Viktor Shklovsky's Explosive Career and Literary Formalism

Ben Sonnenberg
Jean Stein
Viktor Shklovsky
Author(s): Henry Gifford
Source: Grand Street, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Autumn, 1988), pp. 94-110
Published by: Ben Sonnenberg
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25007173
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GRAND STREET
VIKTOR SHKLOVSKY
Henry Gifford
In the summer of 1920, not far from Kherson in the

Ukraine, when Wrangel mounted a last and dangerous
offensive against the Soviets, Viktor Shklovsky blew him
self up. This had been predicted by his wife, then in the
town of Kherson, and by his comrades in the demolition
squad he had formed to impede Wrangel's advance. Any
thing that happened to Shklovsky was of enormous inter
est to him. He described the episode twice, in a prelimi
nary sketch of 1922 and more elaborately in his memoirs
of the revolution and civil war, A Sentimental Journey
(1923).
Shklovsky had acquired "some little white cylinders of
German origin" which he took to be primers. But the fuse
was too small for the aperture when he wanted to try one.
He puffed on a cigarette: "according to rules," a cigarette
was used as a lighter, not a match. Then he picked up the
cylinder and bent over it. The next moment he couldn't
remember in detail, but his account of what followed is
as vivid and complete as anything in Tolstoy's Sevastopol
Sketches (Shklovsky was a great admirer of Tolstoy):
My arms were flung back; I was lifted, seared and tumed

head over heels. The air filled with explosions. The cylin
der had blown up in my hands. I hardly had time for a
fleeting thought about my book Plot as a Manifestation of
Style. Who would write it now?
It seemed as if the explosion were still resounding, as
if the rocks still hadn't fallen back to the ground. But I
was on the ground. And I saw the horses galloping in
the field, the little boy running. The grass all around was
splashed with blood.
Blood is remarkably red against green.
Shklovsky survived the accident; he was a born survivor,

endowed with the resourcefulness and courage of an Odys
seus. In the hospital he recognized the woman doctor, who
came from his native Petersburg and had been known
[94]
HENRY GIFFORD
to him eight years before. They "started to divert each

other with conversation" while he was being prepared for
bandaging. Shklovsky talked to her about "the great Rus
sian poet Velemir Khlebnikov."
He tells us that his first reaction had been to order:
"Take a report: the object given to me for purposes of ex
perimentation proved to be too powerful for use as a
primer. The explosion took place prematurely, probably
because the outer covering of the safety fuse had been
removed. Use regular primers!" Once again he insists that
everything had been done "according to rules, as in the
best of families." The Red brigade he had joined that sum
mer truly formed a family for Shklovsky. The soldiers
liked him, he says: they brought green apples and sour
cherries to the hospital, and "looked at me tenderly." He
was their instructor, in demolition when on duty and in
simple arithmetic at leisure. Within a few months, back in
Petrograd, he and Yevgeny Zamyatin would be instructing
a group of talented young writers, later to be known as the
Serapion Brothers, on how stories and novels are best con
structed. Shklovsky was a born instructor, too. The black
smith lying next to him in the hospital, "a dedicated and
naive Bolshevik," recognized this when he called Shklov
sky "professor."
In the love of action, and in his terse and exact recording
of immediate things, he resembles Hemingway. Shklov
sky's concern with the sharp visual image, the clean un
cluttered phrase, is bound to provoke this comparison.
There are passages of war reporting in A Sentimental
Journey that more than hold their own with any counter
parts in A Farewell to Arms. The two men were almost of
an age, Shklovsky born in 1893 being a few years the
older. They are very much sons of the twentieth century,
with Hemingway for many years more a favorite son.
But they also are markedly different. A Sentimental Jour
ney is not inherently a sentimental work in the manner of
A Farewell to Arms whenever Catherine appears. Shklov
sky's note is one of alert irony. He describes le'ducation
sentimentale of an active participant in revolution and
civil war: "I'm telling about events and making of myself
a case study for posterity." He searches for knowledge of
[95]
GRAND STREET
himself no less than of the time. His book is fittingly dedi

