Il contributo di Michail Aleksandrovič Petrovskij (1887-1937) allo studio della forma novellistica

Abstract

Between the 1920s and 1930s, M.A. Petrovskij, a Germanist, literary critic and translator, is working on a theory of the narrative composition, the aim of which is to draw the functional architecture of the tale, its “physiology”. The objective is to unveil the dynamic links that exist within the tale’s different components and which arise from the perspective that each poetic procedure used in the text assumes. Within the realm of this study project, the final result of which should constitute a real “poetics of the short story”, Petrovskij publishes some essays during the 1920s. In these, the Russian scholar not only combines a rigorous theoretical planning, aimed at the precise definition of the tools of the study and of their terminology, but he also uses a pragmatic approach, which foresees, from time to time, the close reading of one or two case studies. In this essay, the aim is to show the originality of the theoretical-conceptual contribution of Petrovskij’s research, focusing on some aspects of the theory of the composition of the short story and briefly examining a specific case study, the one concerning A. Puškin’s short story The Shot. The analysis of the first of the Five Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin also gives Petrovskij the opportunity to take a position with respect to some critical judgements that the formalist critic B. Ėjchenbaum, an insightful scholar of Puškin’s prose and a renowned theorist of the short form, had formulated during those same years.