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The Nature of Language and the Language of Nature: The Concept of Evolution in Russian Formalism and Structuralism

Basil Lvoff
p. 147-162

Résumés

L’article compare les approches de Roman Jakobson et de Boris Yarkho des théories évolutives utilisées pour expliquer le développement linguistique et littéraire. Le travail de Jakobson, fondé sur des principes nomogénétiques, reliait le langage et la vie organique par la métaphore, mettant l’accent sur les schémas universels de l’évolution dans les deux domaines. En revanche, Yarkho, un adepte de Darwin et Mendel, traitait la littérature de manière métonymique — comme une extension homologique de la vie. L’approche de Yarkho cherchait à établir un ordre à grande échelle, comme en biologie des populations, en s’appuyant sur une méthode comparative-statistique, dans laquelle il anticipait les Humanités Numériques. Pendant ce temps, l’approche de Jakobson, bien que fondée sur la nomogenèse scientifiquement obsolète, s’alignait avec le travail de Schrödinger dans What Is Life?, qui explorait les régularités des systèmes vivants. Les prédictions de Schrödinger sur la base moléculaire de la vie, y compris la structure cristalline apériodique, ont précédé la découverte de la structure en double hélice de l’ADN, une percée que Jakobson a célébrée comme une confirmation de ses métaphores biologiques pour le langage.

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After Spinoza… Fechner did not shy at attributing a soul to a plant, to the earth as a celestial body, to the planetary system, etc. I do not fall in with these fantasies, yet I should not like to have to pass judgment as to who has come nearer to the deepest truth, Fechner or the bankrupts of rationalism. (Schrödinger 2012: 94–95)

Introduction

1Crossbreeding human and natural sciences (as Dilthey called them) is frowned upon, like those unlawful marriages condemned for their morbid offspring—to wit, social Darwinism. Yet, in the course of time, così fan tutte—morphological theories at least, when the sprout of theory has grown into a tree which casts the shadow of diachrony and reflexivity.

2Conscious attempts to marry literature with biology had already been made at the close of the nineteenth century—by Ferdinand Brunetière, who wrote about ‘l’évolution des genres’ with an eye to Darwin. (It was convergent with a saltation, a leap in the development, of comparative linguistics and, later, comparative literature.) Today, a similar trend is active in Digital Humanities, as practiced by Franco Moretti and his colleagues who study the diffusion of literary forms in terms of population biology—what Moretti calls ‘the Darwinian side of cultural geography: forms that fight for space’ (2013: 103). (Of course, there are fundamental differences between Brunetière and Digital Humanists, both in the premises and methods of research, largely due to the historic breakthroughs achieved by the life sciences since then.)

  • 1  Rad Borislavov (2011) disputes that as regards Shklovsky. For a counterargument, see Lvoff 2021. T (...)
  • 2  All translations from Russian and other foreign sources are mine unless specified otherwise.

3However, it was Russian Formalism and phylogenetically related Structuralism, these trailblazing movements of modern literary and linguistic theory, that set a particularly far-reaching example: on the one hand, with the exception of Yarkho (see section 3), the Formalists and Structuralists strove for a self-defined and self-legislating literary and linguistic theory; on the other, the leading ones among them would sooner or later fall under the spell of contemporary biology. For reasons laid out elsewhere, I doubt that biology was as pivotal for the legendary trio of Petrograd Formalists: Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, and Boris Eikhenbaum.1 Meanwhile, as this article goes to show, biology proved to be indispensable for Roman Jakobson, originally their closest ally, becoming the cornerstone of his structuralist life drive toward a ‘system of systems’2 (Tynianov and Jakobson 1977: 283)—in and of itself, also a biological metaphor (cf. Pilshchikov 2024). Lastly, as a counterexample to Jakobson, this article cites Moscow Formalist Boris Yarkho. Increasingly recognized for his prescient work in applying statistics-driven biology to literature, Yarkho also inferred the patterns of verbal art from its affinity with organic life; however, unlike Jakobson, he did so by embracing Darwin’s teaching, not opposing it. It is thereby the task of this article to uncover the methodological and epistemological premises of these scholars as they grappled with the mystery of evolutionary laws.

1. From positivist confusio linguarum to structuralist sprachbund

4When the Visigoths sacked Rome, St. Augustine sought refuge in the City of God, a realm of perennial truths—not the City of Man, whose walls no longer offered protection. Thus, where locus failed, logos came to the rescue. In a way, this also was true for the fathers of Russian Formalism and Prague Structuralism, above all Roman Jakobson. Five times was he forced to flee for his life by two totalitarian regimes before settling in America, his first ostranenie (in the sense of estrangement, displacement) propelled by ‘Someone 1917,’ as per Velimir Khlebnikov’s prophetic inscription (1912: 112) crowning the list of kingdoms and the dates of their fall next to them. That, of course, came to be the year of the Russian Revolution.