cated to three men whose integrity he prized: Dr. Shedd,
the American missionary who saved 3,500 children of
the Aissors at war with the Kurds in 1918; Dr. Gorbenko,
who saved some wounded Greeks from being massacred
at Kherson during the civil war; and a nameless Bolshe
vik driver, who wanted Shklovsky to join him in saving
the lathes for service to the revolution.
Viktor Shklovsky is indeed a case for study, and not
only in the framework of A Sentimental Journey and his
memoirs published in 1964, Zhili-byli [Once Upon a
Time]. The case is both singular and revelatory, especially
of the time when he was most active (from 1914 to the
mid-1920s). It is not that he ever ceased from activity,
however much this was thwarted, throughout a life last
ing until 1984, the span of ninety-one years from Alexan
der III to Andropov. But in the events of his early man
hood the flame burned brightest and he felt most in his
element. We need to consider him in the fullest possible
perspective of the age. To understand at least one aspect
of the Russian revolution that tends to be ignored nowa
days, it is important to know Shklovsky. Sure-footed, self
reliant, prominent in the generation that took the full
brunt of a portentous century, and the contemporary of
Russia's most talented artists in every field for a long time
before and after, he was a restless innovator who repre
sents, in its final phase before ruin, what Pisarev in the
1860s had called "the thinking proletariat."
Pisarev gave this name to the intelligentsia, who existed
outside the official structure of Russian society. They were
plebeians by origin, or gentry who had crossed over to
become plebeians. Shklovsky was the youngest child of a
poor and fatally improvident schoolmaster, Jewish but
converted to Orthodoxy. He grew up in "Dostoyevsky's
Russia," to borrow the phrase from his contemporary,
Akhmatova, in its then capital city. Petersburg slighted
the shabby genteel with their petty ambitions so often
unrealized. Viktor Borisovich was a bright boy, precocity
showing in the high forehead which in years to come
would make disguise difficult; its shape reminded Man
delstam of a cucumber. But he moved from one school to
[96]
HENRY GIFFORD
another, with repeated failure, until his arrival at the uni

versity. There he became the student of a strikingly orig
inal thinker on language, Baudouin de Courtenay, the
Polish descendant of a twelfth-century crusader king of
Jerusalem, and much too independent for the faculty to
approve of him. Baudouin showed interest in the new
phenomenon of Futurism. Shklovsky himself in 1913 gave
a paper on Futurism and its place in the history of lan
guage, at The Stray Dog, a cafe where poets and artists
met. The following year he published a pamphlet, The
Resurrection of the Word, which turned out to be the
opening shot in the campaign of Russian Formalism.
This movement, so influential until it was denounced
under Stalin, owed much to Shklovsky. He helped to
found Opoyaz (the Society for the Investigation of Poetic
Language) which gave close attention to the procedures
of Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky. Opoyaz brought him the
collaboration and friendship of three scholars in particu
lar, Roman Jakobson, later of the Prague Linguistic Circle
and Harvard University, Yury Tynyanov and Boris Eich
enbaum. Another moving spirit was Osip Brik, husband
of Lili whom Mayakovsky loved with a titanic despair. It
was Shklovsky who conceived many of the ideas central
to Russian Formalism: "baring the device," "alienation"
or "making it strange," the canonization of minor and
hitherto unregarded genres, the line of tradition that runs
obliquely as it were from uncle to nephew. These were
remarkably fecund ideas, and they have had a currency
matching that of Eliot's well-worn formulations, the "ob
jective correlative" and "the dissociation of sensibility."
Shklovsky might very loosely be compared with Thomas
Hobbes, in that he too was "rare at definitions" in Aubrey's
words, and "had a curious sharp sight, as he had a sharp
wit."
In short, he was the ideal proponent of a new approach
to literature, with his adventurousness, his lively under
standing and well-nigh unfailing good humor. He came on
the scene at the hour when Formalism was ready to be de
veloped. Andrey Bely had prepared the ground with a
minute examination of Russian prosody, and a new interest
in techniques had been manifested by those young poets,
[97]
GRAND STREET
for example, who received instruction from Vyacheslav

Ivanov. For many decades Russian criticism had de
pended heavily on the sociological method, as practiced
by the successors of Belinsky and Chernyshevsky-soon to
return, of course, when literature had been thoroughly
taken in hand with the consolidation of Stalin's power.
T he Formalist movement which sprang up during the

