One Hundred Years of Youri Tynianov’s The Interval (Promezhutok)

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

The year 2024 marks 100 years since the first publication of Yuri Tynianov’s “Promezhutok”. Dedicated to the fortunes of Russian poetry in the early 1920s, this essay models a new type of criticism, blending a solid theoretical framework with a genuine joy in writing and reading. Tynianov discusses his contemporaries – Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky – to name just a few. How can a period, when these poets were all active, be presented as a mere gap in the history of Russian poetry? Tynianov provides a partial explanation himself (claiming that the prose has taken over), but the article may owe its title to a more general feeling of 1923-24, when the past was in the past, and the misty future still very much in the mist… In our roundtable we want to reexamine Tynianov’s undisputed masterpiece as a point of intersection for several cultural contexts. Looking at the text from multiple viewpoints will require at least five different speakers, each of them representing different possible approaches. Ainsley Morse, the editor of the fullest existing edition of Tynianov’s works in English (Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory, and Film (2019)), will focus on the translation issues and contemporary resonance of the essay; Daria Khitrova, the author of the preface to this edition, and Lidia Tripiccione will place “The Interval” in the larger context of the formalists’ theory of the literary evolution; Basile Lvoff and Alexaner Dmitriev will determine its place in the intellectual history of the 1920s.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Tatiana Smoliarova, U of Toronto (Canada)

Roundtable Members

• Daria Khitrova, Harvard U

• Vasily Sergeyevich Lvov, CUNY Hunter College

• Ainsley Morse, UC San Diego

• Lidia Tripiccione, Princeton U