5Then again, like the Byzantines who fled ‘Second Rome’ upon its capture and brought the seeds of Renaissance to Europe, the Formalists and the Structuralists belonged to interwar intellectuals from Central and Eastern Europe who, according to Galin Tihanov, laid the foundations of modern literary—and, by extension, linguistic—theory thanks to their precarious status. All were subjects of ‘by-then-defunct empires before World War I,’ of which each one was ‘a natural locus of polyglossia and heterotopia (exile), providing—sometimes at the cost, and in the form, of bitter ethnic conflicts—a painfully beneficial environment for theoretical contemplation of literature beyond the presumed naturalness [~’pax imperica ?’—B.L.] of native tongues and traditions’ (Tihanov 2004: 80).

6This, doubtless, accelerated the drift of literary and linguistic scholarship toward greater systematicity, already evident in Alexander Veselovsky’s historical poetics, which paved the way for Vladimir Propp’s morphology of the folk tale—or in Jan Baudouin de Courtenay’s phonology, which laid the groundwork for Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson’s phonological structuralism.

7Nor was it perhaps a coincidence that the political system, sharing the same environment with new literary and linguistic scholarship, paralleled their evolution. Thus, empires were upheld by a distinctly positivistic principle of accumulation—adding territories, tribes, tongues; then, empires disintegrated, giving way to polities organized around certain ‘innate traits,’ viz., nation-states centered on national identity or ideocracies such as the Soviet Union. Metaphorically speaking, it could be said that the fall of the imperial eagles (Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German)—as well as that of the Ottoman crescent—made more apparent such phenomena as the fall of the jers, the latter having been famously reevaluated by Jakobson in his 1929 book Remarques sur l’évolution phonologique du russe comparée à celle des autres langues slaves (Remarks on the Phonological Evolution of Russian in Comparison with the Other Slavic Languages) as the phonological shift that triggered the evolution of Common Slavic.

8The comparison drawn above between intellectual and political history is essential, if only because the juxtaposition of the two was the touchstone of Russian Formalism, a major forerunner of Structuralism. In the lectures on Russian Formalism, which he delivered at Masaryk University in 1935, Jakobson commented on this classic chicken-and-egg problem of which revolutions come first, poetical or political—siding with ‘immanent, independent development of poetic forms, which cannot be mechanically derived from other socio-economic layers’ (2011: 19). The common Formalist understanding was that no literary theory is possible unless the autonomy of literature is recognized. In the words of Eikhenbaum (1987: 379), ‘all efforts were directed to putting an end to the earlier status of literature, when, to quote Veselovsky, literature was a res nullius.’ Eikhenbaum was referring to the famous passage in which Veselovsky had described (2006: 57) the status of literary history as almost that of a colony, ‘where the art historian and the aesthetician go hunting, along with the erudite and the scholar of social relations,’ taking whatever they like, ‘according to [their] abilities and beliefs, with the same label on the good or prey, which is far from being the same.’ Now Formalism was set to approach literature in terms of ‘literariness,’ as Jakobson put it in The Newest Russian Poetry—a pioneering book on Khlebnikov written in 1919, published in 1921 (1997: 179).

9One key approach was to reevaluate the medium of the work as its message (to use Marshall McLuhan’s phrase), i.e., to make language the ‘protagonist’ of verbal art, as, for example, in the Formalist theory of skaz. Thus, in an influential article ‘How Gogol’s “Overcoat” Is Made’ (1918), Eikhenbaum challenged the prevailing view that reduced the story’s stylistic and thematic complexity to the plight of its central character—the ‘little man’ of Russian literature, unnoticed but with a delicate soul. According to Eikhenbaum, the story of the humiliated and insulted clerk was a byproduct of Gogol’s intonational techniques (skaz), not the overarching symbol it became in Russian literary criticism. Meanwhile, the ‘little man’ reading was so powerful that Russian literature is often said to have come from under Gogol’s overcoat. Having gone against the grain of this tradition, the new literary scholarship encroached on the domain of sociological criticism the very way sociological criticism had previously violated the autonomy of literary facts. As a matter of course, Tynianov, a close collaborator of both Eikhenbaum and Jakobson, described this type of logic as the ‘“imperialism” of the constructive principle’ (1977: 267), and while he used the phrase to describe the expansion of literature into previously non-literary genres, such as the diary, the term does apply to the theory created in literature’s image and likeness.

