Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader

About the Book

Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature 2016

Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) was both patriarch and enfant terrible of Formalism, a literary and film scholar, a fiction writer and the protagonist of other people’s novels, instructor of an armored division and professor at the Art History Institute, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary. His work was deeply informed by his long and eventful life. He wrote for over seventy years, both as a very young man in the wake of the Russian revolution and as a ninety-year old, never tiring of analyzing the workings of literature.

Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader is the first book that collects crucial writings from across Shklovsky’s career, serving as an entry point for first-time readers. It presents new translations of key texts, interspersed with excerpts from memoirs and letters, as well as important work that has not appeared in English before.

Table of Contents:

Translator’s Introduction
Viktor Shklovsky: Life and Work
Ostranenie and Other Key Concepts
Shklovsky in the West: Reception and Heritage
The Poker of Russian Formalism: Shklovsky as Protagonist
In Fiction
In Diaries and Memoirs
Shklovsky’s Shorts
Shklovsky’s Style
Selection, Translation and Formal Remarks

Section I: OPOYAZ Publications
Translator’s Introduction

Resurrection of the Word (1914)
Art as Device (1917/1919)
Literature beyond “Plot” (1921/1925)
Literature beyond Theme; Non-Linear Inheritance
Literature beyond Genre; Digressions
Literature beyond Categories; Seeing like a Child

Section II: Autobiographic Hybrids
Translator’s Introduction

A Letter to Roman Jakobson (1922/1990)
Zoo, or Letters Not About Love (1923/1965)
Author’s Preface to the First Edition
A Second Preface for an Old Book
A Third Preface
Letter Four
Letter Six
Letter Eight
Letter Eleven
Letter Seventeen
Letter Twenty Two
Letter Twenty Eight
Letter Thirty
A Sentimental Journey (1923)
Revolution and the Front
The Writing Desk
Knight’s Move (1923)
Preface One
Driving Nails with a Samovar
On “The Great Metalworker”
A Thousand Herrings
The Tsar’s Kitchen
Teaser Stallions (1924/1990)
The Third Factory (1926)
The First Factory
The Second Factory
The Third Factory

Section III: Early Soviet Criticism and Advice to Young Writers
Translator’s Introduction

The Technique of Writing Craft (1927)
Introduction: Don’t Hurry to Become a Professional Writer
Newspaper Work
Narrative Prose
Unfolding a Text
A Few Words on Poetry
Conclusion
Hamburg Score (1928)
Babel: A Critical Romance (1924)
In Defense of the Sociological Method (1927)
Ten Years (1927)
Hamburg Score (1928)
The Way I Write (1930/1990)

Section IV: After the Freeze
Translator’s Introduction

Once Upon A Time (1964)
Childhood
Youth
The Ending of Youth
Tales about Prose (1966/1983)
A Note From the Author
On the Novella
Some Empirical Remarks on the Methods of Connecting Novellas
On the Different Meanings of “Character” when Applied to Literary Works of Different Epochs
On the True Unity of Works of Art
What Happened after the Plague of 1348?
On the Sense of Wonder
Scenes of Recognition in Dickens
Concept Renewal
Letters to Nikita Shklovsky (1965-1969/2002)
05.10.1965
05.10.1966
19.04.1968
02.04.1969
20.07.1969
Bowstring. On the Dissimilarity of the Similar. (1970)
Energy of Delusion. A Book on Plot. (1981)

Section V: On the Theory of Prose (1983)
Translator’s Introduction

Preface
Words Free the Soul from Narrowness: About the OPOYAZ
The Rhyme of Poetry. The Rhyme of Prose. Structuralism through the Looking Glass: A Farewell
The First Unsuccessful Blueprint of a Whale: Chekhov’s “Darling”
The Links of Art Do Not Repeat Each Other. Once Again, on the Dissimilarity of the Similar.
Sterne
In the Footsteps of Old Discoveries and Inventions
The Problem of Time in Art
The Lungs Are for Breathing. Thoughts Out Loud.
Yet Another Foreword
Ostranenie
In Reply to a Questionnaire
[More Thoughts Out Loud]

Section VI: In 60 Years: Works on Cinema. (1985)
Translator’s Introduction

Introduction (1985)
On Cinema (1919)
The Plot in Cinema (1923)
Chaplin as Policeman (1923)
The Semantics of Cinema (1925)
Poetry and Prose in Cinema (1927)
On Re-Editing Films (1927)
Five Feuilletons on Eisenstein (1926)
Talking to Friends (1939)
Happy Fable-land (1948)
What the Character Knows and What the Audience Knows (1959)
The Emergence of the Word (1963)
Return the Ball into the Game (1970)
Unread Dream (1984)
Instead of an Afterword: A Letter to Evgeny Gabrilovich (1984)

About the Author :

Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) was one of the foremost literary critics and theorists of the 20th century. One of the founders of the Formalist movement in literary criticism, his seminal works include “Art as Method” (1917), Theory of Prose (1925), Third Factory (1926), classic studies of Tolstoy and Mayakovsky, and a memoir of the Russian civil-war era, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922 (1923).

Alexandra Berlina is Postdoctoral Researcher in Literary Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. Her translations of Brodsky's poems "Dido and Aeneas" and "You can't tell a gnat..." have won awards from the 'Willis Barnstone Translation Prize' and the 'The Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize'. She is the author of Brodsky Translating Brodsky (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Review :
An extraordinary revelation of the unbelievable life and work of the man who invented formalism. Alexandra Berlina has done a great service to literature by rescuing these fragments of one of the most lively and irreverent minds of the last century. A book to return to, again and again. This collection allows all readers to approach the life and opinions of Viktor Shklovsky, one of the most fascinating figures of Russian cultural life in the twentieth century. Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader, thoughtfully translated and edited by Alexandra Berlina, is a valiant reminder of the extraordinary versatility, humor, brilliance, and sensitivity the Formalist label has come to conceal. … With this exemplary new anthology, Alexandra Berlina has helped free Shklovsky from the clanging of -isms, allowing new readers to appreciate his thought in the fullness of its diversity and beauty. The reviewed omnibus, it must be added, challenges yet another well entrenched doxa concerning Shklovsky’s work. Traditionally, it was regarded as consisting of two unequal parts: the impishly appealing pre-1929 formalist output followed by the appalling potboilers written after the author reluctantly renounced his formalist stance … Berlina, though, managed to erase the perceived caesura between the early and late Shklovsky’s writings not just by telling but by showing. Her Reader, assembling texts from all periods of his long writerly career, clearly highlighted the motivic iterations binding them together as well as their overall thematic unity.