Article

Name: Boris Tomashevskiy and Yury Tynyanov at Work on Their Article “Fake Pushkin”

Authors: A. Ustinov, I. Loshchilov

San Francisco, USA; Institute of Philology of Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract: This publication is dedicated to the circumstances of Boris Tomashevsky’s (1890‒1957) and Yury Tynianov’s (1894–1943) work on their article “Fake Pushkin”. Tomashevsky’s autograph was discovered by Evgenii Toddes (1941–2014) and is published here for the first time. It was mentioned in Toddes’ commentary to Tynianov’s essay with the same title, which was included in his volume “Poetics. History of literature. Cinema” published in Moscow in 1977. Here the authors reconstruct history of Tomashevsky’s and Tynyanov’s attempts at co-writing an article dedicated to the literary works that were erroneously (or intentionally) attributed to Pushkin at different times. This work was to appear in the almanac “Nedra” in 1923 or in the journal “Print and Revolution” a year later. However, the co-authorship did not manifest, and the only example of their work together was the article “The Young Tyutchev” (1923). The five parts written by Tynianov, and Tomashevsky’s draft are based on a common platform of revising the foundations of the contemporary Pushkin studies. Both scholars were well aware of the need for a new theoretical and historical methodology in studying the poet’s work, criticizing accordingly Nikolai Lerner (1877‒1934), and Modest Gofman (1887‒1959.) The sharpness of Tynianov’s tone towards Lerner is based on the personal offence he took to Lerner’s review of the posthumous edition of Georgii Maslov’s poem “Aurora”, which was published in 1922 with Tynianov’s introduction, written pro memoria. Two years later, while preparing his essay for the publication, he nevertheless softened the tone of his polemic with Lerner. In his draft of the “Fake Pushkin” Tomashevsky translated into the polemical register the main provisions of his article “New on Pushkin” (1922), that discussed Gofman’s textual constructions. This explains the stylistic and emotional mismatch in Tomashevsky’s and Tynianov’s contributions to the article. However, they remained in accord in their critical approach, claiming that a “new chapter in the Pushkin studies” (the title of Gofman’s book) was untenable, as long as the scholars conservatively adhere to an aesthetically-evaluative rather than analytical approach in their critical studies. Both Tomashevsky and Tynianov expressed this concept in their respective parts of “Fake Pushkin” through a range of metaphors, that appeal to the Latin proverb “Ex ungue leonem pingere” (“The lion is recognized by its claw”).

Keywords: literary criticism, Pushkin studies, OPOIAZ, literary polemics, Russian Formalism, Alexander Pushkin, Georgii Maslov, Boris Tomashevskii, Yury Tynianov, Evgenii Toddes

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