How Lenin’s language is made: Material of history and technique of ideology

Abstract

There is a connection between the formal theory and the history in which formalists were submerged, the history which they represented and the history which they reflected in their scholarly and literary works. This connection is not limited by the use of historical, biographical or artistic material for the illustration of theoretical ideas. Formalists described literature as the destruction of the habits of perception and interpretation formed by the everyday life. In this sense the mechanisms of literature and history turned out to be isomorphous with each other. The concept of defamiliarization formulated by V. Shklovsky becomes, then, not only a universal mechanism of art, but also an immanent law of history. While formalists tended to bare the device — the “literariness” of literature, the revolution was seen by them as “baring” the historical device of history itself. A special issue of the journal LEF published in 1924 under the title “Lenin’s Language” was dedicated to the study of the political language of the revolutionary leader. Participants of this special issue included representatives of OPOIAZ and the Moscow Linguistic Circle. Description of V. Lenin’s language as one which followed the laws of poetic language that had been “discovered by Formalists” was an official opportunity for them to extend their theory of literary evolution into the sphere of social history as a whole. The very concept of the “device” that bares the “completeness” of a literary work found its application in the critical analysis of ideology. In this manner, ideology is revealed as opposed to history in precisely the same manner as automatized practical language is opposed to poetic language. Lenin’s language is transformed into an agent of poetic, revolutionary disavowal of ideology, the durability of which relies on the ideological automatization of false consciousness and everyday habits of perception.