Published Spring/Summer 2008
 
Viktor Shklovsky at 115
by David Gorman | ns 70
The Russian critic, writer, and literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) became known in the West during the 1960s and 70s, when work that he did in the 1910s and 20s was first translated and discussed in English and French. This work was connected with the Russian Formalist movement in criticism, which was having a vogue in the West as a precursor of structuralism. Shklovsky even enjoyed a moment of fame as the de facto leader of the Formalists, in which context his name still appears in theory textbooks, though the space allotted to him (and to Formalism, for that matter) continues to diminish, given the constant need to make room for the many poststructuralist developments in criticism.
There was some irony in Shklovsky's belated Western success, especially considering that it was not posthumous. I doubt that most of us who were enthusiasts of the handful of essays available in the West were aware that he was not only still alive, but still publishing. Nor did we have a clear sense of Shklovsky as a figure: to us he was a Formalist critic (or the Formalist critic), but his literary and cultural identity was considerably more complicated. For one thing, he saw himself primarily as a writer, for whom criticism counted as one kind of writing among others. This should have been clear even in the 1970s, from Richard Sheldon's translations of three complete works—A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs 1917-1922 (1970), Zoo, or Letters Not about Love (1971), and Third Factory (1977)—which were billed at the time as experimental novels. In retrospect, they might be better described as generic hybrids, which include important comments on art and literature, mixed in with many other kinds of material (primarily autobiographical) in a purposely disorienting way.
Whether due to limited distribution or already fading interest in Formalism, this second wave of translations had no discernible impact on Western literary studies. It is only now becoming possible to assess Shklovsky's identity and career, primarily because Dalkey Archive Press, a small literary publisher, has reissued a good deal of his work in English, beginning with Benjamin Sher's translation of his most important Formalist publication, Theory of Prose, in 1990, continuing with the Sheldon translations in the 2000s, and culminating last year with the most significant critical work of Shklovsky's later career, Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot. Two more translations are in progress. In a short time, it will be possible to read at least eleven of Shklovsky's books in English: Knight's Move, Sentimental Journey, Zoo, Literature and Cinematography (all 1923), Theory of Prose (1925, enl. ed. 1929), Third Factory (1926), Hamburg Account (1928), Mayakovsky (1940), Tolstoy (1963), Bowstring (1970), and Energy of Delusion (1981).1
These books, along with their introductory and supplementary material, give a lot of information about Shklovsky. The effect of reading through them is like that of a very long, very foreign novel with many characters and storylines. One feels the need for an outline of major events, accompanied by clear, sequential explanations. This will be the task facing prospective biographers of Shklovsky, whose life calls for a chronicler if anyone's does. To make a preliminary sketch, we might divide his story into two parts—one dealing with, to borrow from Roman Jakobson's collection My Futurist Years, his densely packed Formalist years (1913-1930), and the other with a much longer period of eclipse and revival under Stalinism and then during the thaw. Shklovsky was more than a Formalist, but there is a sense in which Shklovsky never got past his role as leader of the movement, or the views and values he endorsed in this role.
It was during the first period that Shklovsky published the initial manifesto of Formalism, "The Resurrection of the Word" (1914), as well as its charter document, "Art as Device" (1917; or "Art as Technique," depending on how one translates priem), which, frequently reprinted, remains the best-known Formalist document in English. Along with Osip Brik Boris Eikhenbaum, and Lev Yakubinsky, Shklovsky organized the Petersburg wing of Formalism, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOIAZ), the other wing being Roman Jakobson's Moscow Linguistic Circle. Though there was a falling out with Jakobson after the latter's departure for the West in 1920, the gap was filled by Yury Tynianov, perhaps the group's best theorist. In any case, Shklovsky seems to have done all of this in his spare time, since his Formalist years were, as the movie ads say, action-packed. While a student at the university in Petersburg, he studied linguistics with Badouin de Courtenay, and from 1920 he taught writing at the Institute of Art History there, exerting a strong influence on the group of young writers who called themselves the Serapion Brothers. Shklovsky was an early enthusiast of Futurism (starting with the coffeehouse lecture of 1913 that was published as "Resurrection of the Word") as well as other avant-garde movements in the arts, and seems to have known every poet in a brilliant literary era, including Alexander Blok, Velimir Khlebnikov, and especially Vladimir Mayakovsky. Shklovsky was also active as a journalist, reviewing theater, painting, and film, and he tried his hand at creative writing. If this were not enough, Shklovsky served in the military during much of this period, when Russians were constantly at war on foreign and domestic fronts: he drove, commanded, and serviced armored cars in places as remote as Galicia and Persia, and also changed political allegiances several times, leading to a period of exile in the Ukraine and another in Germany. This second exile was especially painful to Shklovsky (who was passionately homesick), but also extremely productive—in Berlin in 1922-23, he finished or began four books.
