Poetika est nauka. Note sullo studio del verso secondo i formalisti

The original and fruitful theories of Russian formalism were an important influence in 20th-century literary criticism. The purpose of this paper is to present the first steps of the Formalist doctrine in pre-revolutionary Russia, stressing the close link among leading personalities of the movement, flourishing Modernist Russian poetry and the general advancement in linguistic research. It is also important to observe that the first in-depth approach to text analysis was concentrated on verse theory. Indeed, in conformity with the well-known Shklovskian principles of ‘device’ and ‘estrangement’, avant-garde poetry (with special reference to the Cubo-futurist experiments) was perceived as the most successful embodiment of the literary transformation of everyday language. Starting from poetic phonetics, brilliant scholars such as Brik, Jakobson, Tomaševskij, Tynjanov, Ejchenbaum and others devoted themselves to the innovative study of prosody and semantics. Besides contemporary poetry, Russian formalists were involved in a new approach to Pushkin’s masterpieces in their historical context. In order to understand a literary work as a complete and dynamic ‘system’, it became necessary to pay attention to its connection with the so-called ‘extra-literary series’ or, broadly speaking, with the culture of an entire period. This will be the starting point for the methodical studies of the Prague Linguistic Circle.