ambiguity" (61). We see Potebnia's influence in Khlebnikov's treatment of language as "an organism, a kind of self in its own right" and "a necessary complement to, or even condition of, the self" (67). And we see it in the revolutionary strivings, on the part of both Futurists and Bolsheviks, toward the creation of a universal tongue, replacing the petrified language of the quotidian with one that reflects "pure meaning." Even the Russian formalists, Seifrid argues, despite their vocal opposition to "Potebnia-ism," were more beholden to Potebnia's ideas than they let on. For all their rejection of his ideas of "thinking in images" and "inner form," they still perceived the "word" in terms of Logos (most famously in Viktor Shklovskii's "Resurrection of the Word") and at least indirectly accepted a personified vision the word in their discussions of the skaz narrator and literary heroes.

Seifrid opens chapter three ("Orthodox Essentialism and Its Dialogue with Modern Thought") by drawing a parallel between the better known religious renaissance that took place in fin de siècle Russia with a lesser-appreciated boom in thought and writing devoted to language. Here and...