25

‘mouton mange tout’

Van Schooneveld to replace the ‘manuscript evaluation forms’ then in use: *[•••] the old’ form [...] is usually too brief and unspecified. Moreover, it does not give us sufficient insight into the motives and the precise charac ter of the editor’s or reader’s evaluation.’ 48 In short, while Mouton’s pub lishing activities had been seemingly automatically successful from the beginning of the 1950’s on, now a more explicit argumentation was need ed why a book should be published. Mouton sometimes created trends which, according to a memo from De Ridder dated March 28,1972, were not followed well: In 1955 publiceerden wij het inmiddels klassiek geworden boek, Russian Formalism, History, Doctrine van Professor Victor Erlich. Dit boek werd inmid dels vertaald in een flink aantal talen, terwijl wij zelf meerdere edities uitgaven, waarvan de laatste nog steeds regelmatig wordt verkocht. De publikatie van dit boek in 1955 betekende niet alleen de eerste kennismaking van de Westerse lite ratuurtheoretici met een interessante Russische literatuurtheorie (hetgeen op zichzelf reeds de uitgave zou hebben gerechtvaardigd), maar gaf ook de stoot tot een nieuwe aanpak van literatuurtheoretische problemen door Westerse geleerden, en, vreemd genoeg, leidde daarna tot een hernieuwde bloei van het Formalisme in de Soviet Unie zelf, (Lotman, Uspenskij, Ivanov, Revzin), waar deze richting tegen het eind der dertiger jaren was verboden. Na de publikatie van het boek van Erlich hebben wij eigenlijk weinig meer gedaan aan het bekend maken van het werk van de Russische formalisten zelf. [...] Andere uitgevers hebben echter de door ons ontstoken fakkel overgenomen [...]. 49 [In 1955 we published Professor Victor Erlich’s Russian Formalism, History, Doctrine, which has since become a classic. This book has been translated into a good number of languages, while we continued to publish more editions, the last of which still sells regularly. The publication of this book in 1955 represented not only the first time Western literary theoreticians became acquainted with an interesting Russian literary theory (which by itself would have justified publica tion), but it also gave the impulse for a new approach towards literary theoreti cal problems by Western scholars. Strangely enough it led to a renewed flowering of Formalism in the Soviet Union itself (Lotman, Uspenskij, Ivanov, Revzin), where this movement was forbidden toward the end of the 1930s. After the pub lication of Erlich’s book we did not really do much more to promote the work of the Russian formalists themselves. [...] Other publishers, however, have taken over the torch that we lit...]. A translation plan was announced in this connection. One of the aspects of the plan was the cooperation with the Bloomington Translation Group (see