First World War derived its vitality not only from
the distinction of the minds that worked on it, or from
their excitement and solidarity. Formalism had its own
powerful impulsion. It was alive to Futurist poetry and
the visual arts; its influence spread to prose fiction (the
Serapions) and to filmmakers, notably Eisenstein. Shklov
sky himself holds a key position in the development of
early Soviet fiction, when his style was widely imitated.
Both he and Tynyanov, later a skilled writer of historical
novels, canonizing the genre in Russia, were practitioners
in their own right. It may look strange that a method
which came under fierce criticism for its aloofness from
social reality should have held so strong a fascination for
Shklovsky, turning over amid all his vicissitudes in the
civil war the problems of "plot as a manifestation of style."
(When defending Kherson he had in his pocket Vanity
Fair to analyze for illustration of his ideas.) He was far
from indifferent to social reality and its often unbearable
pressures. But he maintained strongly the Formalist view
of art as autonomous, and determined wholly by its inner
necessities. Moreover, for him, during those stormy years,
life and art became inextricable.
After serving until 1916 on the Eastern Front, he had
returned to Petrograd as instructor in a school for armored
car personnel. "The individual," he wrote, "needs to master
the mystery of machines." This accomplishment gave him
a satisfaction bordering on conceit. It would seem that the
armored cars held a symbolic value for Shklovsky. They
represented what the revolution, at the outbreak of which
in Petrograd they played a significant part, should really
have been: efficient, thoroughly understood and expertly
handled. His role as an army instructor, much respected
by his men, runs in parallel with that other avocation of
[98]
HENRY GIFFORD
Opoyaz. It encouraged Shklovsky to see himself as a tech

nologist in literature, who knew where he was going and
what should be done. "Men who know their business," he
said sententiously, "are always good men."
He observes somewhere in A Sentinental Journey that
"there wasn't a man alive who didn't experience periods
of belief in the revolution. For whole minutes, you would
believe in the Bolsheviks." This was a highly skeptical
form of support; and one of Shklovsky's embarrassments,
when trying to take his place in Soviet society, came from
this attitude, throughout A Sentimental Journey, to the
arbiters of his fate. Like so many writers he had been
drawn to the Socialist Revolutionaries, uneasy allies of the
Bolsheviks, on their radical wing (the "Left SRs") until
they resigned from government in the summer of 1918.
Their revolutionary faith was still rooted mainly in the
Russian village and the heroic illusions of nineteenth
century populists. Shklovsky adhered to the right wing
of the party, whose leader, Kerensky, eventually domi
nated the Provisional Government. The "Right SRs"
wanted to recall the Constituent Assembly, dissolved by
the Bolsheviks in January 1918. Shklovsky was not slow
to recognize the weakness of Kerensky and Lenin's
strength. Kerensky's rhetoric he compares, in one of those
images that came so aptly to him, with "the feeble fire
made by alcohol poured over wood-consuming itself
without yet igniting the wood." Lenin, whom he heard
arguing with a soldiers' committee opposed to his ideas,
"swept all doubts before him like a wild boar. . ." Shklov
sky confesses: "I left for the front with the sensation
that a blind, powerful force was trampling everything
before it."
He was sent to the front in the spring of 1917, as one
of three commissars appointed to rally the wavering troops
for an offensive. Later he would repent of having "fought
for Lloyd George in June," but his motives were, from the
revolutionary point of view, impeccable. Like Zamyatin,
he saw revolution and entropy as opposed to each other. A
revolution, he thought, needs to be on the offensive, there
fore the exhausted armies had to attack. They were in no
condition to do so with success. Discipline had been un
[99]
GRAND STREET
dermined by well-meaning democratic reforms; and the

soldiers, peasants in the great majority, wanted to go home
and receive their share of land in the expropriations. By
persuasive speech and brave example, Shklovsky was able
to turn the tide on a very small scale. When in July
1917 General Kornilov marched on Petrograd, Shklovsky
dashed round behind the front countermanding tele
graphed orders. He was a good servant of the revolution
as he conceived it. In the 1860s the intelligentsia had "'gone
to the people," only to be greeted with mistrust and ridi
cule. Shklovsky was an intellectual with the rare gift of
being able to get on with all conditions of men, because,
as he likes to remind us, he knew his business.
A Sentimental Journey records with unsurpassed can

