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Carol Any. Boris Eikhenbaum: Voices of a Russian Formalist. Stanford, Ca. Stanford University Press. 1994 (released 1995). xiii + 281 pages, ill. $39.50. ISBN 0-8047-2229-3.
The theoretical contribution of Russian critic Boris Eikhenbaum (1886-1959) to the modern understanding of literature is immense, albeit somewhat neglected in current scholarship. In 1914-16 he was one of the founders of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language ( Opoiaz), the group which developed the enormously influential formalist methods of literary analysis. In later years when the formalist heritage was vilified by Soviet hacks, Eikhenbaum found a niche for himself as a Tolstoy specialist, witnessing in deep disgust the vulgarization of Soviet criticism.
For the title of her remarkable Eikhenbaum monograph, Carol Any has chosen the term voices - certainly an unexpected metaphor for a book dealing with Russian formalism. It immediately signals an approach much different from common theoretical investigations, which often resemble monological pamphlets rather than scholarly analyses. Indeed, Any's book deals as much with Eikhenbaum the literary critic and theoretician as it does with Eikhenbaum the man...