K sravneniju nauchnych metodologij B.I. Jarcho i G.G. Shpeta

The paper analyses and compares the methodologies of the study of a literary text developed by Boris Jarkho and Gustav Shpet. Both participate in the activities of the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN) in Moscow. Shpet was the Academy’s vice president and the director of the Philosophic Department (1924–1929). Jarkho was head of the Laboratory on historical poetics and literary translation. He was also a member of the Literary Subsection of the Philosophic Department. In 1924 within the Philosophical Department and the Literary Section took place a vehement discussion about the “boundaries of literary science”. The protagonists of this discussion were Gustav Shpet and Boris Jarkho. The philosopher Shpet defended a deductive approach to the literary text, which aims to define the structure in its ontological foundations. Its purpose is to define in general the construction of meaning in poetic language. Shpet’s theory is the first attempt to realize the modern critical semantics. The philologist and medievalist Jarkho proposes instead an inductive approach to the literary text, based on the model of the natural sciences, such as biology. Jarkho promotes a statistic analysis to identify the text’s invariants. His methodology is the basis of modern Russian philological studies.