Yury Tynyanov

Yury Tynyanov as a child (middle) with his older brother Lev and his 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.[2] His father, Nikolai Arkadyevich Tynyanov, was a doctor while his mother, Sofya Borisovna Tynyanova (née Epshtein), was a co-owner of a tannery.[3]

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.[3]

In 1916, he married Leah Abelevna Zilber, the elder sister of his friend and well-known Russian author Veniamin Kaverin.[3] During his time in university, Tynyanov frequented the Pushkin seminar held by a venerable literary academic, Semyon Vengerov.

At age 27 in 1921, Tynyanov became a professor at the Petrograd Institute of Art History. During this time, he also began teaching 18th to 20th century Russian poetry while also being part of the Society for the Study of Poetic Language. In 1921, he published his first book titled "Dostoevsky and Gogol" where he drew connections between the works of Dostoevsky and Gogol. In 1925, Tynyanov released his first novel called "Kukhlya". He would then in 1927 publish another piece of historical fiction titled “The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar”. "Archaists and Innovators" was released in 1929.[5]

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.[6] As a translator, he translated the poems of Heinrich Heine from German to Russian.[6]

Bust of Tynyanov near his childhood home in Rēzekne, Latvia, 2016

On 28 May 1981, a museum dedicated to Tynyanov opened in his hometown in Rezekne Secondary School No.6. The museum was supported by Tynyanov's friend Veniamin Aleksandrovich Kaverin, his sister Lydia and his daughter Inna. The museum continues to operate in Latvia.[8]

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.[9]):

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.

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