Crisis of biographical methodology in russian science and criticism of 1920-1930

Abstract

In this article the basic tendency in the comprehension of the biographical meaningfulness of fictional works by Russian literary scholars and critics, who lived in the period 1920-1930 is considered. By that time side by side with the radical biographical method of the M.O. Gershenson’s school there existed the antibiographical approach to fictional works, which was developed by formalists and was radical too. V.M. Zhirmunsky and B.V. Tomashevsky tried to reconcile these contradictory views in the theory and practice of literary criticism. The mythopoetical interpretation of the writer’s biography in D.S. Merezhkovsky’s essay “Dante” (1939) is presented as an alternative for the biographical method