dor the chaotic years in which revolution emerged
and spread from the havoc of world war. Shklovsky had
no case to argue except that of personal freedom. After
the Kornilov episode, he asked to be sent as commissar
to Persia, where the Russian occupying army remained in
the north. He denounces this as "imperialism-what's
more, Russian imperialism, which is to say, stupid im
perialism." Perhaps the best thing he achieved in Persia
was to stop single-handed a pogrom in the bazaar of one
city, losing his fur coat to the mob. After an armistice had
been signed, he returned with the army in the disorderly
scramble to get home.
An army committee on the Persian front had passed "a
strongly worded resolution," with which he concurred,
against the Bolsheviks. Only one delegate spoke up for
them. "He was a good man, who later helped us a lot.
But I think he left his faith in the people behind in Persia."
Shklovsky's dealings had always been with individuals,
not with "the people" as imagined by myth-makers; and
he still wanted to save the revolution. On coming back to
Petrograd in January 1918, he did his best to rebuild an
armored division, on behalf of the conspiratorial Union
for the Rebirth of Russia. The soldiers in his unit, he says,
"liked me a lot. The narrowness of my political horizon,
my constant concern that everything be made right imme
[100]
HENRY GIFFORD
diately, my tactics, as opposed to strategy-all this made

me comprehensible to the soldiers." It was, however, a
dangerous mission he had given himself. The deadlines
for action kept slipping by. Then the organization ran
into trouble, and the Cheka was after Shldovsky. He es
caped to Kiev, occupied by the Germans in 1918 but ruled
nominally by the Hetman, Skoropadsky. On Shklovsky's
reappearance in Petrograd at the beginning of 1919, Gorky
helped to rehabilitate him. Conditions there were very
hard; Shklovsky's wife went south with her sister, but he
was too ill and had to endure the privations of the city until
the spring of 1920, when he went to rejoin her. Mean
while, in Petrograd, he had written the first part of A Sen
timental Journey: it was called Revolution and the Front
(published in 1921). He also taught literary theory at the
Translators' Studio, a creation of Gorky's. When, after
nearly destroying himself in the accident at Kherson in
the summer of 1920, he came back once more to Petrograd
with his wife, they lived in the House of Arts, among many
other writers. Until February 1922 he continued his teach
ing. Then the Cheka turned on the SRs, and Shklovsky
had to escape over the ice to Finland. In May he began
the second part of his book, entitled A Writing Desk, and
finished it shortly afterwards in Berlin. The heroic days
had ended.
They had been heroic because in every crisis he could
act as his own man. Toward the end of the book he makes
"<a deposition": "I remained honest throughout the revolu
tion. I drowned no one, I stomped no one to death and I
made peace with no one because of hunger. I worked all
the time." Unspeakable things were done in those years,
yet the time retains a kind of epic grandeur in all the hor
ror, since the participants at least made their own de
cisions. But few who lived through it could claim as much
for their integrity as he did. The boldness and dignity of
his assertion are striking. Elsewhere he quotes his friend
Eichenbaum: "The main distinction between revolution
ary life and ordinary life is that now everything is felt."
It was at the coming of spring in 1922. "Life became art.
Spring is life. I think no hungry cow in her shed was more
[101]
GRAND STREET
overjoyed to see spring than we were." He trusted his