10It may come as a surprise that, after insisting on literature’s literariness, Jakobson would soon align linguistic evolution with evolution proper, that of living organisms. Yet, in his final lecture on Formalism, Jakobson criticized its inability ‘to adopt a consistent dialectical framework of artistic development and its relationship with other components of social life’ (2011: 83). His take on Formalism notwithstanding, what this passage shows is the abovementioned movement toward a ‘system of systems,’ which Jakobson declared in the theses he cowrote with Tynianov in Prague in 1928: ‘Problems in the Study of Literature and Language.’ Thus, if the first stage of new literary and linguistic scholarship resembled a nation’s quest for self-determination, and the second, a kind of risorgimento essential to nation-building, then the third—associated with Structuralism rather than Formalism—evokes Trubetzkoy’s idea developed by Jakobson—that of a Sprachbund, or language union: a coalition of independent nations united by shared interests.

11Trubetzkoy’s Eurasianism is evidence that there was indeed a political dimension to new linguistic ideas. In 1929, the same year as his trailblazing book on phonology, Jakobson published Über die heutigen Voraussetzungen der russischen Slavistik (On the Current Conditions of Russian Slavic Studies)—an article ‘interesting in that it brings together ideological, scientific, and political trends,’ as Nataliya Avtonomova and Mikhail Gasparov observe (2023: 532). The latter two juxtapose that article with Jakobson’s later one, ‘The Kernel of Comparative Slavic Literature,’ published in 1953 and already in America. The 1929 article not only contrasted positivist eclecticism and structuralist functionalism; it also paid homage to Eurasianism by opposing Slavic and ‘Romano-Germanic’ scholarship to one another. According to Avtonomova and Gasparov, Jakobson never saw to it that the 1929 article was republished, as Stalin had co-opted the idea of a language union, compromising the vision behind it. Subsequently, Trubetzkoy abandoned Eurasianism as a movement while Jakobson, whose primary goal was to promote Slavic studies, had to change his rhetoric.

12What is noteworthy in this context is the shift of emphasis from convergent to divergent development of Slavic cultures, as Avtonomova and Gasparov observe. Convergence, highlighted in the 1929 article, was toned down in the 1953 publication, while divergence was played up—among other things, lest Slavic studies be too narrowly associated with the Soviet Union. And yet, in that same year, DNA was deciphered, and Jakobson’s commitment to convergence resurfaced in the enthusiasm with which he embraced it as a linguist, reinforcing the principles he had drawn from contemporary biology in the 1920s. It is, therefore, necessary to analyze the biological underpinnings of Jakobson’s scholarship.

2. The role of biology in Jakobson’s theory

13Remarks on the Phonological Evolution of Russian in Comparison with the Other Slavic Languages was Jakobson’s first foundational work to explain linguistic phenomena through parallels with biology. This book was a huge step towards Jakobson’s groundbreaking theory of distinctive features—the term coined already in the 1940s. That theory challenged Saussure’s division between the synchronic and diachronic study of language, for Jakobson insisted on studying the history of language also as a system. As summarized by Ladislav Matejka (1997: 172), ‘the decomposition of the phoneme into concurrent distinctive features rejected Saussure’s “linearité du signifiant” and, thereby, one of the general principles of his Cours’—which, Matejka adds, was also ‘the underlying impetus’ to Jakobson’s book of 1929. Where historical linguistics seemed to be too random and asystematic, evolutionary biology, particularly the doctrine Jakobson opted for, offered the desired answers.

14Along these lines, Jakobson argued that the fall of the jers created a domino effect in the evolution of Common Slavic. The drop of the jers—ultra-short, originally high vowels, ь and ъ (the latter, in strong positions, likely realized as mid)—actualized other meaning-differentiating oppositions in Slavic languages (e.g., between phonemic pitch and consonant palatalization), which, in turn, led to new conflicts between distinctive features, such as the struggle between phonemic vowel quantity and phonemic stress accent. As Ronald I. Kim observes (2020: 83), ‘much scholarship before World War I treated changes such as palatalization or umlaut in atomistic terms, as isolated events,’ whereas ‘Jakobson argued that all linguistic changes must be viewed in terms of their impact on the structure of the language as a whole, a view that has since come to seem entirely natural.’ Thus, rather than observe the patterns of change, as an average positivist would have, Jakobson integrated the phonological facts, systematizing them in the form of conflicts between distinctive features, unfolding within the constraints of a given language. This went to show the same level of systemic interconnectedness in language when it unfolds as in language taken at a given point in time.

