Literature and Literary Theory, Visual Arts and Performing Arts, Philosophy, History
12
Scopus Publications
Scopus Publications
On the Origin of Postimperial Formalism: Revolutionary Populist Ethnographers, Poetic Language, and the Energy of Liberation Michał Mrugalski Poetics Today, 2025 Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian Formalism were all facets of a larger phenomenon called Postimperial Formalism. The shared postimperial heritage is epitomized by the Polish-Russian-Ukrainian Siberian school that emerged among exiled populist revolutionaries in the 1880s and 1890s as well as in the linguistic work of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay. The author reconstructs the ways in which the imperial situation in general, and the Siberian school and Baudouinian linguistics as its instantiations, made possible the Formalist theory of poetic language as a universal phenomenon across cultures (and not restricted to higher cultures entitled to dominate more “natural peoples”). Language is conceived as necessarily divided into distinct communicative and poetic currents, and poetic language always appears alien to its natives. Thus, aesthetic autonomy, and consequently the autonomy of the subject who experiences its own freedom in art, has a translinguistic character, since “estrangement” always operates in relation to communicative language. The strangeness of poetic language coincides with the problematic relationship between sound and meaning prompted by the tension between energy expenditure and austerity. This common situation also sheds light on other otherwise inexplicable and seemingly whimsical qualities of Formalism in the successor states of the Russian Empire, most importantly the role that the Formalist idolaters of the autonomy of the “literary series” played in the Soviet political strategy of nativization and, to some extent, in the Polish politics of regionalism.
Provocation and Pre-Diction: Terrorist Realism as a Narrative Mode in the Russian Empire 1862–1914 (Particularly in Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, 1913) Russian Literature and Cognitive Science, 2024
Ukraine as the Hub of Postimperial Formalism. Ukrainness, Revolutionary Populism, and the Theory of Poetical Language 'in' Russia and 'in' Poland Michał Mrugalski Linguistic Frontiers, 2023 The notion of ‘postimperial formalism’ accounts of the interconnectedness of Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish variants of formalism, whose distinctive character is contingent on the dialectics of liberation and subjugation (or autonomy and heteronomy) operating in the multinational entity of the Russian empire. Specifically, the theory of poetic language – the pars pro toto of early literary theory – carries with itself the survivals of the conditions of the multinational empire. This is most eloquently expressed in the writings of Polish and Jewish-Ukrainian populist activists turned ethnographic researchers, who prepared a theory of poetic language to which the formalists could have recourse. I first map the dimensions of the Ukrainian investment into the formulation of the theory of poetic language. Secondly, I describe the role of the constructed Ukrainness – under the guise of the so-called Ukrainian school of Polish romanticism – in the emergence of Polish formalism.
The tragedy of early literary theory Przeglad Filozoficzno Literacki, 2017
The time of Aeschylus has dawned, my dear. Wagner, Bakunin, Slowacki on the Greek tragedy and the creative destruction Michał Mrugalski Zeitschrift Fur Slawistik, 2012 The present paper is an endeavor to formulate the tertium comparationis between the “time of Aeschylus”, when the Greek tragedy came into being, and the time of Juliusz Słowacki, in whose poem we find the title comparison, or the identification of the two epochs. The tragic potential lies in the habitus where Słowacki and his contemporaries wrote and acted, i.e. in the way the people interacted in order to negotiate the answers to the events that had happened to them or that they had provoked. The best way to hem the inherent tragic of Słowacki’s habitus in is to recall the epoch’s pre-scenes (Urszenen) and to extract their intrinsic theory, i.e. the logics of praxis that defines the acts of the actors. The most promising seems to be the theory of tragedy: both the one explicitly expressed by the mentioned authors, heroes of the pre-scenes, and the implicit one. The Greek tragedy served our actors as an ideal fulfillment of the then theory’s assumptions: it spanned a realm in which a word actually was an action. The three heroes of our pre-scenes – their relations intertwine until they create a web with which to catch the tertium comparationis – also emphasized the destructive, rebellious nature of Greek tragedy and its theory. In it, a destructive potential of art is supposed to appear for the first time in history; the very potential will become later a vital part of modern art’s organon and will eventually influence the aesthetics of the new total politics in the 20th Century. The present paper comprises four major sections: in the first one, the author contemplates the concurrence of the theory and the praxis in the pre-scenes and eventually extracts the most characteristic elements of the scenes, so that he may articulate these extracted terms’ oppositions and identifications that shaped the late romantic theory of tragedy, and of action. In the second part, the author concentrates on a particular identification: that of creation with destruction. In the third part, the author turns to the privileged object of these destructive-creative actions of ancient and future tragedy – the law. In the last part, the planned totality of the new tragedy is demonstrated, as the new tragedy is supposed to create a new form of sociality, a new organic social system.
Bakhtin and general abolition Teksty Drugie, 2011
The aesthetics of revolution - The revolution of aesthetics. Karol Libelt and the "polenprozess" of 1847 in Berlin Zeitschrift Fur Slavische Philologie, 2011
