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NOTES

18 According to the title page and a note inside, Kručënych’s 1913 collection Piglets (Porosjata) was co-authored by an eleven-year old, Zina V.

19 Another 1913 collection of Kručënych’s works, Explodity (Vzorval’), con­tains three poems written in “Japanese,” “Spanish,” and “Hebrew.”

20 It is important to stress that Jakubinskij himself conceived of “verselanguage”simply as a special case of poetic language,” (Jakubinskij 1919b, p. 54). As I shall show later, this seemingly subtle difference de­veloped into an important argument against the entire linguistic model.

21 This speech was published separately in 1914 as The Resurrection of the Word, see Stempel 1972, p. 14.

22 Nevertheless, this connection is implied by the fact that Polivanov’s essay appeared in the OPOJAZ Studies in the Theory of Poetic Language. Viktor Šklovskij wrote, “The observation that in Japanese poetic language there are sounds which do not exist in practical Japanese was most likely the first actual indication that these two languages are divergent” ( Šklovskij 1919, p. 104). Still, it seems far-fetched to claim, as Ladislav Matejka does, that Polivanov wrote about Japanese poetry (Matejka-Pomorska 1978, p. 282).

23 In an appendix to the first volume of the OPOJAZ Sborniki appeared a Russian translation of segments of M. Grammont’s Le vers français and K. Nyrop’s Grammaire historique de la langue française that discussed the expressive quality of linguistic sound stemming in part from its articulatory properties (see OPOJAZ 1916, pp. 51-71).

24 It was from Ščerba’s monograph on Russian vowels, Russkie glasnye v kačest­vennom i količestvennom otnošenii (St. Petersburg, 1912), that the Formalists drew their conclusions about the nature of sound in practical language (see, for example, Jakubinskij 1916, p. 38 or Jakobson 1921a, p. 9).

25 For a list of Formalist articles pertaining to Sievers’s school, see Mayenowa 1970, p. 18.

26 In this passage Tynjanov insists on a subtle but untranslatable difference between two synonymic adjectives stichotvornyj and stichovoj, both rendered in English as “verse.” His preference for stichovoj most likely can be attributed to the fact that Jakubinskij who conceived of “verse language” as a mere sub­category of “poetic language,” used stichotvornyj (see note 22 above). For this reason, it is quite surprising that sitchotvornyj, rejected by Tynjanov, should have appeared in the very title of his book. Tynjanov’s correspondence reveals, how­ever, that this title was chosen by his publisher who was apprehensive of the original title Problema stichovoj semantiki (see Tynjanov 1966 [1924], p. 142).

27 In the conclusion to his “Art as Device,” Šklovskij promised to devote a special book to the problems of rhythm. This plan never materialized, however, perhaps because Šklovskij considered poetic rhythm nothing but a deformation of prosaic rhythm, a deformation that must remain unpredictable and hence unsystematizable in order to carry out its de-familiarizing function (Šklovskij 1919a, p. 114).

28 Although quoted in the early twenties by many Formalists, this article was not published until 1927, when it appeared in four installments in the journal Novyj Lef.

29 For a detailed discussion of this topic, see Červenka 1983, pp. 73-84.

30 For Tynjanov’s discussion of the relation between form and function, see especially Tynjanov 1929, pp. 38-41.

31 Apparently in the mid-twenties, perhaps under Tynjanov’s influence, Toma­ševskij modified his position somewhat. Thus in 1925 he was willing to concede that “Majakovskij’s verse is constrained merely by its rhythmical impulse” (Tomaševskij 1929, p. 59).

32 This, of course, does not mean that Tynjanov’s semantic theory is without any intellectual predecessors. As the footnotes to his book indicate, he adopted some of his most important notions from French and German students of language: M. Bréal, C. Bally, J. Vendryes, H. Paul, A. Rosenstein, and W. Wundt, to name a few.

33 Although Jakobson’s definition of verbal art proved to be quite workable for distinguishing poetic language from its emotive and practical counterparts, because of its origins in logic it tended to obliterate the difference between poetic language and another functional dialect which Jakobson later termed “meta-language.” Viktor Šklovskij, for example, when analyzing authorial meta-discourse in Don Quixote,viewed it as a manifestation of the “set toward ‘expression’ which is so typical in art” (Šklovskij 1925, p. 85). Thus Jakobson and some other Prague Structuralists were eventually forced to come up with a secondary criterion to distinguish the metalinguistic from the poetic set toward expression: see, for example, J. Mukařovský 1940, pp. 114-15: or Jakobson 1960, p. 358.

34 See, for example, the joke that Jakobson quotes in his review of André Mazon’s Lexique de la guerre et de la révolution en Russie about a peasant asking the direction to Ljubljanka (a squarein Moscow where the headquarters of the Soviet secret police arelocated). The answer he got was: “Start to sing the Czarist anthem and you will get there quite quickly” (Jakobson 1920, p. 111).

35 To maintain Jakobson’s earlier nomenclature I have translated “sdělovací” as “practical” instead of the more correct “communicative.” By the late twenties, however, Jakobson expanded his functional dialectology and “practical language” became a subcategory of the more general “communicative language."

36 For a more detailed discussion of this proverb see Jakobson 1965, pp. 32-33.

37 The concept of dialogue gained a rather prominent status in the subsequent development of Russian intellectual life as a rallying point for the scholars connected with Michail Bachtin. But with their negative attitude toward Formalism, the Bachtinians approached dialogue from a different perspective. They saw it primarily as a metalinguistic phenomenon—a chain of utterances commenting upon each other from different points of view. Thus, for the Bachtinians, dialogue was a predominantly ideological phenomenon.

38 A special problem that deserves more attention than I can devote to it here is the historical changeability of phonemic systems. In contrast to Saussure, Jakobson maintained that these systems evolve. At the same time, he regarded this change as purely phenomenal, not affecting their “deep structures”—the universal and absolute inventory of hierar­chically correlated distinctive features that in one way or another is im­plemented in every actual phonological system.

39 In English the line means “The storm covers the sky with haze:” it is from Puškin’s poem “Zimnij večer” (Winter Evening).

40 This is the most controversial point in Jakobson’s theory. For the opposing view, which maintains that stress rather than word boundary constitutes the prosodic basis of Czech verse, see, for example, Mukařovský, 1926, p. 217-20; or Červenka 1981, pp. 260-65.