Viktor
Shklovsky
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Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (or
Shklovskii; Russian: Виктор Борисович
Шкловский; Saint Petersburg, 24 January
[O.S. 12 January] 1893; Moscow, 6
December 1984) was a Russian and Soviet
critic, writer, and pamphleteer.
Shklovsky was born in St. Petersburg,
Russia. His father was of Jewish and his
mother was of German/Russian origin. He
attended St. Petersburg University.
During the First World War, he
volunteered for the Russian Army and
eventually became a driving trainer in
an armoured car unit in St. Petersburg.
There in 1916 he founded the OPOYAZ (Obshchestvo
izucheniya POeticheskogo YAZyka—Society
for the Study of Poetic Language), one
of the two groups, with the Moscow
Linguistic Circle, which developed the
critical theories and techniques of
Russian Formalism.
Shklovsky participated in the February
Revolution of 1917. Then he was sent by
the Russian Provisional Government as an
assistant Commissar to Southwestern
Front where he was wounded and then got
an award for bravery. After that he was
an assistant Commissar of the Russian
Expeditionary Corps in Persia (see
Persian Campaign).
Shklovsky returned to St. Petersburg in
early 1918, after the October
Revolution. He opposed bolshevism and
took part in an anti-bolshevik
conspiracy of Socialist-Revolutionary
Party members. After the conspiracy was
revealed by Cheka Shklovsky went into
hiding traveling over Russia and the
Ukraine but was eventually pardoned in
1919 due to his connections with Maxim
Gorky and decided to abstain from
political activity. His two brothers
were executed by the Soviet regime (one
in 1918, the other in 1937) and his
sister died from hunger in St.
Petersburg in 1919.
Shklovsky integrated into the Soviet
society and even took part in the
Russian Civil War serving in the Red
Army; but in 1922 he had to go into
hiding again and to flee from Russia
escaping arrest for his previous
activities. In Berlin in 1923 he
published his memoirs about 1917-22
called Sentimental'noe puteshestvie,
vospominaniia (A Sentimental Journey)
after A Sentimental Journey Through
France and Italy by Laurence Sterne. In
the same year he was allowed to return
to the USSR.
In addition to literary criticism and
biographies about such authors as
Laurence Sterne, Maxim Gorky, Leo
Tolstoy, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, he
wrote a number of semi-autobiographical
works disguised as fiction, which also
served as experiments in his developing
theories of literature.
Shklovsky is perhaps best known for
developing the concept of ostranenie or
defamiliarization (also translated as
"estrangement") in literature. He
explained the concept in the important
essay "Art as Technique" (also
translated as "Art as Device") which
comprised the first chapter of his
seminal Theory of Prose, first published
in 1925:
"The purpose of art is to impart the
sensation of things as they are
perceived and not as they are known. The
technique of art is to make objects
‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult,
to increase the difficulty and length of
perception because the process of
perception is an aesthetic end in itself
and must be prolonged. Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of an
object; the object is not important." (Shklovsky,
"Art as Technique", 12)
In other words, art presents things in a
new, unfamiliar light by way of formal
manipulation. This is what is artful
about art.
Shklovsky's work pushes Russian
Formalism towards understanding literary
activity as integral parts of social
practice, an idea that becomes important
in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and
Russian and Prague School scholars of
semiotics.
He died in Moscow in 1984.
