Boris Eikhenbaum: Voices of a Russian Formalist

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Stanford University Press, 1994 - Literary Criticism - 281 pages
A study of Boris Eikhenbaum (1886-1959), a leading Russian Formalist and a pathbreaking Tolstoy scholar. The author carefully traces Eikhenbaum's intellectual trajectory from his pre-Formalist philosophical criticism, through Formalism, to his later biographical criticism of Tolstoy and Lermontov. Eikhenbaum's contribution to Formalism has not heretofore received clear definition, and the author shows that his ideas and influence were even greater than previously supposed. His shift away from Formalism, with its emphasis on purely literary analysis, toward a criticism that emphasized the writer as a cultural figure is seen as a response to both political exigency and personal need. The author demonstrates that Eikhenbaum had compelling intellectual reasons to move away from Formalism, which had reached a dead end. Throughout, the author relates Eikhenbaum's critical thinking to such current literary issues as intention, perception, meaning, reader reception, deconstruction, and the new historicism. This book is a Stanford University Press title distributed and marketed by Cambridge University Press in all territories outside North America.
 

Contents

Introduction I
1
A Grandson Makes His Way
7
Demythologizing Tolstoy
28
Guarding the WorkCentered Poetics
46
The Formalist in Crisis
80
Remythologizing Tolstoy
104
Restoring a Voice
134
Losing a Voice
167
Reading the Legacy Whole
200
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About the author (1994)

Carol Any is Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.

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