priem as Wirkungsmittel, a means of effect or a medium of effect (onto the reader) [Žirmunskij, 1925: 124], the other words started soon to stand in for priem: Verfahren, Kunstgriff, in line with device, artificio, procedimento. All these words emphasize either the subjective aspect of an utterance or on the utterance’s construction. This is exactly the case with the Polish chwyt, or ‘grip’, a pendant to German Kunstgriff, which was used by virtually all scholars of the “aesthetic school”. Chwyt refers to the activity of the author, even if it is an activity of grabbing a hold of the reader.
Now, the fission of priem in the process of its reception that lead to losing its receptive facet directs our attention to the initial unity that the word which encompassed all the three aspects of the literary process. The whole point in assuming the existence of an entity called the intellectual morphic field of literary theory is to avoid banal claims that the notion of priem was just an amphibology, or that the ambiguity of the word does not affect the terminus technicus that is marked by it, because any such explanation fails to explicate why virtually all formalistic notions were constructed in that particular way, why literary theory emerged at this particular point in time, in a particular place and language, for the sake of symbolist, futurist and no other poetry.
We should rather accept the fact that the circumstances in which formalist literary theory emerged were different than those of our time and see what these were like, so that the terms that to us sound equivocal not only could have emerged effortlessly, but also quasi spontaneously and were readily seized in other cultures of the region even at the cost of a partial or incomplete translation. My claim is it was easier for the translators in those days to accept the loss in translation in hopes that any loss in language transfer would be compensated by the assumptions of the cultural context (or by the forces of the morphic field, if you like) in which it was carried over. Chwyt is in a way one half of the ancient symbolon, a piece of parchment, a picture or a coin that was cut in half or broken, and only if the two halves were brought together could messages be conveyed to unknown recipients. In other words, both the Russian Formalists and their Polish and German translators worked in a field that assumed the unity of production, product, and reception. If a translator could not find a word that, like priem, would connote all three aspects of literary communication, he put faith in the force of the field that it would restore the symbolic homology of emitter, artifact, and receiver. Some of them, in particular the central figure of Polish Formalism Manfred Kridl, did not let things drift. Kridl’s “integral method of literary studies” tends to explicitly restore the lost receptive side with the help of a very liberal and nominalist version of the phenomenological method. Other Polish scholars, in the first place the members of the Warsaw Circle, fought off Phenomenology, so that it would not have taken the vacant position of reception, because they thought Phenomenology had done enough harm in Russia and Czechoslovakia. (I expand on this topic in the second part of the paper.)
It would not at all be possible to come up with the idea of priem outside of the intellectual space that was formed by, among other, Hegel’s notion of Geist and Goethe’s concept of Urphänomen, concepts that, at the time when Formalism emerged, were amplified in international symbolism or the aesthetics of expression. Priem emerged from the same premises that enabled Wilhelm Dilthey’s unity of experience, expression, and understanding or Benedetto Croce’s notion of intuition that has to be an intelligible expression in order not to fall to the order of animalistic perceptions. What is not objectified in a form cannot be an intuition and belongs to the realm of nature [Dilthey, 1979: 87; Croce, 1908: 11–12]. The field in which Dilthey, Croce, and Russian Symbolism operated (it was Belyj who first talked about a series of technical priems as a structure of the work of art [Hansen-Löve, 1978: 54–55; cf. Žirmunskij, 1925: 119]) thusly dates back to Hegel and Goethe.
Of course, the assumption of the unity of expression and reception in an object endowed with an aesthetic form does not automatically lead to or generate Formalism, despite being its indispensable precondition. Gervinus’ Nationalliteratur as an expression of a nation’s political history, and Gundolf’s and Simmel’s searching for the unity and uniqueness of life expressed in a poet’s oeuvre [Gervinus, 1842; Gundolf, 1916; Simmel, 1916] are just some examples of realizations of the unity of expression and reception, along with the well-acknowledged 19th-century Polish perception of literature that draws on the expression of a given poet’s love to his deplorably lost fatherland. In order for the unity of reception and expression to engender Formalism, it has to interact with other regimes of culture and other presuppositions, with developments in linguistics and other disciplines, say biology [Sériot, 1999; Brzostowska-Tereskiewicz, 2012]. In addition, the individual qualities of geniuses such as Shklovsky, Jakobson or Tynianov harmonize with the construction of the field.