Many of the key concepts and themes in Formalist criticism seem to have originated with Shklovsky—although he was content to leave most of them for others to elaborate. (In this respect, as in others, Shklovsky resembles Roland Barthes, who was also a theorist, writer, teacher, and intellectual impresario.) By far the most important is an emphasis on the literary work as a composition, on the basis of which the function of its elements becomes the primary focus. "Formalism" was a term of abuse coined by critics of the movement, which stuck because neither Shklovsky nor anyone else in the group chose to come up with a label for themselves; but there would be less puzzlement now over the aims and methods of the Formalists if instead they had been called "Russian Functionalists." Their formalism derives from their functionalism, since asking the role that any element plays in a composition amounts to treating everything in a work as a form.2 Other notions articulated by Shklovsky include the distinction between device and motivation in narrative, the significance of parody as a universal technique for refunctioning literary forms, making it a motor of literary change, and the idea that literature evolves in a nonlinear way, with marginal or subliterary genres being "promoted" to replace established, outworn genres. In addition, Shklovsky set examples followed by many Formalists, first in his belief that literary scholars had much to learn from linguistics and folklore studies, and second with his early interest in film.
One might ask, what about defamiliarization (or "estrangement")? Surely this is Shklovsky's most famous idea, and the one contemporary critics most likely associate with Russian Formalism. But the fact is that ostranenie—briefly, the claim that art, through the use of difficult form, can renew our perception of the world—finds almost no resonance in the work of the other Formalists and plays a restricted role in Shklovsky's. Theory of Prose does lead off with "Art as Device," but except for introducing the term "device," it stands apart from the other essays, which are all concerned specifically with narratives, whereas defamiliarization is a general aesthetic doctrine. There is an odd divide within the famous essay itself, which begins by talking about poetry and introducing ostranenie as an alternative to various theories of poetic language, but goes on to give a string of examples taken almost entirely from narrative works (as various as Tolstoy's "Kholstomer" and erotic riddles in folklore). In the essay, Shklovsky uses "prose" as a term for the nonliterary, since defamilarization distinguishes poetic from prosaic forms of language, but in the rest of the book "prose" becomes a term for narrative (and thus for a kind of literature). This constant zooming between the level of art as a universal phenomenon and narrative as involving very specific compositional problems characterizes all of Shklovsky's work, and helps to explain the impression that he is leaving aside much else about art, literature, and narrative, or noting it only in passing.3
While Shklovsky's interests as a theorist ranged from general aesthetics to poetic language, genre, and literary history, he had a single, perennial focus on the construction of narrative, which he called "plot" (syuzhet). Plot is the recurrent theme and organizing principle in the often rambling, digressive studies that make up Theory of Prose. Shklovsky was not the kind of writer interested in systematic expositions, which sometimes makes his work difficult to apply for anyone interested in narrative theory. Theory of Prose resembles Henry James' prefaces to the New York edition of his work more than it does a treatise on narratology.4 The job of laying out an explicit theory fell to others, especially Boris Tomashevsky, whose essay on "Thematics" (1925) gives a clear, concise account of narrative unlike anything in Theory, and yet is dependent on it for almost every point. I sometimes wonder what later critics have gotten from Theory, except for a few endlessly cited one-liners (art exists "to make a stone feel stony" [6], "Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel in world literature" [170], etc.). The book actually consists of, digressions aside, a catalog of plot devices, with some methodological examples interspersed. It encourages narrative analysts to ask about the function of elements (devices) in any fictional composition, and then to consider how the device is disguised (motivated) or revealed (laid bare)—which is the chief reason we should still read it.