15The jer fall described in the book became one of the best-known tropes of Slavic linguistics, and yet Jakobson’s book itself did not receive as much attention. That was partly due to the manner in which it was written. On one hand, Jakobson’s style got often technical to the point of being spartan and then suddenly burst with multifarious metaphors, not to mention nonconventional terminology such as accent musical. On the other, these tendencies were exacerbated in Louis Brun’s French translation, the Russian original of the book lost, while the English translation, the one by Ronald F. Feldstein, saw the light of day only in 2018. As a result, the theoretical underpinnings of the Remarks, including numerous references to biology, were overlooked. When analyzed in the context of Jakobson’s early as well as later work, they do shed light on his holistic view of the role of language among other systems.

  • 3  For an earlier treatment of Jakobson vis-à-vis Berg, see Sériot 1995. In that article, Sériot trac (...)

16It is, therefore, of great import that Jakobson turned not to Charles Darwin, but Lev Berg (1876–1950), the world-acclaimed Soviet geographer, biologist, and ichthyologist who developed a controversial theory of evolution, expounded in Nomogenesis ; or, Evolution Determined by Law, first published in 1922, then published in English in 1926 and republished by The MIT. Press in 1969.3

17Berg’s theory was a form of orthogenesis, i.e., directed evolution, thereby opposed to Darwin. He derived his conclusions among other things from observing fossils of organic life in geological layers, which led him to conclude that ‘it is not individuals [osob’] but the absolute, or nearly absolute, totality thereof that undergoes change’ (2021: 446). Note that Berg writes about ‘the massive transformation of forms in space’ ‘in the same way’ when they change ‘in time, namely, when moving from one geological layer to another’ (ibid.). This is the same logic we find in Formalism, as exemplified by the following passage from Eikhenbaum (1924: 8): ‘[H]owever paradoxical it may sound, history is a science of the permanent, the immutable, the immovable though it has to do with change, with movement. It can be a science only insofar as it manages to transform real movement into a chart.’

18Thus, based on the geological layers he observed, Berg concluded that evolution unfolds mainly through leaps (~shifts in Formalist and Structuralist parlance), affecting large groups of organisms which would suddenly develop identical traits in a given territory (~language unions). Evolutionary change was, therefore, not random but driven by rigid morphological laws (~the phonological constraints described by Jakobson).

  • 4  It is necessary to point out that Haeckel put forth a racist doctrine of evolutionary polygenism. (...)

19This said, Berg also opposed his theory to Lamarck, who believed in spontaneous generation, when new life forms keep arising from inorganic matter. (To this day, this problem, abiogenesis, has not been resolved.) At the same time, unlike Darwin, Berg insisted on organisms evolving polyphyletically—from many ancestors, not one. Berg maintained that ‘individual development may not only repeat but also anticipate phylogeny,’ ‘realizing the forms that, normally, are characteristic of organisms at higher level in the system’ (2021: 447). In writing this, Berg relied on Haeckel’s law: ‘ontogeny repeats phylogeny’ (ibid.).4 Jakobson cites this passage in the Remarks: ‘The role of individual initiators of a phenomenon consists solely in “hastening phylogenesis,” to use a term from modern biology, where similar processes are discussed; in other words, here, “ontogenesis, so to speak, anticipates phylogenesis”’ (1962: 108). ‘However,’ Jakobson adds, ‘even without this condition, an innovation may still occur through pure convergence’ (ibid.)

  • 5  For a comparison with McLuhan’s theory that situates Russian Formalism beyond the theory of art an (...)

20An instance of convergence was the striking similarity of these biological principles to the formal cause as it has been interpreted since the time of Aristotle. In Formalist and Structuralist writings, given the emphasis on the self-sufficiency of the verbal system, the formal cause also merged with the final cause—the blueprint with design, the medium with the message.5 Suffice it to replace species with phonemes, and it will become more apparent yet how much Jakobson’s theory shares with Berg’s.

21This also helps explain away the seeming positivism of some of Jakobson’s observations in the Remarks—for example when in Chapter VII of the Remarks he writes that it took phonological changes a longer time to spread to Ukrainian and Russian dialects due to the severity of winters. Jakobson did not write of cold temperatures as the cause of phonological changes—instead, he considered them by way of overdetermination, when systems overlap. This could be compared to the ‘biological question’ Erwin Schrödinger raises in What Is Life ?—about ‘the stability of a molecule at different temperatures.’ ‘Just like Berg,’ Rad Borislavov writes, ‘Jakobson borrowed the Darwinian language but rejected its premises’ (2011: 229), and the same could be said about the nomenclature of positivism.