feelings, and they had told him, four years earlier in Kur
distan: "A man should worry less about history and more
about his own biography." He should be responsible for
what he did, as Shklovsky was to the point of recklessness
in those years, and so "life became art."
In a more demonstrative way it became this when he
reached Berlin and wrote Zoo, or Letters Not About Love,
to Elsa Triolet, and also with her, since she too con
tributed a few letters. Elsa was the sister of Lili Brik: the
unhappy situation of Mayakovsky and Shklovsky himself
made a bond between them. Translator Richard Sheldon
rightly points to the resemblance in tone between Zoo and
Mayakovsky's poem About This, addressed to Lili. Zoo
is a work of supreme artifice. At one point Shklovsky ad
mits: "I am completely bewildered.... That is the prob
lem: I'm writing letters to you and at the same time I'm
writing a book. And what's in the book and what's in life
have gotten hopelessly jumbled." The epistolary genre,
that of Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise, carried for Shklovsky
its own determinations: "After a hundred pages or so, I
will be checkmated. The beginning is already played out.
No one can change the denouement." This brilliant play,
in the manner of Sterne, is sustained with ingenuity, and it
answered his emotional needs of the time. Elsa did not
love him. Shklovsky accepts her ban on the subject in the
letters, only to hint at his obsession on every page. In that
oblique way he can write truthfully of the situation. He
then springs a surprise in the last letter, addressed to the
All-Russian Central Executive Committee. "The revolu
tion," he affirms, pleading for his return, "transformed me;
I cannot breathe without it. Here one can only suffocate."
"Russian Berlin" in 1922 swarmed with emigres around
the Tiergarten. Some would remain in the West; others
were debating whether to go back and make their peace
with the Soviet regime. Shklovsky, like Pasternak, whom
he sketches vividly in one letter, felt uneasy there. As he
wrote in the album of a Russian lady, "I feel on the Berlin
asphalt like a cow on ice." Pasternak he reports as saying
to Lili Brik: "You know, we're like people on a ship."
Shklovsky concluded:
[102]
HENRY GIFFORD
We are going nowhere ...

Steeped in dampness and defeat, iron Germany is cor
roding and we, though not made of iron, are corroding
along with her ...
At the Berlin "House of Arts," where many writers congre

gated whom he had known at the Petrograd establishment
of this name, a political truce supposedly held between
the various factions. But while Shklovsky was there, all
the contradictions within the Russian community came
out into the open. The year 1922 had seen the expulsion
by the Soviet government of many intellectuals, but it
was also the moment in which, under the New Economic
Policy, publication had become available once more to
many writers. The harvest, in poetry above all, but in
prose too, was impressive. Shklovsky, as we have seen,
always craved for action. He believed in Futurism and
the dedication to change and renewal that it entailed.
Khlebnikov for him was a man who "altogether trembled
with the future." In A Writing Desk, he set down some
further reflections on the Bolsheviks. They had "entered
a Russia that was already sick" as "a special kind of or
ganizing bacillus." He thought they "were holding out,"
and would continue to do so, "thanks to the imperfections
of the mechanism which they control." And, to be fair to
them, he would admit that they "had their own music."
To this music he could not close his ears. Quite apart from
any personal reasons-Nina Berberova has suggested that
his wife may have been lheld deliberately as a hostage
it was time to leave Berlin, where "dampness and defeat"
now prevailed.
He had known Mayakovsky for some years, and it was
owing to his intercession and Gorky's that Shklovsky was
allowed home. "The whole wind of Russian poetry,"' he
wrote much later, "was in the Soviet land, and Mayakov
sky himself was like the sail."
1\,1ayakovsky and Brik had already prepared the

ground for "the Left Front of the Arts" [LEF],
set up in 1923. The Futurists wanted, in the power strug
gle between literary and artistic factions, to ensure their
[103]
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dominance. The most dangerous rival was the Russian