The fifty-plus years of the second chapter of Shklovsky's life seem less filled with incident and variety.5 While many of the Formalists pursued academic careers—for example, Eikhenbaum, Jakobson, and Tomashevsky—Shklovsky, like Tynianov, wrote fiction and went into the film industry, writing something like three dozen short stories, historical novels, children's books, and screenplays. Shklovsky also worked as a journalist during World War II. Although things must have been very difficult in Russia after 1930 for a half-Jew known for his association with cultural avant-gardism and for his literary "cosmopolitanism" (code for interest in non-Russian literature), Shklovsky somehow managed to write and publish works on Dostoevsky, Mayakovsky, Pushkin, and above all Tolstoy. Beginning in the 1960s, new editions of his early works began to appear, as well as new writing, including a book on Eisenstein, several collections of essays, and Energy of Delusion.
Despite its subtitle, Energy of Delusion is not just a book on plot; twelve years in the writing, it was clearly intended as a magnum opus and a testament. One of the ideas that Shklovsky plays with throughout the volume is that it is several books in one, including a book on Tolstoy (with of a focus on the composition of Anna Karenina), a meditation on art, and—as almost always with Shklovsky—a memoir. To begin with the latter aspect, almost all of the reminiscence is about his comrades in OPOIAZ and Futurism. Again, the style is indistinguishable from the writings of the 1920s, as is the commitment to avant-gardism, the slightly queasy mix of broad generalizations on the nature of art and detailed considerations of narrative construction. Once more we find that Shklovsky never got past his Formalist years; the patterns he laid down early in his career anticipated everything that followed. In Energy, Shklovsky repeatedly mentions how old he has gotten, comments that simply seem to reflect reality, until we notice that he was already writing this way at age 33, in Third Factory declaring "I'm an old man now" (10). Energy defies summary and disdains organization as consistently as Theory of Prose, and many passages in Energy dealing with art, narrative, and, yes, defamiliarization could be inserted into the earlier book; at the same time, the book shows some effects of history on Shklovsky, for example in the way he limits himself to discussing native writers rather than the broad comparative range of Theory of Prose.
What distinguishes Shklovsky is his style of writing. (Once again, Barthes comes to mind as a parallel case.) It appears fully developed in his earliest work—the reviews and essays of 1919-1921 collected in Knight's Move—and remains unchanged in Energy of Delusion. Shklovsky's discourse proceeds by fits and starts, his signature one-sentence paragraphs marked by constant interruption, digression, and repetition. This works better in belletristic writings such as the epistolary novel Zoo; it becomes a serious impediment in Theory of Prose, which leaves readers baffled about the theory. His staccato can become wearing: at over four hundred pages, Energy of Delusion requires some slogging to get through. (By contrast, the biography of Tolstoy, though perhaps twice as long, is a much quicker read since Shklovsky wrote it more conventionally.) In this way, Shklovsky never gave up on—or we might say, never got over—the literary ideals of his glory days. Ever the Futurist, Shklovsky set out to practice what he preached in writing, and persisted. He rejects smooth, transparent, and tidy expression. His goal is to force his reader to work to understand him; the reason for this, presumably, is that his thoughts will have greater impact. This is the doctrine of defamiliarization, which thus finds its true application on the stylistic level.
Later critics and theorists have sometimes enlisted Shklovsky in political causes, and since he fought for different governments and parties during his Formalist years (sustaining severe wounds twice), he must have been interested in politics in some way, but his writings show no trace of this. One of the things that makes memoirs like Sentimental Journey and Third Factory hard to follow is that Shklovsky explains nothing about the changes in his political allegiances or the circumstances of either his periods in exile or of his recalls. Leaving aside the dutiful citations of Lenin in his publications of the Stalinist era, Mayakovsky and Tolstoy, Shklovsky never refers to politics, unless to maintain its irrelevance to his theoretical concerns, as illustrated in a digression in his essay on "Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery Story":
One critic explained that the perennial failure on the part of the state investigator and the eternal victory of Conan Doyle's private detective by the confrontation existing between private capital and the public state.