22All of this proves that, similarly to Berg, Jakobson saw morphological similarities between the organisms as analogous, not homologous. In biology, the distinction is crucial. Homology explains morphological and genetic overlaps between organisms by their shared ancestry (e.g., the forelimbs of apes, bats, or whales)—that is the Darwinian approach. By contrast, analogy, or homoplasy, explains such similarities as a result of environmental constraints, not kinship. That is why Jakobson sympathized with Berg’s certitude that organisms evolved polyphyletically, i.e., from more than a single ancestral stock. Moreover, while modern biology predominantly upholds the Darwinian view that all organisms developed from one common ancestor, because of how extraordinarily rare, statistically miraculous, the emergence of organic life from nonorganic matter was—in language, the position of polygenesis is somewhat less weak.

23All these questions are being debated to this day and have not been resolved even by Modern Synthesis, i.e., Darwinism, plus Mendel’s genetics. Time and again, such modern fields as evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo)—as they study epigenesis (the stadial maturation of an organism)—will come across the sort of data that evoke the writings of Berg or Lamarck. Thus, this is not just a fact of intellectual history: since we still rely on Structuralism and Formalism, we should treat the analogies they drew with other disciplines as worthy of consideration, even if those disciplines are duly considered obsolete. And yet no provisos will be necessary if we compare Jakobson to his fellow Moscow Formalist Boris Yarkho, who relied on Darwinism and Mendelism when writing about literary development in the 1930s.

3. Darwinism and Mendelism in Yarkho’s literary scholarship

24Boris Isaakovich Yarkho (1889–1942) was a black sheep among the Formalists, even though he shared some important terminology with them (e.g., evolution vs. genesis, or the dominant) and was a member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle, for which Jakobson, its president, had put him forward. He remained a presence for Jakobson into his Czech period, as evidenced, for example, by the back-cover announcement of Yarkho’s Carolingian Rhythms in Jakobson’s On Czech Verse, Primarily in Comparison with Russian (1923), published with a dedication to Shklovsky. In 1929, Jakobson and Tynianov, having just written the Prague theses, hoped to revive The Society for the Study of the Theory of Poetic Language (Opoyaz) under Shklovsky’s leadership and were recruiting members. Shklovsky sent Yarkho an invitation; according to Shklovsky, Yarkho politely declined, remarking that ‘the correct method is statistical,’ which Shklovsky protested, writing that Yarkho ‘appears not to understand the meaning of the word method’ (qtd. in Tynianov 1977: 533–34).

25Yarkho indeed sounded like a positivist to a ‘Futurian of science’ such as Shklovsky, to whom this title applies as much as to Jakobson, who styled himself with it. Yarkho did not see the word as self-sufficient and was busy extrapolating scientific methods to literary scholarship and even ‘suggested replacing the entirety of traditional literary nomenclature of types by the appropriate biological one, i.e., telling between [literary] species, genus, order, family, etc.’ (Akimova 2005: 29).

26The title of Yarkho’s seminal theoretical work, Metodologiia tochnogo literaturovedeniia (The Methodology of Exact Literary Scholarship), implied biological rather than mathematical exactitude: in writing his oeuvre, Yarkho looked up to Einführung in die exakte Erblichkeitslehre (An Introduction to Exact Heredity) by Wilhelm Johannsen—one of the fathers of genetics. Yarkho’s painstaking research applied biology-driven statistics to the study of literature, particularly literary genres, not coincidentally bearing resemblance to population biology. To his contemporaries, Yarkho’s scholarship may have looked as irrelevant—today, however, the degree to which it anticipated Digital Humanities is striking. Yarkho finished his Methodology c. 1936, yet it got published in its entirety only in 2006, though some English translations have appeared both before and after this date, contributing to Yarkho’s growing recognition.

27Unlike Jakobson, Yarkho treated literary and organic forms as homologous. This said, he did not see literature as biology’s stepdaughter; rather, he regarded both as sisters, alike as part of the same ‘common flow of life’ (2006: 7). This, however, was fundamentally different from the nomogenetic binding principle of Jakobson’s. Yarkho defined his method as ‘comparative-statistical, supported, as far as it is possible, by experiment’ (ibid.).

28Most importantly, Yarkho drew not only on Darwin but also on Mendel—just at the time when modern synthesis between the two great scientists, previously opposed to one another, was coming to fruition. Yarkho mentions Mendel already at the beginning of The Methodology: ‘I shall make no secret of it: in the inmost recesses of my soul, I am dreaming of Mendel’s lot: in ten–twenty years, I shall be excavated, discovered, etc.’ (ibid.: 4).

