Summary
Evolutions of Theory.
Biologism in Modernist Russian Literary Scholarship
The monograph provides an archaeology of modern literary scholarship re-
constructed against the background of intellectual history of East European
modernism. From a vertiginous abundance of concepts, doctrines, ideas
and experiments, there emerges an outline of a system whole where scien-
tific languages co-exist with mythological thinking, knowledge reunites
with faith, nature merges with spirit, life fuses with creation, and ideologi-
cal monoglossia is conquered by scholarly and artistic heteroglossia. Lo-
cal congestions of details build up to an “analytical picture” (in Filonov’s
sense of this term) of Russian literary theoretical biologism. Research
shows that the phenomenon crystallized under the pressure of modern
theoretical evolutionary biology, resonated with the vitalist tendencies of
Western European philosophy and reflected the unique local traditions
of Russian culture. Literary theoretical biologism is examined here as a
general methodological and epistemological tendency of Russian mo-
dernism, and not – as it has often been characterized in the past – as a set
of extravagant theoretical experiments or a bunch of random and rather
accidental rhetorical ornaments dispersed in the differentiated languages
of modernist literary theory.
Research indicates that as early as the first three decades of the 20
th
cen-
tury, an overhelmingly utopistic biologism spread widely through theore-
tical and historical reflections on literature and assumed, among others, the
varied shapes of paleogenology and paleosemantics, morphology of genres,
nomogenetic theory of folklore, the theory of philembryogenesis of tropes,
literary mutationism, and versological Morganism. The multifarious forms
of literary theoretical biologism are conceived of as an indispensable yet
tiny part of the vast and internally dynamized biologistic style of thought
that arguably united all areas of Russian humanities in the first half of the
20
th
century, and did not lose its impetus until quite recently. The actual
knowledge of this whole can be compared with Dmitrii Mendeleev’s perio-
dic table, which predicts the place and properties of the elements which had
not yet been discovered and are still waiting in the archives of Russian mod-
ernism.
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SUM M A RY
The proposed archaeology of East European literary scholarship has
been narrowed to the “Russian formalist school” (also known as the “mor-
phological school”) and Nikolai Marr’s school of “paleontological seman-
tics” (the “genetic-sociological school”), represented, among others, by Olga
Freudenberg, Izrail Frank-Kamenetskii, Vasilii Abaev, and Vladimir Propp.
The reexamination of their methodological regulations, terminological
thesauruses and modes of conceptualizing literary works in the context of
biologism allows us to modify the existing image of the origins, develop-
ment, internal characteristics and position of East- and Central European
structuralism within the history of modern literary theoretical discourse. It
also provides a new assessment of the methodological and epistemological
foundations of the structuralist movement. Interestingly, it was biology that,
to a large extent, superseded linguistics as a frame of reference for modern
literary studies.
Not only did modern biological sciences provide the early 20
th
century
literary scholarship with powerful methodological inspirations, but they
also defined its disciplinary territory and the objectives of scholarly inves-
tigations. Natural studies supplied literary theoreticians with models for
description, conceptual schemata and patterns for categorising literary phe-
nomena. Biology also stimulated and shaped the theoretical imagination
of the Russian literary scholars. The unprecedented density and unique hy-
bridization of concepts, terms and languages shared both by modern biolo-
gists and literary theoretitians of the first three decades of the 20
th
century
frequently render it impossible to separate Kulturwissenschaft from Natur-
wissenschaft and differentiate between the strict biological terminology and
metaphorical/catachretic (“abusive”) use of scientific jargon in literary stu-
dies discourse.
The monograph’s introduction, From the Archaeology of Literary
Knowledge, discusses the methodological framework, which incorpo-
rates Ludwik Fleck’s history of thought styles. Historical-comparative
epistemology informs a number of contemporary literary theoretical
projects in anthropology, which investigate the complex processes of
cultural memory and are predominantly oriented towards historical se-
mantics of concepts. The introductory chapter also provides a summary
of the previous conceptualizations of the phenomenon of biologism in
East- and Central European humanities of the early 20
th
century. Among
the most important are those of A. Pomorski (Duchowy proletariusz.
