The Russian debate on narrative

Abstract Russian scholars made decisive contributions to twentieth-century Western literary theory. New Criticism, structuralism, reader-response theory, various types of post-structuralism, and, above all, theories of the novel and narratology would all be unthinkable without the influence, direct or indirect, of the Russian formalists and Bakhtin. Their work has also contributed greatly to the development of Western folkoristics and anthropology. Indeed, it has sometimes been said that the most important contributions of Western theory have been a working-out, an extension, and a critique of the implications, sometimes barely noticed at the time, of Russian formalist premisses.