The Fate of Russian Formalism (Russian Formalism as Understood by Foreign Critics)

The history and theory of Russian Formalism began to attract the attention of Western literary scholars as early as the 1920s. Western journals at that time published descriptive articles by Russian scholars such as Viktor Zhirmunskii, Boris Tomashevskii, A.N. Voznesenskii, and Nina Gourfinkel who were close to the Formalist movement. The works on Russian Formalism published in the 1930s and 40s and the early 1950s such as the articles by Manfred Kridl and William Harkins were also of a descriptive nature. However, following the appearance of Rene Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature, a work widely known in the West which confirmed its authors' close ties to Formalist and Structuralist methodology, interest in the Russian Formalist school of the 1920s began to grow sharply. Major studies devoted to an investigation of the history and theory of this critical movement began to appear. Among such works were two which in our view exemplify the attitude of Western literary scholarship toward Russian...