29An example of Mendelism as Yarkho uses it in The Methodology can be seen in the section ‘The Concept of the Feature’ (Poniatie priznaka), in which he discusses the basics of (literary) analysis. Yarkho writes that analysis takes two features, ‘qualities of the same object,’ and compares them until it uncovers a difference (ibid.: 68). ‘That is when analyzing may (but should not) stop,’ he says (ibid.). One of the examples Yarkho adduces is Corneille’s Examen de ‘La Suivante,’ in which, according to Yarkho, the great tragedian ‘singled out three ways of connecting scenes: 1) bruit (the voice of the entering personage is heard); 2) vue (he is seen from a distance); 3) présence et discours (the previous ones remain on stage and talk to him)’ (ibid.: 69). To this, Yarkho adds: ‘Later, however (Discours sur le poème dramatique), Corneille thought it necessary to divide the last feature into two, as observation had made it evident that in drama there can also be a “presence” without “discourse” (for instance, a hiding personage)’ (ibid.: 68).

  • 6  “Heterozygous refers to having inherited different forms of a particular gene from each parent. A (...)

30This may be seen as a pea-sized example, but, after all, Mendel’s momentous discovery was owing to his observation of peas, namely, their colors, illustrating the laws of inheritance, which accounted for the change of traits in the generations of descendants. Yarkho’s example of Mendelism is very similar. ‘If […] in the Mendelizing of plants it is observed that white flowers alternate with yellow-violet ones, then “white” and “yellow-violet” are equipotent traits,’ Yarkho writes (ibid.). ‘If, however,’ he continues, ‘in further crossbreeding both yellow and violet flowers appear (the yellow-violet ones turned out to be heterozygous6 and split), then “yellow-violet” already constitutes two traits’—as with Corneille’s ‘présence et discours’ split into two (ibid.: 68–69).

31This example illustrates the manner in which Yarkho approached the features of literary works. However, one needs to read his Methodology closely to assess the heuristic value of dozens of statistical calculations and graphs scattered throughout its pages.

4. The return of logocentrism ?

32If we draw on Jakobson’s famous distinction between metaphor and metonymy as two organizing principles of language, it is obvious which one guided Jakobson and which one, Yarkho. In Jakobson’s view, organic life and that of language belonged to the same nomogenetic paradigm, hence the metaphor. Yarkho treated literature metonymically—as an extension of life following common patterns, but not the kind of patterns that constrain the system at hand, prescribing it a certain evolution, yet patterns that emerge statistically, when quantity turns into quality, which is best seen if we study large corpora of literary and linguistic data rather than set out on a quest for minimal units, such as distinctive features. (Today, what Yarkho did is called distant reading—the term coined by Moretti.)

33If we next look at the metaphors employed by the two scholars, we will see that Jakobson’s favorite imagery had to do with conflicts, while Yarkho wrote (ibid.: 346) with great inspiration about the universal law of waves as it describes the ebbs and flows in literature and other domains of human activity. Interestingly, Jakobson’s focus on the small rather than the large was more aligned with quantum physics, particularly with its focus on small particles, and with the trends in biology that led to the discovery of the DNA structure.

34The question of common patterns in the configuration of atoms in both organic and inorganic systems was broached in Schrödinger’s What Is Life ? (1944). He, too, showed how statistics help overcome the chaos which emerges when we look at the configurations of atoms too closely (e.g. Brownian motion). And yet what fascinated Schrödinger was the resilience of living organisms against entropy despite a low number of atoms. ‘[T]he unfolding of events in the life cycle of an organism,’ Schrödinger wrote, ‘exhibits an admirable regularity and orderliness, unrivalled by anything we meet with in inanimate matter’ (2012: 77). From the laws and regularities governing the configuration of atoms as such, Schrödinger proceeds to ‘a supremely well-ordered group of atoms’ within a cell, to ‘social organization,’ acknowledging the fact that ‘we, no doubt, draw on experience concerning social organization and other events which involve the activity of organisms’ as we admire ‘the event that existing order displays the power of maintaining itself and of producing orderly events’ (ibid.). This does evoke Jakobson. Now, one could dismiss Schrödinger’s consternation if not for the following circumstance—the fact that Schrödinger predicted the decoding of DNA by writing about ‘an aperiodic crystal,’ which was his definition of ‘the chromosome fibre,’ as ‘the most essential part of a living cell’ (ibid.: 5).

  • 7  To read more about the overlap between computer science, biology, and the humanities, see Liberman (...)

35The discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953 was thus a confirmation of Schrödinger’s scientific intuition, as well as the source of sheer enthusiasm for Jakobson. Jakobson was fascinated by the idea of a genetic code governing the individual as though a program. (The interest Jakobson took in cybernetics should also be remembered.7) Geneticists, in the words of Nobel-winning biologist François Jacob, were also ‘astonished to find that heredity corresponds to a message written along the chromosomes using not ideograms, but a chemical alphabet,’ so that ‘expressions borrowed from linguistics have been widely used in molecular genetics’ (1977: 186).

