Boris Eikhenbaum: Voices of a Russian Formalist.

Rollberg, Peter

The theoretical contribution of Russian critic Boris Eikhenbaum (1886-1959) to the modern understanding of literature is immense, albeit somewhat neglected in current scholarship. In 1914-16 he was one of the founders of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Opoiaz), the group which developed the enormously influential formalist methods of literary analysis. In later years when the formalist heritage was vilified by Soviet hacks, Eikhenbaum found a niche for himself as a Tolstoy specialist, witnessing in deep disgust the vulgarization of Soviet criticism.

For the title of her remarkable Eikhenbaum monograph, Carol Any has chosen the term voices - certainly an unexpected metaphor for a book dealing with Russian formalism. It immediately signals an approach much different from common theoretical investigations, which often resemble monological pamphlets rather than scholarly analyses. Indeed, Any's book deals as much with Eikhenbaum the literary critic and theoretician as it does with Eikhenbaum the man who was painfully involved in the turmoils of his time. Since it is well known that forrealist principles of literary analysis reject any consideration of a writer's biography, Any obviously decided not to use Eikhenbaum's own theory for her work. Yet, by recontextualizing Russian formalism and one of its leading personalities in a scholarly sound way, the author has managed to demystify and rehumanize a fascinating phenomenon within modern literary theory.

Voices, for one, points to the paradoxes of this man's personality and the sometimes contradictory critical concepts he developed. Second, Any attempts "to repair and restore his fractured voice," one that was distorted by the sociopolitical pressures of everyday Stalinism; in other words, her monograph in itself is the consequence of an ethical concept of scholarship. This rare consciousness of a scholar's own moral answerability adds another human dimension to the entire project: After all, treating Eikhenbaum's texts and theories as if the circumstances under which he created them were irrelevant would have meant the continuation of forced totalitarian forgetfulness. Third, in a Bakhtinian sense voices means Eikhenbaum's integration into the intellectual networks of his time - a choir of other voices, so to speak - to which he reacted and which reacted to him, thus mutually shaping and reshaping their thinking. This discoursive integration of Eikhenbaum's individual contribution precludes any attempt at turning his work into a dogma. Rather, we are enabled to observe the lively processes of growth in Russian critical thinking of the early twentieth century.

In his own analytic methods, Eikhenbaum was among the more moderate formalists, which may explain why he did not become a cult figure. Unlike Shklovsky, he never posed as an iconoclastic enfant terrible. Instead, after the radical early period of formalism was over, he was trying to temper all-too-far-reaching claims and to keep formalism's rational core, complementing its strict "intrinsic" approach with plausible "extrinsic" ones. Despite the militant egalitarianism of Soviet criticism, Eikhenbaum struggled to define his own reasonable measures for literary analysis, defying both formalist purism and Marxist determinism. With a similar sense of measure - and also unlike Shklovsky - Eikhenbaum showed a remarkable degree of intellectual independence, personal courage, and integrity.

Any has organized her text in a way that places private and social events and personal decisions next to thorough discussions of literary theory; both aspects indicate that Eikhenbaum avoided extremism and dogmatism of any kind due to his nonideological, artistic nature. She follows Eikhenbaum's path from acquiring a voice (that is, an authentic intellectual identity) to establishing and finally losing it, in the last, tragic years of his life. (The author had access to rare archival sources and uses them to complete the mosaic of Eikhenbaum's life and thought as much as possible.) Carol Any has written a book in which the intellectual and the personal elements not only match but depend on one another. Indeed, Eikhenbaum, in spite of his more rational than romantic mindset, seems to have hoped that someday in the future someone would restore his voice and give it the integrity that was denied to him in his lifetime. Any's book is a worthy response to that hope.

Peter Rollberg George Washington University