Viktor Shklovsky
Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky[1] (Russian: Ви́ктор Бори́cович Шкло́вский, IPA: 24 January [O.S. 12 January] 1893 – 6 December 1984) was a Russian and Soviet literary theorist, critic, writer, and pamphleteer. He is one of the primary figures associated with Russian formalism.
Viktor Shklovsky's Theory of Prose was released in 1925.
Shklovsky himself is still considered as "one of the most prominent literary and cultural theorists of the twentieth century"
(Modern Language Association Prize Committee); "one of the most vibrant and irreverent brains of the previous century"
"one of the most fascinating figures of Russian cultural life in the twentieth century" (Tzvetan Todorov)
Life
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Shklovsky. His father was Lithuanian Jewish mathematician (with Shklov's ancestry) and his mother was German-Russian. University of St. Petersburg.
During World War I, he volunteered for the Russian Army and eventually became a driving teacher in St. Petersburg's armoured car unit. There, in 1916, he created OPOYAZ (Obshchestvo izucheniya POeticheskogo YAZyka—Society for the Study of Poetic Language), one of two groups (alongside the Moscow Linguistic Circle) that established Russian Formalism's critical theories and tactics.
Shklovsky participated in 1917's February Revolution. Subsequently, the Russian Provisional Government dispatched him to the Southwestern Front as assistant commissioner where he was wounded and received a gallantry award. He was an assistant commissar of the Russian Expeditionary Corps in Persia (see Persian Campaign).
Early 1918, after the October Revolution, Shklovsky returned to St. Petersburg. During the Civil War, he opposed Bolshevism and participated in an anti-Bolshevik plan organised by Socialist-Revolutionary Party members. After the Cheka discovered the conspiracy, Shklovsky went into hiding, travelling through Russia and Ukraine, but was finally forgiven in 1919 for his links with Maxim Gorky and vowed to refrain from political involvement. His two brothers were executed by the Soviet state (one in 1918, one in 1937) and his sister died in St. Petersburg in 1919.
Shklovsky joined Soviet society and even participated in the Russian Civil War, serving in Red Army. However, he had to go into hiding again in 1922, as he was threatened with arrest and possible execution for his prior political activity, fleeing to Germany via Finland. In Berlin, in 1923, he published his memoirs on the period 1917–22 under the title Sentimental puteshestvie, vospominaniia, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne, an author he greatly liked and whose digressive style had a strong influence on Shklovsky's work.
He was allowed to return to the Soviet Union the following year, not least because of a plea to the Soviet authorities included in the concluding pages of his epistolary novel Zoo, or Letters Not About Love.
Mihajlo Mihajlo Mihajlov visited Shklovsky in 1963 and wrote: "I was amazed by Shklovsky's liveliness of spirit, his numerous interests, and his vast culture. When we bid farewell to Viktor Borisovich and headed for Moscow, I believed I met one of our century's most cultured, clever and best-educated men." He died 1984 in Moscow.
Writer and theorist
Besides literary criticism and biographies of such authors as Laurence Sterne, Maxim Gorky, Leo Tolstoy, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, he created a number of semi-autobiographical works disguised as fiction, which also served as experiments in his evolving literature ideas.
Shklovsky may be best known to develop the concept of ostranenia or defamiliarization (sometimes rendered as "strangement") in literature.
In the key essay "Art as Technique" (sometimes translated as "Art as Device") in 1917, which included the first chapter of his fundamental Theory of Prose, originally published in 1925. He argued for the need to make something over-familiar, like a cliché in the literary canon, something revitalised:
And so, to give our limbs sensibility, to make us feel objects, to make a stone seem hard, man was given the art tool. The objective of art, then, is to lead us to know something through the sight organ instead of recognition. By "strangling" objects and complicated shape, art's device makes perception protracted and "laborious." The perceptual process in art has its own purpose and should be fully developed. Art is a means of experiencing creativity. The artefact itself is unimportant.
Shklovsky, Viktor, Prose Theory. Benjamin Sher, (Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), p.6.
Among other things, Shklovsky also contributed the plot/story distinction (syuzhet/fabula), which differentiates the sequence of events the work narrates (the storey) from the sequence in which the work presents those events (the plot).
Shklovsky's work pushes Russian Formalism to consider literary activity as integral components of social practise, a notion that becomes essential in the work of semiotics academics of Mikhail Bakhtin and Russian and Prague Schools.
[Note required] Shklovsky's thinking also affected Western thinkers, largely thanks to Tzvetan Todorov's 1960s and 1970s translations of Russian formalists' works, including Tzvetan Todorov himself, Gerard Genette, and Hans Robert Jauss.
Film
Shklovsky was one of film's early serious writers. His thoughts and papers on film were published in 1923 (Literature and Cinematography, first English edition 2008). He was a personal friend of director Sergei Eisenstein and released a scathing review of his life and work (Moscow 1976, no English translation).
Starting in the 1920s and far into the 1970s, Shklovsky worked as a screenwriter on numerous Soviet films (see Select Filmography below), part of his life and work that has so far received very minimal recognition. Third Factory Shklovsky muses on his career in film, writing: "First of all, I have a position in Goskino's third factory. Second, the name isn't hard to explain. My family and school were the first factory. The second, Opoyaz. And the third – is processing me right now
Bibliography (English)
- A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922 (1923, translated in 1970 by Richard Sheldon)
- Zoo, or Letters Not About Love (1923, translated in 1971 by Richard Sheldon) – epistolary novel
- Knight's Move (1923, translated in 2005) – collection of essays first published in the Soviet theatre journal, The Life of Art
- Literature and Cinematography (1923, translated in 2008)
- Theory of Prose (1925, translated in 1990) – essay collection
- Third Factory (1926, translated in 1979 by Richard Sheldon)
- The Hamburg Score (1928, translation by Shushan Avagyan published in 2017)
- Life of a Bishop's Assistant (1931, translation by Valeriya Yermishova published in 2017)
- A Hunt for Optimism (1931, translated in 2012)
- Mayakovsky and his circle (1941, translated in 1972) – about the times of poet Vladimir Mayakovsky
- Leo Tolstoy (1963, translated in 1996)
- Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar (1970, translated in 2011)
- Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot (1981, translated in 2007)
Select filmography
- By the Law, 1926, director Lev Kuleshov, based on a story by Jack London
- Jews on Land, 1927, director Abram Room
- Bed and Sofa, 1927, director Abram Room
- The House on Trubnaya, 1928, director Boris Barnet
- The House of Ice, 1928, director Konstantin Eggert, based on the eponymous novel by Ivan Lazhechnikov
- Krazana, 1928, director Kote Mardjanishvili, based on the novel The Gadfly by Ethel Lilian Voynich
- Turksib, documentary, 1929, director Viktor Alexandrovitsh Turin
- Amerikanka (film), 1930, director Leo Esakya[12]
- The Horizon, 1932, director Lev Kuleshov
- Minin and Pozharsky, 1939, director Vsevolod Pudovkin
- The Gadfly, 1956, director Aleksandr Faintsimmer, based on the eponypous novel by Ethel Lilian Voynich
- Kazaki, 1961, director Vasili Pronin
Interviews
Serena Vitale: Shklovsky: Jamie Richards, Dalkey Archive Press, Champaign, London, Dublin, 2012 ISBN 978-1-56478-791-0. (Italian edition first pub. in 1979). Vitale's interview is undoubtedly the most important historical document describing Shklovsy's later life and activity.
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