36Jakobson wrote on the subject multiple times since, in particular in ‘Essais de linguistique générale. 2. Rapports Internes et Externes du Langage’ (Essays in General Linguistics. Volume 2: Internal and External Relations of Language), in which he correlated nucleotides with phonemes and codons with words. (As contemporary scholars show (Bel-Enguix & Jiménez-López 2012: 776), these correlations also concern the semantic aspect, including such ‘phenomena that can be found in the genetic code [as] synonymy, polysemy, ambiguity.’) Then there was a French television program ‘Vivre et Parler.’ Recorded in 1968, it featured a linguist, Jakobson himself; an anthropologist, Lévi-Strauss; a molecular biologist, François Jacob; and a geneticist, Philippe L’Héritier. The four discussed parallels between language and organic life, with Jakobson once again referencing Berg—the reference neither Jacob nor L’Héritier commented on.

  • 8  To read more on the subject, see Glebov 2005 and Sériot 1999.

37It was undoubtedly the Eurasianist milieu of the 1920s that added to the importance Berg held for Jakobson. Thus, Michal Racyn writes that Petr Savitsky, once a profound influence on Jakobson8 and one of the leaders of Eurasianism as well as a geographer, cherished Berg’s Nomogenesis as an endeavor to ‘combine natural science with the metaphysical acceptance of religion and the existence of God’s will’ (2023: 191).

  • 9  That was a major argument of Marxist critics against Formalism—see “The Formalist School of Poetry (...)

38When turning to chemistry or physics, a scholar of language faces a crossroads. One path is that of extrapolating the patterns of matter to the workings of the mind and human interaction in society. Another is ascribing logic and entelechy, in our very own image and likeness, to matter. In this regard, there is but a step from physics to metaphysics.9 Jakobson was careful to remain within the boundaries of science—but was it necessary to spell it out given the approach according to which the word proverbially was, or at least could also be, at the beginning of the world?

39Aage A. Hansen-Löve, author of comprehensive studies in Russian Formalism and Modernism, writes that Russian ‘Symbolists, later Formalists, and Futurists put forth the basic formula: form, signifiers, and language generate (new) content’ (2017)—tantamount to the evangelical ‘The Word became flesh’ (John 1:14). ‘This formula,’ Hansen-Löve concludes, ‘marks the origins of the development of the world and the text of life from the double helix of the original verbal genes’ (ibid.). However, he adds, ‘while, for the Symbolists, the focus was on action, performative act of communication as initiation, […] for the Futurists’—and that is where Jakobson’s scholarship largely originates from, as shown in My Futurist Years—‘the key is the new/archaic “code of the world” and thus “the language of things”’ (ibid.) To this effect, Jakobson wrote in an essay ‘Life and Language’ drawing heavily on Jacob (hence the quotation marks and Jakobson’s brackets within):

In the sciences of life and language […] ‘one can no longer separate a structure from its signification not only in the organism [and in language as well], but in all the sequence of events that have led the organism [as well as language] to become what it is’. […] These two information-carrying and goal-directed systems imply the presence of messages and of an underlying code. (1987: 69)

  • 10  In the context of Russian culture, as interpreted by Hansen-Löve and by the author of this article (...)

40It is in this context that the previously considered issue of analogy vs. homology takes an interesting turn, as François Jacob writes that ‘Jakobson has always favored […] the idea that a strict relation is imposed between the two systems by a sort of filiation,’ whereas he himself ‘h[e]ld to […] the idea that analogous functions impose analogous constraints,’ hence the correlation between language and DNA/RNA (1977 : 187). (Jakobson’s “filiation” implies lawful structural kinship—neither Darwinian homology nor Jacob’s “analogy,” meaning merely functionally similar.) And yet there remained something enigmatic in the fact Jacob could not but marvel at, viz., ‘the similarities of the genetic code to old systems of symbols described nearly 3,000 years ago in the Chinese […] Book of Transformations’ (ibid. : 191) with its 64 hexagrams correlating to ‘64 possible combinations of three nucleotide units’ in DNA (ibid. : 186). Acting on this intuition, albeit mainly with regard to Slavic cultures, Jakobson, as Hansen-Löve puts it, ‘elevated the principle of equivalence to the status of the primary generator of meaning within language,’ which duly made him ‘the leading representative of linguistic logocentrism in Russia and, after World War II, in the entire world’ (2017).10

Conclusion

41Today’s developments in Artificial Intelligence could be seen as the next great discovery in human evolution after the one made in 1953. AI would have been equally fascinating to Yarkho and Jakobson. Yarkho would have drawn on its data-generating capacities; as for the evolutionary status of AI, he would have likely treated it in such terms of Darwinian evolution as homology, natural selection, adaptation, etc. What would have Jakobson said? Would he have treated AI as a threat to the vital force behind language or the fulfillment of the utopia of convergence, a language union never before seen in the history of humankind? He would have likely approached AI nomothetically—perhaps this time by trying to understand the algorithms of large language models (LLM).

