The „Living Word“ as Art, Knowledge, and Media. Institutional Entanglements of Literary and Poetry Performance Studies in the Early Soviet Union

• Applicant: Valeriy Zolotukhin, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; Art History ; Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 536072735

The project is exploring the correlation between artistic practices and pioneering research in the fields of philology, linguistics, and general art theory. It is focusing specifically on how literary scholarship and the methodologies of humanities in the early Soviet Union have been transformed by performance practices, usage of new media such as sound recording, and phonocentrism of early 20th-century Russian culture in general. Research is centred on the Institute of the Living Word (1918-1924) in Petrograd and the studies of poetics and poetry recitation by Boris Eikhenbaum, Vsevolod Vsevolodskii-Gerngross, Sergei Bernshtein among others in relation to the performance practices of the first decades of the 20th century such as the authorial readings of poetry and prose, performances of the reciters, avant-garde theatre, and dance as well as folklore oral narratives. This research framework supports the efforts to show how performative arts were influencing Russian formalism in the key period of its formation (1918-1924). In turn, the use of new media as a means of documentation is also one of the key problems of this project because it affected the understanding of the performative arts. This perspective allows us not only to take a fresh look at the role of performative arts in the intellectual history of Russia and Europe. It appeals to the very essence of the quest for interdisciplinarity in humanities that is still relevant for contemporary academia. The project is split into three stages focusing on different aspects: 1) Institutional (i.e., Institute of the Living Word as an institution created specifically to develop a new field of knowledge and art); 2) Practice (i.e., collaborative nature of research projects of Russian formalists and reciprocal influences of performative practices and their research); 3) Media-related (i.e., new media archives of performative practices). Realization of the project makes visible mutual influences between the performative arts (authorial reading, individual and collective non-authorial performances, theatre) and the innovative theory of its time. Methods that flourished in the Early Soviet institutions have brought theory to the strict distinction between textualist and performance-centred approaches. Yet they were not mutually exclusive: that is why the revision of it helps us today to conceptualize complex interrelations between the poetics of literary texts and performances. The importance of this investigation is attached to the gap between these two subjects in contemporary studies of poetry performance in parallel with performance theory in general.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position