Przyczynek do dziejów lamarkizmu społecznego i rosyjskiego kosmizmu
XIX–XX wieku (na marginesie antyutopii Andrieja Płatonowa), 1996);
P. Sériot (Structure et totalité: Les origines intellectuelles du strusturalisme en
371
SUM M A RY
Europe centrale et orientale, 1999); A. Vucinich (Darwin in Russian Thought,
1988); and P. Steiner (Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics, 1984). The author
pays close attention to the unstable range of the concepts of modernism/
postmodernism in East European cultural milieux. The monograph is then
further divided into four parts, entitled respectively: Between the Old and
New Biologisms, Prestructuralism and Anti-Darwinism, Paleontologists’
Summer and, finally, Morphologism: An Attempt at (Re)constructing a Cer-
tain Concept within Literary Studies.
The first, most extensive part of the monograph provides an overwiew of
the cultural and historical roots of literary theoretical biologism in mod-
ernist Russia, starting from Goethenian morphology and Schellingian na-
ture philosophy, and moving via Positivist naturalism to Neo-Romantic
vitalist trends in Western European philosophy and biology. An extensive
study of the biologist assumptions of Russian intellectual culture consi-
derably changes the concept of the all-European range of the anti-positivist
(and simultaneously antinaturalist) breakthrough in the humanities, which
has been passed on by eurocentric historians of science. It calls for the revi-
sion of the canonical anti-positivist exponents, such as the epistemological
and methodological emancipation of cultural studies (Kulturwissenschaf-
ten) from natural studies (Naturwissenschaften). Research proves that the
division of knowledge into the natural sciences and the humanities, he-
ralded by the Baden Neo-Kantian school of Wilhelm Windelband and
Heinrich Rickert, was neither definite nor conclusive. The anti-positivist
turn by no means excluded the humanists’ exploitation of biological con-
cepts and methodologies, but instead redefined the relation between the
two disciplines, according to the new self-awareness of the humanities and
modern self-knowledge of the natural sciences.
Prestructuralism and Anti-Darwinism reveals close correlations be-
tween Russian modernist literary scholarship and anti-Darwinian theories
of biological evolution entangled in complex relations with the Marxist or-
thodoxy of the first half of the 20
th
century. The proposed overview of the
concepts of literary evolution demonstrates that prestructuralism was deep-
ly embedded in debates over fundamental epistemological and ontological
questions posed simultaneously in Lebensphilosophie, theoretical biology,
and in the socio-ideological discourse of post-revolutionary Russia.
Paleontologists’ Summer provides a methodological and ideological
overview of the interdisciplinary “semantic paleontology” and the history
of folklore, which emerged under the influence of Nikolai Marr’s linguistic
doctrine known as Japhetidology. Remarkably enough, not until recently
have theoretical and methodological problems of “cultural paleontology”
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SUM M A RY
been adequately documented and estimated. The dominance of Marrism
between 1930 and 1950 in Russian linguistics and cultural studies, and Sta-
lin’s critique of Marrism in 1950, precluded the development of a systematic
body of historical knowledge of the Marr school and its disciples. Special
attention is paid to Olga Freudenberg’s literary theoretical zaum, which as-
similates both Lev Berg’s nomogenesis, Ernst Cassirer’s philosophical prin-
ciples and Marrist linguistics.
The last chapter of the monograph attempts to reconstruct the as-
sumptions and systematise the varieties Russian morphologism. Resting on
Goethean morphology, it focused on issues of internal structure and the
evolution of literary forms. Research has indicated that there are two essen-
tial branches of the Russian morphologism. The first includes mechanicism
in its three varieties: anatomic, physiological, and holistic. The second, anti-
mechanicist, branch can be further divided into Goethean transformation-
ism, literary aromorphoses and the Paleontologies. The latter occurred in
two varieties: Lamarckian paleoembryological morphologism and the pale-
ontology of folklore, which emerged under the influence of the Darwinian
theory of adaptation.
The monograph’s conclusion, entitled The Locks of Tartu, presents the
biologically-oriented “Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics” of the second half
of the 20
th
century as a “sluice-gate” for the utopian and totalising biologism
of early Russian modernism. Vyacheslav Ivanov’s studies on the propensity
of the brain and human culture for asymmetry, and Yurii Lotman’s concepts
of the semiosphere and the explosive evolution of culture, are the examples
contre coeur of the new version of the Russian biologism. Remarkably, it
is the Tartu and Moscow semioticians who took Olga Freudenberg, Boris
Yarkho, Vladimir Propp and other biologists across the borders of the my-
thogenic zone of Russian modernism in the first part of the 20
th
century,
and prepared the soil for their recontextualization in the international field
of the humanities.
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