Preface: Data-Driven Formalism

Abstract

The idea of producing a special volume of hitherto untranslated texts by Russian formalists owes its existence to a newly awakened interest in quantification in the (digital) literary studies. A first indication of this was the conference in Stanford in 2015, entitled »Russian Formalism and the Digital Humanities«. The reason for this interest is simple: with the manifold practices developed in the digital literary studies in the past decade, we are now able to operationalise and automatise formalist research ideas, to reproduce them, to scale them up and to further develop methods along those lines. In this volume, we present three articles by Russian scholars, Muscovite scholars, to be precise. Boris I. Yarkho (1889–1942), Mikhail L. Gasparov (1935–2005) and Maksim I. Shapir (1962–2006) come from different periods representing three generations of Russian formalism, and their works are strongly intertwined. As is well known, there was a strong tradition of formal literary studies in Russia in the 20th century (Kizhner et al. 2018). But there were not so many quantitative works – except, of course, in verse studies, which were always based on statistics and calculations (Bely 1910, Shengeli 1923, Tomashevsky 1959, Rudnev 1968, Bayevsky 1972, Zhirmunsky 1975, Shapir 1994, Taranovsky 2010, Kelih 2008). Against this backdrop, the work of Yarkho stands out. Involving modern statistics in literary studies began with Kolmogorov only years later; Yarkho relied on his own statistical handbooks to find his way.