Yury Tynyanov
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Yury Nikolaevich Tynyanov (Russian:
Ю́рий Никола́евич Тыня́нов; October 18,
1894 - December 20, 1943) was a famous
Soviet/Russian writer, literary critic,
translator, scholar and screenwriter of
Jewish origin. He was an authority on
Pushkin and an important member of the
Russian Formalist school.
Yury Tynyanov was born in Rezhitsa,
present day Rēzekne, Latvia, Russian
Empire. His brother-in-law was Veniamin
Kaverin, another well-known Russian
author. While attending the Petrograd
University, Tynyanov frequented the
Pushkin seminar held by a venerable
literary academic, Semyon Vengerov. His
first works made their appearance in
print in 1921.
In 1928, together with the linguist
Roman Jakobson, he published a famous
work titled Theses on Language, a
predecessor to structuralism, which
could be summarised in the following
manner:
1. Literary science had to have a firm
theoretical basis and an accurate
terminology.
2. The structural laws of a specific
field of literature had to be
established before it was related to
other fields.
3. The evolution of literature must be
studied as a system. All evidence,
whether literary or non-literary must be
analysed functionally.
4. The distinction between synchrony and
diachrony was useful for the study of
literature as for language, uncovering
systems at each separate stage of
development. But the history of systems
is also a system; each synchronic system
has its own past and future as part of
its structure. Therefore the distinction
should not be preserved beyond its
usefulness.
5. A synchronic system is not a mere
agglomerate of contemporaneous phenomena
catalogued. 'Systems' mean hierarchical
organisation.
6. The distinction between langue and
parole, taken from linguistics, deserves
to be developed for literature in order
to reveal the principles underlying the
relationship between the individual
utterance and a prevailing complex of
norms.
7. The analysis of the structural laws
of literature should lead to the setting
up of a limited number of structural
types and evolutionary laws governing
those types.
8.The discovery of the 'immanent laws'
of a genre allows one to describe an
evolutionary step, but not to explain
why this step has been taken by
literature and not another. Here the
literary must be related to the relevant
non-literary facts to find further laws,
a 'system of systems'. But still the
immanent laws of the individual work had
to be enunciated first.
Tynyanov also wrote historical novels in
which he applied his theories. His other
works included popular biographies of
Alexander Pushkin and Wilhelm
Küchelbecker and notable translations of
Heinrich Heine and other authors.
He died of multiple sclerosis in Moscow.
