Authors

Discussion

After the October Revolution, cultural activists who wanted to reform art to make it suitable for proletarian society formed an avant-garde art group called LEF. Constructivist artists designed clothes and furniture. Writers advocated documentary prose called Literature of Fact, modeled on newspapers and reportage, to replace artistic literature with utilitarian prose. And the Productivists, who viewed the art of the new age from the perspective of Marxism supported their practice theoretically. They asserted value of art on the basis of its utility because they thought that emancipation from capitalism would mean emancipation from slavish and uncreative labor, and that all process of production, including material, would be creative like artistic production. Therefore, the artistic theory of productivism inevitably includes the concept of labor.

At the same time Russian formalists were also interested in the relationship between labor and literary history. On the one hand, the Moscow formalist Viktor Shklovsky and his followers participated in the LEF and developed a formal-sociological method in the discussion with the Productivists. Shklovsky’s theory of literary history and artistic labor was focused on the moment of der Ästhetisierung der Politik (the aestheticization of politics), so he was always looking for the possibility that an initial teleological intention of a writer would be sublimated into an aesthetic one, while researching in the deformation of materials and a class intention of writers, related to their form of labor (Material and Style in Leo Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace” in 1928, Matvey Komarov: A Resident in Moscow  in 1929, etc.) to refute the Productivists, who insisted on der Politisierung der Kunst (the politization of art) and the utilization of art by exchanging an aesthetic function for a communicative one. On the other hand, their colleagues in Leningrad, Boris Eikhenbaum and Yury Tynyanov developed the theory of byt (extraliterary reality). Although their research tended toward the purely biographical, their starting point was primarily the roles of the writers’ labor in literary history. Thus, the formalists in the second half of the 1920s integrated problems of the substructure into their literary theories, but their interest in the interplay of literary series and extraliterary series was invoked by the post-revolutionary development of their theories, rather than imposed by the ignorant Marxists. I will examine what role the concept of labor played in the nonorthodox theories of literature in the USSR in the 1920s.