I do not know whether Conan Doyle had any basis for pitting the English state against the English bourgeoisie. Yet I believe that if these stories were written by a writer living in a proletarian state, then, though himself a proletarian writer, he would still make use of an unsuccessful detective. Most likely, it is the state detective who would be victorious in such a case, while the private detective would no doubt be floundering in vain. In such a hypothetical story Sherlock Holmes would no doubt be working for the state while Lestrade would be engaged in private practice, but the structure of the story (the issue at hand) would not change. (Theory of Prose 110)
It would be wrong to conclude from this that Shklovsky rejects political criticism; what is being ruled out here is the employment of a crude reflection model of literature (which reduces compositions to documents about social relations) in preference to a descriptive analysis of literary construction.
Notes
1. Mayakovsky and His Circle, issued by a commercial publisher and long out of print, and the huge literary biography Lev Tolstoy, published in Moscow, are the only ones that have not yet been reprinted. [Return to essay.]
2. As Shklovsky remarks in Sentimental Journey: "The formal method is fundamentally very simple—a return to craftsmanship. Its most remarkable feature is that it doesn't deny the idea content of art, but treats the so-called content as one of the manifestations of form" (232). This is one of the rare times when Shklovsky used the term "formal method." [Return to essay.]
3. For more on the impact of ostranenie, see the recent special issues of Poetics Today on "Estrangement Revisited," 26.4 (2005) and 27.1 (2006). [Return to essay.]
4. While Theory, along with Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1929), is generally recognized as the precursor of contemporary narrative theory, the distance from its descendants needs to be emphasized: for example, Shklovsky lacks a general term for narrative (which is why he sometimes uses "prose"), he does not distinguish consistently between the narrator and the author, and questions about narration—e.g., point of view, reliability, focalization—rarely occur. [Return to essay.]
5. "Seem" because we don't know enough; here a good biography would be especially useful, as well as a group study of Soviet literary intellectuals who worked under Stalinism, survived, and re-emerged. It would be particularly interesting to compare Shklovsky's later career with that of Mikhail Bakhtin. [Return to essay.]
Works Cited
Jakobson, Roman. My Futurist Years. Trans. Stephen Rudy. New York: Marsilio, 1998.
Lemon, Lee T., and Marion J. Reis, trans. and ed. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965.
Propp, Vladimir. Morphology of the Folktale.1928. Trans. Laurence Scott. 1958. Rev. Louis A. Wagner. Austin: U of Texas P, 1968.
Shklovsky, Viktor. "Art as Technique." 1917. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Trans. and ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 5-24. (Also trans. as "Art as Device" in Theory of Prose.)
---. Bowstring. 1970. Trans. forthcoming. Springfield, IL: Dalkey Archive.
---. Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot. 1981. Trans. Shushan Avagyan. Springfield, IL: Dalkey Archive , 2007.
---. Hamburg Account. 1928. Trans. forthcoming. Springfield, IL: Dalkey Archive.
---. Knight's Move. 1923. Trans. Richard Sheldon. Springfield, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2005.
---. Lev Tolstoy. 1963. Trans. Olga Shartse. Moscow: Progress, 1978.
---. Literature and Cinematography. 1923. Trans. Irina Masinovsky. Springfield, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2008.
---. Mayakovsky and His Circle. 1940. Trans. and ed. Lily Feiler. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972; rpt. New York: Pluto P, 1974.
---. "The Resurrection of the Word." Trans. Richard Sherwood. Russian Formalism: A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation. Ed. Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973. 41-47.
---. A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs 1917-1922. 1923. Trans. Richard Sheldon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1970, 1984; rpt. Springfield, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2004.
---. Theory of Prose. 1925; 2nd ed., 1929. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Springfield, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1990.
---. Third Factory. 1926. Trans. Richard Sheldon. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1977; rpt. Springfield, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2002.
---. Zoo, or Letters Not about Love. 1923. Trans. Richard Sheldon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1971; rpt. Springfield, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2001.
Tomashevsky, Boris. "Thematics." 1925. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Trans. and ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 62-95.
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