The modesty of this book's title and cover belies the force of its intervention in twenty-first century literary studies. Jessica Merrill's study is unfashionable in the best sense of the word: she charts a course that is distinctly her own, synthesizing and shining new light on an early twentieth-century intellectual context where philology and psychology go hand in hand. Merrill joins a growing number of scholars searching for ways to approach literature and culture after the “turn against the linguistic turn” (Julie Orlemanski, cited on 3). She contributes to this broader effort by limning the “philological paradigm” of Russian formalism and reconstructing a non-structuralist philosophy of language that traces the origins and evolution of language to extralinguistic sources. Ultimately, Merrill does nothing less than argue that an alternate history of Russian formalism might show literary studies a way out of its current impasse and even out of the hermeneutic mode itself.

Merrill establishes that Russian formalism “needs to be uncoupled from structuralism” (220) to reveal those elements of the movement that speak to twenty-first-century concerns. This claim may seem self-evident to many Slavists, but, as Merrill demonstrates, it has not yet permeated Anglo-American scholarly circles, something she hopes to change. Merrill frames her study with an introduction and conclusion steeped in recent theoretical approaches, devoting special attention to new formalism, quantitative formalism, historical poetics, and cognitive poetics. The five body chapters linger on the mid-nineteenth century and the first decade of Russian formalism. They cover (1) nineteenth-century comparative philology; (2) Viktor Shklovskii's theory of the author as grounded in oral performance and collective creation; (3) the psychology of poetic form, linking Aleksandr Veselovskii's psychological parallelism to Shklovskii's narrative theory; (4) poetic dialectology—a “lost branch of Russian Formalism” based on “extralinguistic social history” (146) debated by Osip Brik, Roman Jakobson and others in the meetings of the Moscow Linguistic Circle; and (5) a chapter on structuralisms that marks Jakobson's move from the earlier philological paradigm (based on a non-differentiation of folklore and literature) to a structuralist one in the late 1920s.

There is no doubt that readers knowledgeable about Russian literary theory will find Merrill's book a must-read. Along with its bold claims about the extralinguistic drivers of Russian formalist theory and the need for non-hermeneutic literary studies, The Origins of Russian Literary Theory offers many welcome insights about familiar texts, ideas, and people. For example, as Merrill builds the case that Shklovskii developed a collective and non-elitist theory of authorship based on his understanding of the fundamental equivalence of written literature and oral folklore, she explodes the “biographical paradox” of Russian formalism. As she explores the psychological foundations of Shklovsky's narrative theory, she offers up a brilliant reading of the last letter of Zoo as a “catch riddle” (one of Shklovskii's favorite forms of erotic folklore, 142–43). Merrill's account of the Moscow Linguistic Circle is based on meeting transcripts found in the archives—she gives voice, for example, to Brik, who is known to have shaped many of the Russian formalists’ key ideas but never to have published much of his own.

My hope is that The Origins of Russian Literary Theory finds its way to readers who are less familiar with “Russia” and more invested in “theory.” I might recommend that these readers start by reading the book's conclusion, “Formalism and Philology in the Twenty-First Century,” which introduces English studies to a Russian version of “form” that is not defined by the opposition between intrinsic and extrinsic reading so fundamental to Anglo-American literary scholarship of the twentieth century. Merrill's insistence on the value of the “philological paradigm” is an invitation to a larger conversation and future research: can the nineteenth- and early-twentieth proximity of philological and psychological investigation inform a twenty-first century literary theory? How might the inclusion of folklore debunk the primacy of the written word? And how might we recuperate close reading as a technique that need not exclude the political? Not everyone will agree with Merrill's privileging of philology, but the scholarship is sound, the prose is lucid, and the conclusions original. This book deserves to be read widely by scholars of literature and literary theory interested in the future of literary studies and the humanities; not only by those already invested in the history of Russian formalism.