Doctoral defence: Valerii Otiakovskii „Микроистория сообщества формалистов: Кабинет современной литературы при ГИИИ (1927-1930)“

On 13 September at 12:15, Valerii Otiakovskii will defend his doctoral thesis "Микроистория сообщества формалистов: Кабинет современной литературы при ГИИИ (1927-1930)" ("A Microhistory of the Formalists’ Community:  The Office for Contemporary Literature in the Institute of Art History (1927–1930)").

Supervisor:
Associate professor Roman Leibov (University of Tartu)

Opponents:
Professor Andrei Zorin (New College, Oxford) 
Professor Igor Pilshchikov (Tallinn University)

Summary
This dissertation examines a marginal but revealing episode in the history of Formalism, the work of the Office for Contemporary Literature at the Institute of Art History. The office was formed in 1927, when the institutional possibilities of the Formalists were at their peak, and existed until the Institute was dissolved in 1930. The appearance of the Office was related to the attempt of Yuri Tynyanov and Boris Eikhenbaum to organize a center for the study of recent prose and poetry in Leningrad –– the Committee for Contemporary Literature. Within the framework of the Committee’s activities, meetings with writers were held, literary novelties were discussed, and theoretical paradigms capable of conceptualizing this material from a historical and literary perspective were developed. Gradually, an archive of Russian Modernism literature was formed in the Committee, which quickly grew and turned into an independent institution, the Office for Contemporary Literature. It quickly gained independence, and its members, such as the philologist Konstantin Shimkevich and the literary critic Yuri Pertsovich, began to actively collect and research a corpus of materials on the history of Russian Modernism, ranging between Dmitrii Merezhkovsky to Aleksandr Vvedensky. The work of this institution is examined in several dimensions –– through an institutional lens, in the context of the social history of Stalinism, and through the prism of the history of theory, thus revealing the Office’s position among the scientific, educational, and literary institutions of the 1920s and early 1930s.