Other volumes of the Regents Critics Series in print are: Joseph Conrad on Fiction Edited by Walter F. Wright Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford Edited by Frank MacShane Literary Criticism of George Henry Lewes Edited by Alice R. Kaminsky Literary Criticism of Alexander Pope Edited by Bertrand A. Goldgar Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe Edited by Robert L. Hough Literary Criticism of William Wordsworth Edited by Paul M. Zall Russian Formalist Criticism Four Essays Translated and with an Introduction by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS LINCOLNUNP Copyright © 1965 by the University of Nebraska Press All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Catalog card number 65-21899 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Regents Critics Series ‘The Regents Critics Series provides reading texts of significant literary critics in the Western tradition. The series treats criticism as a useful tool: an introduction to the critic’s own poetry and prose if he is a poet or novelist, an introduction to other work in his day if he is more judge than creator. Nowhere is criticism regarded as an end in itself but as what it is—a means to the understanding of the language of art as it has existed and been understood in various periods and societies. Each volume includes a scholarly introduction which describes how the work collected came to be written, and suggests its uses. All texts are edited in the most conservative fashion consonant with the production of a good reading text; and all translated texts observe the dictum that the letter gives life and the spirit kills when a technical or rigorous passage is being put into English. Other types of passages may be more freely treated. Footnoting and other scholarly paraphernalia are restricted to the essential minimum. Such features as a bibliographical checklist are carried where they are appropriate to the work in hand. If a volume is the first collec tion of the author’s critical writing, this is noted in the bibliograph- ical data. Pau A. OLson University of NebraskaArt as Technique Victor Shklovsky is certainly the most erratic and probably the most important of the Formalist critics. A charter member of the group, he had that rare combination of brilliant originality, combativeness, and theoretical flexibility required of a propagandist during the carly years of a movement. ‘As Eichenbaum shows (‘The Theory of the ‘Formal Method”””), Shklovsky touched most of the fundamentals of Formalist theory, was often the first to define a problem, and frequently pointed towards its solution. He saw issues clearly ted them sharply—perhaps too sharply. Like T. E. Hulme or TS. he was a master of the kind of statement that disciples make slogans of and opponents find embarrassingly easy to attack. Because he was the most obvious and the most vulnerable target for the Marxists and because his attitude toward the Russian Revolution was unusually complex,’ he was ‘one of the first of the Formalists to attempt a compromise. By 1926 he was trying to include sociological material in his study of literature; kis work on Tolstoy in 1928 analyzes War and Peace as a product of two irreconcilable forces—the social class Tolstoy represented and the novel as a genre.? s Technique” (1917) is the most important statement made of early Formalist method, partly because it announces a break with the only other “absthetic”” approach available at that time and in that place, and partly because it offers a theory of both the methodology of criticism and the purpose of art, Although we have discussed the Formalists’ quarrel with Potebnya in general terms, mare specific comment is appropriate here. Skklosky attacks the its purpose isto present the unknown (most often the abstract or transcendent) in terms of the known. Theoretically, the views recognized neither the richness (Vol. LV of Stavistic Printings Gravenhage: Mouton & Co.,