If in this work on the nature of the poetic dealt with a literary term of the “internal” type, my work from on literary evolution [Petrov, 1967] dealt with another, not less significant term employed by the formalist school, underlining the difference between evolution and genesis (the Marxist thesis), on the one hand, and evolution and tradition (Eliot’s view), on the other.
My book In the Space of Prose was published in Belgrade in 1968. The main part of the book was actually my Master’s thesis titled “The Poetic in Andrić’s Prose”, defended at the University of Belgrade in 1967. In the same book I published a study dealing with Eikhenbaum’s concept of skaz [Петров, 1968a].
The same year the well-known Belgrade journal Knjizevnost [‘Literature’], published in three installments my study “The Poetics of Russian Formalism” [Петров, 1968]. This long study later became the Introduction for the book with the same title that was published in Belgrade in 1970, reviewed for publication by the Zagreb professor A. Flaker. The book includes the most important texts of the Russian formalists as well [Petrov, 1970].
The introductory study first dealt with the state of Russian literary scholarship and criticism prior to the appearance of the formalists (among others A. A. Potebnya, A. N. Veselovsky, A. Bely, V. Bryusov, V. Ivanov), a detailed presentation of the representatives of the formalist school from all three of its periods (according to the periodization proposed in [Erlich, 1955]), their polemics with Marxist critics (P. N. Sakulin, A. Lunacharsky, P. Kogan, V. Polyansky, L. Trotsky), and finally the comparison with the most important linguists and literary theoreticians from Western Europe and America.
A book of selected of works by B. Eikhenbaum, the main opponent of Soviet Marxist critics in the twenties was published two years later. I selected Eikhenbaum’s works for this edition and wrote the introduction titled “Boris Eikhenbaum – Theory and History of Literature” [Петров, 1972]. The introduction details an analysis, more detailed than the previous one, of the polemics conducted between the formalists and the Marxists. I also indicated the changes that appeared after these polemics in the works of the formalists regarding the relationship between literature and literary and extra-literary facts (“series”).
The appearance of these books attracted obvious attention not only in Serbia. Thanks to the Russian professor V. N. Turbin, the Poetics of Russian Formalism reached V. Shklovsky and M. Bakhtin.
When I visited Bakhtin in 1973 he showed me the book, saying he had no difficulty in reading the Introduction written in Serbian. During our conversation, which lasted around five hours, we also discussed Russian Formalism, especially the problem of the author. His opinion was that the Russian formalists did not dedicate enough attention to this issue. Following this conversation, the Bakhtin’s distinction of external and internal author assumed special importance in my own studies, not only regarding prose, but also poetry. Even today, when I am trying to introduce an additional term regarding the author, the meta-author, it is his theses that come to mind. Even prior to my encounter with Bakhtin, Shklovsky suggested that I ask him about his role in the writing of P. N. Medvedev’s book The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship and V. N. Voloshinov’s book Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Shklovsky said Bakhtin was not willing to discuss this sensitive issue. Shklovsky was convinced that Bakhtin was the real author of both books. During our conversation Bakhtin again circumvented this issue and told me instead about the tragic fate of his friends. However, he did provide an unambiguous answer to my question as to which 20th century Russian theoretician of literature and art he regarded as the most interesting or most significant: Father Pavel Florensky. The most interesting part of our conversation for me was about the concept of chronotope, not only in prose fiction but in poetry as well. Bakhtin was much more interested in fiction but he advised me to try to implement this concept analyzing poetry what I recently started.
The support for the application of the ideas proposed by the Russian formalists in the study of literature, especially Serbian, was not forthcoming from Serbian academic circles except for a few university professors. A substantially greater understanding was expressed by certain literary critics, publishers, and especially certain poets, including the Serbian avant-garde Odysseus Miloš Crnjanski, the one-time surrealist Oskar Davičo, and the two poets most responsible for the change towards new literary modernism in the early fifties of the 20th century: Vasko Popa and Miodrag Pavlović.
