Authors

Valeriy Zolotukhin¹;  ¹ Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany

Discussion

The paper explores the relationship between artistic practices, sound recording technologies and pioneering research in poetics and general literary theory in the first decades of the 20th century. It focuses on the study of poetics in relation to performance practices such as authorial readings of poetry and prose, oral folklore narratives, performances of reciters, as well as the new possibilities for storing and presenting literary texts offered by technological inventions. Performative practices played a key role in the process of establishing new fields of research, such as the study of poetry recitation and verse intonation in the 1910s and 1920s. Boris Eikhenbaum and Sergei Bernshtein, both employees of the Institute of the Living Word (1918-1924), mentioned in their texts the importance of Aleksandr Blok's readings of his poems. After the Institute received its collection of audio recordings of poets' readings, students were able to compare their own recitations of contemporary poems with the way their authors read them. It was not just imitating the poet's reading, but a way of studying his or her poetry through performance. This strategy fitted in well with the research on poetic intonation being carried out at the Institute of the Living Word.
To explore the connection between the development of new scientific approaches and contemporary performative arts centred on the spoken word, it seems appropriate to turn specifically to a study of Boris Eikhenbaum's approaches to the analysis of poetry and prose, influenced by the new possibilities offered by the inventions of sound waves inscribing and reproducing. Among other things, I focus on how Eikhenbaum's analysis of skaz resonates with artistic practices, including new approaches to reading prose on stage, such as those of the actor and reciter Aleksandr Zakushniak. This research framework supports efforts to show how performative arts influenced Russian formalism during the key period of its formation.