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Tynyanov
, specific dynamic relations with 
other cultural systems, both synchronically and diachronically. In describing process of 

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change within literary systems, Tynyanov recognizes that a new “constitutive principle” 
may start from a series of chance occurrences or encounters, but in order to become 
substantial the principle may need the transfer of models and materials from beyond 
itself (1924: 19-20). That observation was not actually accompanied by any 
consideration of the role of translations, although elsewhere Tynyanov did write a 
critical account of Tyutchev’s renditions of Heine (study dated 1921, included in 
Arxaisty i novatory
in 1929 and in the French translation 
Formalisme et histoire 
littéraire
of 1991 but not in the partial German translation of 1967). A framework for 
the study of literary translation was certainly there, but the study itself would seem not 
to have been part of the main agenda of Russian Formalism. Any potential insights 
about translation would remain without immediate impact within Russian theory, 
although some students of Tynjanov’s, like 
Andrei Fedorov
, became major theorists of 
translation in the Soviet era, and Jakobson would go on to write several seminal papers 
on translation, as we have noted in previous chapters.
The legacy of the Formalist moment would have been passed on, in various 
forms, to the sociolinguist Valentin Vološinov, perhaps in part to the cultural theorist 
Mikhail
 
Bahktin, and more obviously to the semioticians Yuri Lotman and Boris 
Uspenski, whose names might be more familiar. None of those cultural theorists, 
however, produced systematic theoretical work on translation; nor did the later 
Formalists themselves. When Andrei Fedorov wrote his ground-breaking “Introduction 
to the Theory of Translation” in 1953, he had studied at the State Institute for the 
History of the Arts, where the Formalists had created a program (our thanks to Itamar 
Even-Zohar for this information), so something of the basic approach certainly lived on. 
The traces of that legacy might be divined from Fedorov’s highly systematic approach 
to basic principles (after paying due homage to Marx and Lenin) and his detailed 
investigation of the way different genres and stylistic features should be translated. The 
same can be said of 
Efim Etkind
, whose work on Russian poet-translators (1973) drew 
attention to the role of translation in the development of cultures.
From Fedorov and others we do reach a certain Russian school of translation 
theory, which includes important work by