In 1968 Vasko Popa invited me to write an introduction for the revised and final edition of his groundbreaking collection of poems Bark (Kora, first edition 1953), noting that he would like me to analyze its poems and cycles in “the formalist spirit” [Петров, 1969]. Soon after his return from exile in 1965 Crnjanski gave me his just published Collected Works in ten volumes, telling me he was acquainted with my partially “formalist” criticism from the time he still lived in London. As a critic I truly endeavored to provide even the criticism published in newspapers and journals with a scholarly-objectivist potential. I felt like a disciple of Russian formalists in my close interest for contemporary literature and my effort to link criticism and scholarship, and therefore I decided to dedicate my dissertation to the study of a living poet – Crnjanski. I defended my doctoral dissertation “The Poetry of Crnjanski in the Evolution of Serbian Poetry” in Zagreb in 1971.
The book that appeared that same year [Петров, 1971], my doctoral dissertation under a slightly changed title (The Poetry of Crnjanski and Serbian Poetry) did not deal only with the constructive function, Crnjanski, to use Tynyanov’s terminology, of the elements of Crnjanski’s poetic works, but also with their literary function, i.e. the mutual ties between his works as well as with works by other authors of the same literary epoch, but also prior and subsequent epochs. This marked the transition from the study of the work as a closed whole towards the interpretation of the work in the dynamic and evolutionary substitution of canonized forms. My book also focused on the author’s poetic/critical attitude towards his own and others’ works as well as the attitude of the critics of various epochs towards Crnjanski ad his works, meaning the reception of literary works.
The poet Miodrag Pavlović, who was also an editor in Prosveta, which had published the Poetics of Russian Formalism, invited me to compile a representative anthology of Russian poetry from the 17th century to the present for Prosveta. My work on the anthology was not simply that of an anthologist, but also that of a theoretician and literary-historical challenge. Working on this project my guidelines were the ideas of Eikhenbaum on the transformation a movement into a drawing, of Eliot on the “ideal order”, of Taranovsky on references and subtext, and contemporary interpretations of intertextuality. Brezhnev personally complained to Tito when he was in Belgrade on a visit in 1976, attempting to prevent the publication of this anthology. However, Tito, after asking for and receiving from me an explanation of what this anthology was about, and the question I posed on the Yugoslav and his personal independence regarding Moscow, consented to the anthology’s publication. Needless to say, Leonid Ilyich was not concerned with the theory the anthology was based on, but with the fact that it included a substantial number of undesirable poets such as, for example, the “oberiuts”, emigrant poets and representatives of the “samizdat” from the Liazonovo group. To Brezhnev’s horror together with Pushkin in the same book!
Towards the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, based on formalist theories and those of structuralism as its partial scholarly heir, three scholarly and critical projects were launched: the establishment of the journal Književna istorija [‘Literary History’] in 1968, the Department for the Study of Serbian Literary Periodicals in the Institute for Literature and Art in 1971, and the publication of a book jointly authored by ten younger critics and scholars brought together by their critical attitude towards the current university and academic scholarship on literature. For these new projects, especially the journal, we owe gratitude to the poets Davičo and Popa for providing support for them from the authorities.
The Russian formalist never had his or her own journal. Nonetheless, they dedicated due attention to the problems specific to periodical publications. They were first in introducing the term “journal problems” [Эйхенбаум, 1927: 119]. At the beginning of their activities, they considered journal publications “utterly superior to academic studies and ideas coming from universities” [Eikhenbaum, same] This “journal scholarship” was comprised of works authored mainly by symbolist critics and theoreticians and was “based on certain theoretical principles and formulae supported by new artistic currents accepted by that epoch” [Eikhenbaum, same] Serbian critics of the new orientation had the same attitude towards journal criticism and scholarship of their own times, towards the traditional scholarship of mainstream university professors who mostly engaged in biographical and sociological studies, and towards the predominantly impressionistic current literary criticism.
Even later, when interest for “journal scholarship” waned due to its “subjective and tendentious character” [Эйхенбаум, 1927: 119], the interest of Russian formalists for periodicals continued. Shklovsky was probably the first to indicate that prior to the formalists periodicals were studied with neglect to their literary form. He also claimed that in the twenties a journal could exist only as “a specific literary form”. “A journal must be sustained not only by interest for its specific parts, but also by interest for their mutual relationship” [Шкловский, 1928: 116]. Tynyanov (“Journal, Critic, Reader and Writer”) also stressed that journals and almanacs began to be considered as “literary works” and “literary facts” only in his time [Тынянов, 1977: 225]. He defined criticism and polemics published in journals as a “literary necessity” of journals: “the basic life of a journal consists always of criticism and polemics” [Там же: 461]. Younger Serbian scholars in the early seventies could hardly find