Analytical vs. Synthetic Theories in 1920s Russia

It was almost a century ago that a double polarity emerged in the Russian episteme, and in particular in the theory of art and literature. The vertical axis came to be dominated by the official doctrine of Marxism–Leninism, high up—in the position of power, below was whatever was left of autonomous scholarship. The horizontal axis was where the concepts of analytics and those of synthetics in the theory and practice of art and culture were positioned. In the Russia of the 1920s, this vertical polarity was clearly represented by the official doctrines of the ruling ideology of the party and the state. However, unlike in the Stalin era that was to follow, this dominance was not yet dependent solely on the brutal use of force, which allowed the avant-garde concepts of analytics and synthetics alike to develop in all areas of culture and art (futurism vs acmeism, constructivism vs suprematism, etc.), even if this cultural field was becoming more and more restricted and suppressed. In the theory of art and literature, the analytical ideas of Russian formalism (exemplified by Shklovskii, Eikhenbaum, Tynianov, but also Zhirmunskii, Vinogradov, or Tomashevskii) stood in opposition to the explicitly synthetic ones of the so-called “formal-philosophical school”—with the latter represented by the Moscow GAKhN = Gosudarstvennaia Akademiia Khudozhestvennykh Nauk (the State Academy of Art Sciences) and the Leningrad GIII = Gosudarstvennyi Institut Istorii Iskusstv (the State Institute of Art History). The GAKhN was under the philosophical dominance of the phenomenologist Gustav Shpet; other prominent figures there were A. Gabrichevskii, M. Gershenzon, B. Griftsov, N. Zhinkin, V. Kandinskii, M. Petrovskii, B. Tarabukin, A. Tsires, B. Iarkho, G. Vinokur, and others.