Two approaches to the analysis of spatial and temporal organizations of a literary work (M.M. Bakhtin and V.M. Zhirmunsky)

This article examines two methodologies for analyzing a literary work. The first one was developed by M.M. Bakhtin on the basis of a broad aesthetic and philosophical approach; the second one was developed by V.M. Zhirmunsky on the basis of a more specific formal and poetological approach. These methodologies were applied by both researchers to A.S. Pushkin’s poems in the 1920s. It is argued that Bakhtin’s methodology was worked out in opposition to the main provisions of Zhirmunsky, who was close to the position of Russian formalism, also taking into account L.V. Shcherba’s achievements in the field of the linguistic analysis of a poetic text. This article describes the fundamental differences in the methodological conceptions of the philosopher and the literary critic concerning the nature of verbal creativity and understanding of the spatial and temporal organization of a literary work. The comparison of two analyses of Pushkin’s poem “For the Shores of Distant Homeland…”, shows that Zhirmunsky reduces the spatial and temporal aspects of a work of art to the compositional arrangement of verbal and sound material, since he considers verbal creativity as a linguistic phenomenon, while Bakhtin refers to the space and time of aesthetic reality, drawing a distinction between the composition and the architectonics of the literary work. It appears that the philosopher perceives the work as a field of dialogue between various subjects of consciousness (the author, the characters, the reader), while the literary critic proceeds from the author’s primacy as creator of a system of artistic techniques, giving the reader a position of passive perception. It is concluded that both methods of analysis complement each other organically, Zhirmunsky analyzing the verbal-compositional dimensions of a literary work and Bakhtin its objective-architectonic dimension.