A makeshift conclusion would be that only the transfers and movements of notions within the field elucidate both the construction of the notions and of the field in question. The priem’s travels present a good example of this regularity. Note that the displacement of a notion – be it only its translation into other language – exposes the premises of both the presenting and the receiving culture (subfield).
The post-Goethean unity of expression, artifact, and understanding is the dominant of this system of presuppositions that made the rise of Russian and Polish Formalisms possible (although not necessary). From the perspective of Franciszek Siedlecki, Leon Chwistek and, as I presume, Shklovsky, it lays on hand that the specificity of the formalist methodology depends on the correct, by which I mean strictly Goethean, interpretation of the Urphänomen. It mustn’t be contaminated with the Humboldtian inner form of the world, nor platonic metaxis, nor Husserlian noesis. The Urphänomen must be, as in Christiansen, interpreted in a nominalist and empirical way, as a meeting of individuals that takes place both on the sensual and the sensible levels.
Modern literary studies in Poland from 1937 onwards had two poles, on the one side Phenomenology with Ingarden and, with a certain respect Zygmunt Łempicki, Stefania Skwarczyńska and Konstanty Troczyński; on the other side, the Warsaw Circle consisting of strict anti-phenomenologists, Żółkiewski, Siedlecki, Hopensztand. They were accompanied from afar by Leon Chwistek, a painter who held the Chair of logic at Lwów/Lviv University (in the competition, he defeated the candidature of Alfred Tarski [Feferman, Feferman, 2004: 67]) and wrote abundantly about art [Chwistek, 2004]. Their programme aimed to wed the Opojaz poetics of sensations (whose methodologically mature extension they saw in the Prague Circle, above all in phonology) with Marxist sociology and neo-positivist logic of scientific discovery in an attempt, explicitly competitive with Phenomenology, to found the sciences of literature [Siedlecki, 1934; 1935; Żółkiewski, 1937; 1938]. Their notion of methodology started to resemble mathematical Formalism as formulated by David Hilbert and championed by Leon Chwistek. One has to keep in mind, though, that they (especially Żółkiewski) advanced the strict division between methodology (understood as purely formal research into the logical structure of notions of a given discipline) and theory that always contains an explanatory interpretation of the notions (the notion of explanation as in [Meyerson, 1921]). The theory of the Warsaw Circle tried to combine the physiological and the sociological explanation of literary phenomena, like when Siedlecki claimed that the roots but only roots of rhythmus stick in physiology whereas its rich development is a matter of the social [Siedlecki, 1935: 176–177]. In the spirit of a certain monism, which was implemented in Poland by Stanisław Brzozowski in the first years of the 20th century, the Warsaw young scholars actually sought ways to combine Marxism with empirio-criticism [Brzozowski, 1906: 15 ff.]. In Russia, the very same idea of monist synthesis, fiercely criticized by Lenin [Ильин, 1909], engendered, among others, Alexander A. Bogdanov’s ideas of Proletkult [Богданов, 1904–1906; 1918]. This is important in the context of the dispute with Phenomenology, lead by the Polish formalists, because the reference to empirio-criticism brings to mind that Formalism, as an aesthetic of reception, needs a philosophy of phenomenalism but it definitely does not need Phenomenology. The phenomenological Wesensschau is alien to Formalism that, in its receptive, historical and social dimension, should think of general notions as of an outcome of the grouping together of sensations in time – and not as of cognizing the essences. The grouping of sensations in relatively stable structures was the main focus of the interest of empirio-criticism. Phenomenalism goes hand in hand with conventionalism that is required not only by structuralist phonology but also by the device of estrangement (this is one of the main reasons why phonology may have been regarded by the Warsaw scholars as an extension of the Opojaz [Siedlecki, 1934; Hopensztand, 1938]). Only when the aesthetic object, with which the recipient commutes, is not one of a limited number of truthful views of an essence, but an abbreviation of previously experienced sensations, can the objects be brought back from the dead, rearranged, and made palpable. As already proven by Chwistek in 1932 [Chwistek, 2004: 197 ff.], such nominalist and empiricist phenomenalism was already postulated by David Hume’s philosophy of mind and language, according to which all notions and all meaning subscribed to words are but products of habit. If so, new constellations of signs can at least hope to blow up old perceptive and receptive habits, and this is what Formalism is very much about.