Galin Tihanov's latest monograph is just like his previous book, The Master and the Slave: Lukacs, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time, thoroughly researched, incredibly detailed and informative, while still retaining an overall view and outlining the force fields in the period and topic under examination. What is perhaps even more remarkable is his flair to keep his reader hooked like a good old-fashioned sleuth retracing the many meanders of intellectual history between world wars. Of course, the structure of the book emphasizes this characteristic by starting and finishing with the diagnosis of the subject's death…

And yet. With a sleight of hand Tihanov masterfully shows us that literary theory is anything but dead. In truth, it might not be totally live and kicking due in part to the dominance of other forms of cultures that privilege more instant gratification, but literary theory has morphed into a contemporary set of concerns at the very center of the current Anglo-American movement of “world literature,” rather than world literature. The difference is subtle. But Tihanov shows how crucial it is. The current trend operates in a globalized and decontextualized mode (Tihanov stops short of calling it “decentralized” as he, precisely, considers it a very Anglo-Saxon current). On the other hand, literary theory, as he demonstrates, is very clearly localized geographically (Russia and central and eastern Europe) and chronologically (the interwar period) but also intellectually: the figures he gathers are old friends (Mikhail Bakhtin, Gustav Shpet, and Viktor Shklovskii). He also discusses trends and movements, such as an interesting exploration into Russian émigré literature and semantic paleontologism (initiated by Nikolai Marr but receiving increasing international attention in Russianist circles in the past twenty years, due more to its impact on Soviet intellectual debates than its truth value).

Tihanov guides us into his work by stating in the prologue that literary theory takes two of its major concerns from Romanticism, the notion of the writer as an autonomous figure, due to its exceptional and isolated character and its exilic traits at a time when European nation states are emerging and solidifying into political entities:

The chasm which separates Germaine de Staël and Shklovskii, in intellectual terms at least, is that “[w]hat is so distinct about literary theory is that it contemplates this autonomy (and the resulting uniqueness of literature as a discourse) not through the figure of the writer per se, but through language” (3). This will constitute the main obvious legacy of Russian formalism, traceable through French structuralism to poststructuralism and deconstruction, as Tihanov succinctly puts it: “what really mattered was the text and its language” (3). For him, what really matters, it soon appears, is that “theory is a specific mode of reflection on literature, and hence ‘literary theory’” (7), which links literature to aesthetics and philosophy, including philosophy of culture. The real question which gradually comes to the fore is why did the study of literature become such a prominent intellectual activity that needed to be theorized, and professionalized, after World War 1? A partial answer soon emerges:

It thus becomes clearer how Russian Formalism has filiations in contemporary world literature and its consideration of translation as a legitimate means to access literature beyond the boundaries of a natural language. But the work's forte lies in its rich, contextualized discussions that cast new light on and show the enduring relevance of Shklovskii, Shpet, and Bakhtin.