Association of Proletarian Writers [RAPP], which aimed
to establish an entirely working-class culture, excluding
the fellow travelers of bourgeois origin and therefore un
sound ideology. It was natural for Shklovsky, along with
his associates in Opoyaz, to support LEF and to write in
its journal of the same name. He worked actively in the
movement until its collapse in 1925, and joined Mayakov
sky in the New LEF of 1927-28. But he was critical of
its prevailing tendency, not refused by Mayakovsky, to
subordinate art to "the social demand" (a concept ex
pounded, with disastrous consequences for the arts in the
Soviet Union, by Osip Brik and Arbatov). In his collection
of essays Knight's Move (1923), Shklovsky published one
written in March 1919 to challenge Mayakovsky's and
Brik's line. They had accepted positions under the Soviet
govemment which would allow them to gain control over
the arts. He reminds them that "Futurism has been one of
the purest achievements of human genius." Art, he pro
claims, "has always been independent of life," and "never
reflects the color of the flag over the city fortress." And
elsewhere he demanded: "In the name of agitation, take
agitation out of art." His own beliefs were made clear in
the "second preface" to Knights Move. Art must develop
organically, because "you cannot regulate the unknown."
A Sentimental Journey contains a similar charge against
the Bolsheviks: "They couldn't understand the anarchy
of life, its subconscious, the fact that a tree knows best
how it should grow."
Mayakovsky knew well "the anarchy of life": it was
manifested in his own temperament. A few months before
committing suicide, he declared in his poem At the Top
of My Voice-the defiant apologia of a man dragged down
by RAPP-that "I stood / on the throat / of my own song."
This defiant boast would have been unthinkable for
Shklovsky. His "own song," it is true, would never be
heard breaking out again so irresistibly as in the work
before his return to Russia. But the stance he took on this
decisive issue-the independence of art-was the opposite
of Mayakovsky's (which faltered at times in practice). He
[1041
HENRY GIFFORD
was critical of the effect LEF had upon some of the archi
tects, filmmakers and stage designers belonging to it, and
he points out in his book on Mayakovsky (1940): "Just con
sider the poet's position. He presides over a journal, but
the journal is against poetry."
Third Factory (1926) is named after the Moscow state
film studio in which he had been working. Nadezhda
Mandelstam writes of Shklovsky that he hid there "as
the Jews in occupied Hungary did in Catholic monas
teries." Presumably the Jews in question would have re
mained aloof from the actual concerns of the monastery.
Shklovsky, however, threw himself eagerly into filmmak
ing: he collaborated closely with Eisenstein, another ad
herent of LEF, and was excited by the film as a new
medium that might escape the decline of Soviet theater
into "good taste and restoration." Other Formalists as
well, and notably Tynyanov, were interested in the ra
tionale of film. The cinema provided a haven for writers
in difficulty. Mandelstam wrote a wry account of his own
fruitless attempt, instigated by Shklovsky, to contrive a
scenario.
Richard Sheldon, translator of Third Factory (from
whose excellent versions of A Sentimental Journey and
Zoo I have quoted above) in his introduction seeks to
defend Shldovsky against the charges of opportunism and
weakness when the Formalist doctrine came under in
creasing attack. From Third Factory, Zoo and his seem
ing recantation of all that Opoyaz had stood for-the ar
ticle of 1930 entitled "A Monument to Scientific Error"
Sheldon illustrates "the device of ostensible surrender."
It is well named by him: Shklovsky, always vigilant to spot
devices in literature, and to use them creatively, had dis
covered one that was gratifyingly ironic. Only the percep
tive reader, in a time of ever more blunted perceptions,
would be able to recognize his method. The argument is
convincing. Sheldon quotes a statement from Hamburg
Account (1928), in which Shklovsky explains how his books
gained their effect from a montage of contradictions. In
Third Factory each apparent concession is, in the next
breath, whisked away by a rebellious afterthought. Shkl
[105]
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ovsky admits to having found this book "completely in

comprehensible": ". . . I wanted to capitulate to the time
-not only capitulate," he wrote, "but take my troops
over to the other side. I wanted to come to terms with the
present. As it turned out, however, I had no say in the
matter."
The desire to capitulate may seem, at our comfortable
distance, a fatal weakness in Shklovsky. It is only fair to
recall what Nadezhda Mandelstam says in Hope Against
Hope about her husband's attitude in the very same year.
"He really was in a state of confusion: it is not so simple
to go against everybody and against the times . . . we all
had the temptation ... to join the crowd that knew where
it was going." Formalism, like the Acmeist movement in
poetry to which Mandelstam belonged, was profoundly
suspect in the eyes of the power brokers. It offended them
by insisting that art feeds on itself, one genre being ele
vated from obscurity as another is exhausted. Shklovsky
was less ready than Tynyanov to admit the relation be
tween the system of art and adjacent systems-above all,
its sociological aspect. In Third Factory, he doggedly
maintains its independence by a series of deft substitu
tions, so that his argument is subtly restored. Art in his
view "liberates itself' from the author's "original inten
tion." His example is the experience of Tolstoy, in whose
fiction doctrine and imagination are frequently at odds.
When Mandelstam wanted to capitulate and write an
ode to Stalin, he too "had no say in the matter." The poem
was unsatisfactory and had to be cast away. But it gave
rise to a series of counter-poems which purged him of
contempt before the court of his conscience. Under the
stress of a furious assault upon Formalism, as dangerous a
charge to face as the subsequent one of "cosmopolitanism,"
to which Shklovsky was also vulnerable, he chose a dif
ferent path from Mandelstam. The poet told Akhmatova
in 1934 that he was "<ready for death." His widow refers to
Zoo as "that sorry book in which he tearfully implores
the victors to take him under their wing." Shklovsky does
indeed own that "my youth and self-assurance have been
taken from me," and declares "I raise my arm and surren
[106]
HENRY GIFFORD
der." Mrs. Mandelstam seems to have forgotten the final

