ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the approaches to the analysis of narrative structure by key scholars of the group of scholars writing in the newly established Soviet Union generally known collectively as The Russian Formalists. It provides an English translation of the whole story to provide a clear context for each stage of the analysis. The chapter aims to provide a framework for the structural analysis of short-story form, and to illustrate that this framework works by applying it to a short story. Dialogue and commentary in the story-within-the-story sometimes consist of short sentences, but these have the special linguistic characteristics already noticed and do not belong to the overall narrative structure. Although Russian Formalists have been regarded as new and revolutionary, both at home and in the West, their theories and modes of analysis were founded on classical models from Aristotle and the ancient and mediaeval rhetoricians.