42Then again, it is important to consider the observer effect, well known from quantum physics: we are part of the systems we study (Kant had shown it long before), so, to a degree, it is ourselves that we study, so that the convergent patterns, the categories, we examine are objectively part of our neural environment, hence real.

43Moreover, one only need to look at a standard response by an AI chatbot—glaring yet not moving in response to a human query—to realize that, so far, it only bears a semblance with human communication. Otherwise, AI would have initiated communication itself—in pursuit of truth or, as importantly, out of curiosity (as does literature, as does genuine human storytelling). Our communication with AI is only human as long as we interact with ourselves by means of this tool, yet the intercourse, the near-sexual reciprocity, celebrated by Jakobson and Saussure (cf. Jakobson 1987), is absent from it. Instead, there is an acute feeling that the only real thing here is discourse itself—the way it was described in Novalis’s ‘Monologue,’ in Eikhenbaum’s article on Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat,’ or Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator.’

44Nowadays, that we live in the post-Gutenberg Galaxy, the Modernist logocentrism of Formalism and Structuralism may look obsolete—for now, but it is all the more essential in that it enjoys the heuristic and artistic power of what Marshall McLuhan called anti-environment and Viktor Shklovsky, ostranenie (defamiliarization), bearing the promise of the resurrection of the word.

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Notes

1  Rad Borislavov (2011) disputes that as regards Shklovsky. For a counterargument, see Lvoff 2021. The latter compares the strains of Russian Formalism and Digital Humanities, considering biology as one point of reference in assessing their contrasting approaches. Also see Kizhner et al. 2022.

2  All translations from Russian and other foreign sources are mine unless specified otherwise.

3  For an earlier treatment of Jakobson vis-à-vis Berg, see Sériot 1995. In that article, Sériot traces a line of scholarly thought alternative to Darwinism and focused on innate patterns of evolution back to Karl Ernst von Baer, a founding father of embryology and a notable figure in Russian scientific circles who was a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a co-founder of the Russian Geographical Society. For a book-length treatment of the subject, see Sériot 2014.

4  It is necessary to point out that Haeckel put forth a racist doctrine of evolutionary polygenism. That is an example of the dangers that lurked in biology, exploited and abused numerous times by certain politicians in the twentieth century.

5  For a comparison with McLuhan’s theory that situates Russian Formalism beyond the theory of art and within a global twentieth-century formalist paradigm shift, see Lvoff 2015–2016 [2018].

6  “Heterozygous refers to having inherited different forms of a particular gene from each parent. A heterozygous genotype stands in contrast to a homozygous genotype, where an individual inherits identical forms of a particular gene from each parent” (Dutra 2025).

7  To read more about the overlap between computer science, biology, and the humanities, see Liberman 1983. Efim Liberman—who, incidentally, was married to Shklovsky’s daughter—laid out the principles of his Chaimatics, which considers DNA as a molecular computer. His son, Nikita Shklovskiy-Kordi, continues his legacy.

8  To read more on the subject, see Glebov 2005 and Sériot 1999.

9  That was a major argument of Marxist critics against Formalism—see “The Formalist School of Poetry and Marxism” in Trotsky 1971.

10  In the context of Russian culture, as interpreted by Hansen-Löve and by the author of this article, logocentrism means “the cult of language” (ibid.), irrespective of how the term was famously construed by Derrida. The sacred status of the word—primaevally conformal with the world—is thus celebrated in Nikolai Gumilev’s eponymous poem, based on the opening verse of the Gospel of John, and finds another vivid expression in the title and very principle of The Resurrection of the Word, in which Shklovsky, though non-religious, effectively called for a poetic restoration of the identity of word and world.

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Basil Lvoff, « The Nature of Language and the Language of Nature: The Concept of Evolution in Russian Formalism and Structuralism »Histoire Épistémologie Langage, 47-2 | 2026, 147-162.

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Basil Lvoff, « The Nature of Language and the Language of Nature: The Concept of Evolution in Russian Formalism and Structuralism »Histoire Épistémologie Langage [En ligne], 47-2 | 2026, mis en ligne le 22 janvier 2026, consulté le 13 juin 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/hel/9024 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15jtm

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Basil Lvoff

Hunter College, City University of New York, United States

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