passage (dropped from Zoo on its republication in 1964
and again in 1973). He asks of the Central Committee:
"Do not let the history of Erzerum repeat itself." After the
Russian victory in 1916, all the Turkish casualties were
found to have been struck by the saber on their right arm
and head. There was a "very simple" reason for this:
"When Turks surrender, they always raise their right arm."
From one throwing himself on the mercy of his former
adversaries, the anecdote has an impolitic sting.
His most original work was certainly achieved before
Stalin came to exercise full power. But thereafter Shklov
sky cannot be dismissed as a mere shadow of his daring
and uncompromising self. Compromises there were: with
out them, publication would have been impossible. In the
most difficult of times he contrived to hold out as a Rus
sian writer. The book on Komarov (1929), who wrote
stories and compilationis for a large, half-educated audi
ence in the later eighteenth century (the eventual "third
estate" of Gogol's time), enabled him to reiterate his no
tion of lowly genres that finally become canonized. His
study of Gogol's contemporary and admirer, Fedotov
(1936), a satirical painter of dauntless integrity, long in
ured to failure and disappointment, makes a rear-guard
defense of the free artist. Shklovsky managed even in the
dark period of the Cold War to keep going, with a study
of Russian craftsmen and inventors between 1714 and
1812. Admittedly the enterprise conformed with the offi
cial doctrine that the native culture of Russia had always
been independent of Western example and even antici
pated its scientific discoveries. But Shklovsky's ingenious
men of the people seem genuinely to have rivaled any of
their counterparts in Great Britain. They also display the
initiative and self-assurance so congenial to Shklovsky.
His account of Mayakovsky (1940) came in for severe
criticism because it made too much of the poet's Futurist
allegiance, and should have played down both the rele
vance of Formalist ideas and Mayakovsky's consuming
passion for Lili Brik. Shklovsky took advantage of the re
laxation following Stalin's death to resume his old interests.
[107]
GRAND STREET
He wrote on Tolstoy and on methods in fiction; he pre

sented the case "for and against" Dostoyevsky in 1957,
though on a restricted basis; and his autobiography of
1964 returns guardedly to the issues of former days. His
paradoxes are more careful, the verve less ebullient. But
he is recognizably the same man, saddened though re
silient still.
T here is a photograph by Moses Nappelbaum of

Shklovsky in middle age. It is quite unlike those
of other notable writers and artists in Nappelbaum's gal
lery. The man who tums toward us, spectacles in hand,
has a smile on his lips-this was habitual with Shklovsky
and under the high bald dome of his forehead the face
with the steady eyes is intent, brimming with energy. He
might be an inventor or a soldier; he is assuredly an activ
ist with a very clear purpose. Shklovsky in those years
did not hesitate to take risks. At the beginning of the 1930s,
he continued to write on Tynyanov, or Mandelstam, or
Eisenstein, when others were more cautious. The personal
courage he had shown on the battlefield did not desert
him under the Terror. Mrs. Mandelstam in Hope Against
Hope pays tribute to the readiness of the Shklovskys to
take in Osip and herself when their neighbor on the same
floor was a zealous informer. She speaks of the moral at
mosphere in the Shklovskys' household-"the one house
where an outcast could always go"-and of the outspoken
ness of their young son, Nikita, greatly loved by his par
ents, who was killed in action very near the end of the
Second World War. They were absolutely fearless in their
protection of the Mandelstams, even in the deadly year
1937, when Shklovsky brushed aside their scruples about
visiting them: "Come over at once: Vasilissa misses you
terribly."
Nina Berberova saw a lot of him in the Berlin period.
She describes Shklovsky as "a man from another planet"
when compared to Khodasevich and Bely, "but for me
there always clearly burned in him talent, energy, humor."
Elsewhere she notes that Shklovsky, like many of his con
temporaries-Mayakovsky, the Futurists in general, the
painter Larionov-delighted in mischievousness. Shklov
[108]
HENRY GIFFORD
sky himself in Hamburg Account speaks of the gaiety at

