Problems in the Study of Language and Literature

Abstract

1. The immediate problems facing Russian literary and linguistic science demand a precise theoretical platform. They require a firm dissociation from the increasing mechanistic tendency to paste together mechanically the new methodology and old obsolete methods; they necessitate a determined refusal of the contraband offer of naive psychologism and other methodological handme-downs in the guise of new terminology. Furthermore, academic eclecticism and pedantic formalism which replaces analysis by terminology and the classification of phenomena and the repeated attempts to shift literary and linguistic studies from a systematic science to episodic and anecdotal genres should be rejected.