Boris Tomashevsky

Boris Tomashevsky (b. 1890–d. 1957) was a Russian Formalist literary scholar, verse theorist, academic editor, historian of Russian literature and Russian-French literary relations, and scholar of Pushkin’s life and work. A mathematician and engineer by education (he studied mathematical statistics and electrical engineering at the Montefiore Institute of the University of Liège, Belgium, and at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, where he also audited courses on literature), he pioneered a new statistical-probabilistic approach to the study of verse. Tomashevsky participated in the activities of two groups associated with the Russian Formalists: the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (Obshchestvo izucheniia poeticheskogo iazyka, OPOIaZ), and the Moscow Linguistic Circle (Moskovskii Lingvisticheskii Kruzhok, MLK). Born in Saint Petersburg, Tomashevsky produced a significant part of his research on Russian verse in Moscow, where he lived from 1918 to the end of 1920 (after coming back from the fronts of the First World War), and presented the results at meetings of the Moscow Linguistic Circle. In 1919, following the proposal made by the first president of the MLK, Roman Jakobson, Tomashevsky was elected a full member of the Circle. His quantitative verse studies from the Moscow period were, however, published as a separate collection as late as 1929 in Leningrad (former Saint Petersburg/Petrograd). In 1921 Tomashevsky left Moscow for Petrograd and joined OPOIaZ. He started working in the Pushkin House (the Institute of Russian Literature), and giving lectures at the State Institute of the History of Arts and, from 1924, at Leningrad University (professor from 1942). In the 1920s he published a treatise on Russian vesification, a compendium of Formalist poetics, and a textbook on the same subject. Due to “the external pressure” (his own words)—the official anti-Formalist policy started in 1931—Tomashevsky abandoned verse studies and poetics and focused on Pushkin’s biography and textology (a term he coined in the mid-1920s), as well as the research of Pushkin’s interests in French literature. As a “textologist” (textual analyst), he became one of the partisans of a new (“layer-by-layer”) method of transcribing manuscripts in critical editions that he championed both in theory and in practice. In 1948 he became the head of the Pushkin House’s Manuscript Department. Tomashevsky mostly escaped anti-Formalist purges, but his works in the field of comparative literature were officially condemned during the anti-comparativist campaign of 1948–1949. He returned to the study of verse only at the end of life.