Bergson and Russian Formalism

IN THE PREFACE to his book Through Literature (1924), Boris Eichenbaum says of his articles written in 1916 and 1917 that Their basic striving is toward epistemologically based aesthetics.' Although Eichenbaum expresses his interest in such problems as the nature of space and time more openly than the other formalists he was in fact stating a commonly held attitude.2 This paper suggests that, to a considerable extent, Russian formalism did succeed in creating an epistemologically based aesthetics, for a conceptual paradigm which derives from the thought of Henri Bergson informs the criticism of the two principal theoreticians of formalism, Viktor Shklovsky and Yury Tynianov. In saying this, I do not mean to present Shklovsky and Tynianov as philosophers, or even as philosophical critics like Shestov or Sartre, and thus some preliminary considerations must preface this initial investigation into the relationship between Bergson and formalism, to which commentators have made only passing references.3 I prefer to speak of a Bergsonian paradigm in formalism, rather than of Bergson's influence, for two reasons. First, the term implies analogy with linguistic procedures; it does not suggest that those who used the paradigm worked in a purely inductive manner, or that they could necessarily have articulated it as I propose to do. Second, by assuming that the formalists used a Bergsonian paradigm one can