Literary Criticism and Literary Theories

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century the dominant tendency in Russian literary criticism was towards the so-called “social” or “civic” criticism, towards estimating literary works by their social content and appeal. The beginning of Formalism as a school dates from the first years of the War, when a group of young students of literature organized in Petrograd the so-called Association for the Study of Poetical Language which issued its non-periodical publication. The extreme Formalists not only ban altogether the element of contents in the usual sense, and study the naked forms of literary works, but they have a tendency to deny all causal connection between literary facts and other facts that co-exist with them. Boris Eichenbaum denies just as emphatically all causal connection between art on one hand, and life, social environment, etc., on the other. Doubtless some of the Formalists, and especially Eichenbaum, realized the insufficiency, narrowness and futility of the purely formalistic method.