Among the striking features of early Soviet intellectual life were various ambitious attempts to refashion the humanities along the lines of the hard sciences. One strategy involved employing graphical methods to represent research results visually. This paper traces the use of graphs and curves in analysing works of art, as seen in the writings of several prominent intellectuals of the 1920s.
In The Psychology of Art (1925-26), Lev Vygotsky analyses the plot of Ivan Bunin’s short story Light Breathing, using segmented lines to illustrate the relationship between siuzhet and fabula. His analysis draws on Viktor Shklovsky’s 1921 study of Laurence Sterne. The lines in which Tristram Shandy depicts his biography are understood by Shklovsky as ‘the baring of the device’, and Vygotsky seeks to perform the same act by ‘drawing’ Bunin’s story. Vygotsky’s and Shklovsky’s graphical methods can be compared to Andrei Bely’s calculations of the ‘curve of poetic rhythm’, developed around the same time. While Vygotsky used visual representation to lend his analysis a scientific aura, Bely went further, infusing his curves with autobiographical elements, thus transforming a method of visualising scientific observations into a practice of self-fashioning.