the bottom of art, fermenting it. This is the quality Blok
cherished in Pushkin, and it was with a friend of Pushkin's,
Vyazemsky, that Tynyanov compared Shklovsky as a wit,
"brilliant and very traditional." He was always interested
in the way he felt about things: "This is called sentimen
talism," Tynyanov comments, "and all true sentimentalists
have been wits."
Those who, like Berberova, elected to live abroad are
bound to speculate whether Shklovsky might not have
profited by their example. She believes that "in the West
he was one of the few who could have realized himself
fully-Roman Jakobson, a man close to him, of course
would have helped him." But instead, "his was the fate of
a wasted man, one of the most tragic." Any writer of
Shklovsky's generation who stayed in Soviet Russia had
to confront potential tragedy and the waste of his talents.
Shklovsky was often frustrated, and could not always
emulate the openness he admired in that versatile innova
tor, Lomonosov: "Whatever he thinks, he will tell im
mediately." But I believe Shklovsky may be admired for
his persistence in honesty, and the skill with which he
played the few cards remaining to him.
When Opoyaz in 1929 found itself in deep crisis, he
wrote to Jakobson, then living in Prague, about the need
for their continued collaboration, in what was his "life's
work." Opoyaz had "always been three people"-Jakob
son, Tynyanov and himself. Friendship was important to
him, and he loved to develop ideas through discussion.
This was greatly appreciated by Tynyanov, among others
who knew him: "Talking with you, everything is first-rate."
Quite characteristic is the description Ilya Ehrenburg
gives of him at Kiev in 1919: "V. B. Shklovsky flashed by
like a meteor: he gave a brilliant, involved lecture ...
smiled slyly, and criticized absolutely everyone merci
lessly but with affection."
As a witness to the first years of Soviet power, he can
always be trusted. His vision of what was happening and
what was still to come may be less profound than that of
the great poets in the age: there is no metaphysical dimen
sion to his thinking. But his particular virtue, a rare one
[ 109]
GRAND STREET
at the time and much needed, was that he could retain a

strong individuality when almost everybody else was los
ing this, and with it any significance for the future. Some
where he talks of the oriental belief that "fast running
water cleanses itself." Sbklovsky's eager and irreverent
mind behaves in that way.
[110]

Viktor Shklovsky's Explosive Career and Literary Formalism

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Viktor Shklovsky's Explosive Career and Literary Formalism

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Ben Sonnenberg

In the summer of 1920, not far from Kherson in the

My arms were flung back; I was lifted, seared and tumed

Shklovsky survived the accident; he was a born survivor,

to him eight years before. They "started to divert each

himself no less than of the time. His book is fittingly dedi

another, with repeated failure, until his arrival at the uni

for example, who received instruction from Vyacheslav

T he Formalist movement which sprang up during the

Opoyaz. It encouraged Shklovsky to see himself as a tech

dermined by well-meaning democratic reforms; and the

A Sentimental Journey records with unsurpassed can

diately, my tactics, as opposed to strategy-all this made

overjoyed to see spring than we were." He trusted his

We are going nowhere ...

At the Berlin "House of Arts," where many writers congre

1\,1ayakovsky and Brik had already prepared the

dominance. The most dangerous rival was the Russian

ovsky admits to having found this book "completely in

der." Mrs. Mandelstam seems to have forgotten the final

He wrote on Tolstoy and on methods in fiction; he pre

T here is a photograph by Moses Nappelbaum of

sky himself in Hamburg Account speaks of the gaiety at

at the time and much needed, was that he could retain a

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