Yury Tynyanov

Yury Tynyanov
Born	Yury Nasonovich Tynyanov (1894-10-18)October 18, 1894 Rezhitsa, Russian Empire
Died	December 20, 1943(1943-12-20) (aged 49) Moscow, USSR
Resting place	Vagankovo Cemetery, Moscow
Occupation	Writer, screenwriter, translator, literary critic, scholar
Language	Russian
Notable works	Lieutenant Kijé
Spouse	Leah Abelevna Zilber ​ ​ (m. 1916)​

Yury Nikolaevich Tynyanov (Russian: Ю́рий Никола́евич Тыня́нов, IPA: [ˈjʉrʲɪj nʲɪkɐˈlajɪvʲɪtɕ tɨˈnʲænəf]; October 18, 1894 – December 20, 1943) was a Soviet writer, literary critic, translator, scholar and screenwriter. He was an authority on Pushkin and an important member of the Russian Formalist school.

Early life and education

Yury Tynyanov as a child (left) with his sister and father

Yury Nikolaevich Tynyanov was born on 18 October 1894 in Rezhitsa, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire - modern day Latvia. Tynyanov was born in a Jewish community, but would go on to have little connections with his Jewish heritage. His father, Nikolai Arkadyevich Tynyanov, was a doctor while his mother, Sofya Borisovna Tynyanova (née Epshtein), was a co-owner of a tannery.

At age nine in 1904, Tynyanov attended the Pskov Provincial Gymnasium after he passed the enterance exams. With his brother, Tynyanov lived primarily in Pskov when he was attending the school, returning to Rezhitsa during the holidays via train to see his mother and sister, Lydia. He graduated in 1912 with a silver medal. Tynyanov then enterred the Faculty of History and Philology of Saint Petersburg University.

In 1916, he married Leah Abelevna Zilber, the elder sister of his friend and well-known Russian author Veniamin Kaverin. During his time in university, Tynyanov frequented the Pushkin seminar held by a venerable literary academic, Semyon Vengerov. His first works made their appearance in print in 1921.

Career

In 1925, Tynyanov released his first book titled "Kukhlya". He would then in 1927 publish another piece of historical fiction titled “The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar”. Aside from writing novels, Tynyanov wrote the scripts of The Overcoat (1926), Asya (1928) and The Club of the Big Deed (1927) in collaboration with Y.G. Oksman.

As a translator, he translated the poems of Heinrich Heine from German to Russian.

Tynyanov died of multiple sclerosis in Moscow in 1943, aged 49.

Major works

In 1928, together with the linguist Roman Jakobson, he published a famous work titled Theses on Language, a predecessor to structuralism (but see Ferdinand de Saussure), which could be summarised in the following manner (from ref.):

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.

Selected bibliography

In English

Works by Yury Tynyanov

• Formalist theory, translated by L.M. O'Toole and Ann Shukman (1977)
• Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar, translated by Susan Causey (edited by Vera Tsareva-Brauner), Look Multimedia (2018)
• The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar, translated by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush, Columbia University Press, 2021 (The Russian Library)
• Lieutenant Kijé / Young Vitushishnikov: Two Novellas (Eridanos Library, No. 20), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1990)
• Lieutenant Kizhe, translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater, Look Multimedia (2021)
• "Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film" translated and edited by Ainsley Morse & Philip Redko (2019, Academic Studies Press)

Works edited by Yury Tynyanov

• Russian Prose, edited by Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum and Yury Tynyanov, translated by Ray Parrot (1985)

In Russian

Novels:

• Кюхля, 1925
• Смерть Вазир-Мухтара, 1928
• Пушкин, 1936

Novellas and stories:

• Подпоручик Киже, 1927
• Восковая персона, 1930
• Малолетный Витушишников, 1933
• Гражданин Очер

On Pushkin and his era:

• Архаисты и Пушкин, 1926
• Пушкин, 1929
• Пушкин и Тютчев, 1926
• О "Путешествии в Арзрум", 1936
• Безыменная любовь, 1939
• Пушкин и Кюхельбекер, 1934
• Французские отношения Кюхельбекера, 1939

1. Путешествие Кюхельбекера по Западной Европе в 1820 – 1821 гг.
2. Декабрист и Бальзак.

• Сюжет "Горя от ума", 1943

External links

• A brief article on Tynyanov's historical novels
• a Russian site with links to several online texts
• Question about Tyutchev