ABSTRACT
Gustav Shpet has emerged over the last few years as the most significant Russian academic philosopher of the two decades following World War I. The principle promoter of Husserlian phenomenology, at the same time creatively modifying Husserl and departing from him on some essential points, Shpet was also an early advocate of modern hermeneutics. He left behind seminal work spanning philosophy, aesthetics, psychology, literary and theatre studies, and the history of Russian thought. Notwithstanding its significance, Shpet’s intellectual career is still insufficiently researched and conceptualised, both in Russia and in the West. The present essay will therefore begin by furnishing an outline of the main stages of Shpet’s life and evolution as a thinker, along with an account of the principal areas of his work. Once the larger context of his multifaceted intellectual endeavours has been established, the latter part of the essay will turn to the specific question of Shpet’s engagement with literary and theatre theory, assessing in the process the precarious balance between innovation and regression that marks his contribution, and offering detailed examination of his involvement in the study of literature and theatre in the Moscow Linguistic Circle and at the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN). Finally, the essay will address the question of Shpet’s position within the broader field of theoretical enquiry in the 1920s, including a comparison of his theoretical perspectives with those of Mikhail Bakhtin.
