The immediate problems confronting literary and linguistic science in Russia must be posed from a stable theoretical basis. They require a definitive abandonment of the mechanical montages which more and more frequently combine new methodological procedures with old sterile methods, and hypocritically introduce naïve psychologism and other relics beneath the cover of a novel terminology.
There can be no compromise with academic eclecticism, or the scholastic ‘formalism’ which replaces analysis by mere enumeration of terminology and cataloguing of phenomena. Attempts to transform literary and linguistic studies, which are systematic sciences, into random and anecdotal forays must cease.
The history of literature (or art) is intimately linked to other historical series: each of these series has a complex set of structural laws which is specific to it. It is impossible to establish a rigorous correlation between the literary series and the other series without first having studied these laws.