Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (or Shklovskii; ;
Saint PetersburgSaint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city's other names were Petrograd and Leningrad...
, ;
MoscowMoscow is the capital and the largest city of Russia. It is also the largest metropolitan area in Europe, and ranks among the largest urban areas in the world. Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a...
, 6 December 1984) was a
RussianRussia , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia . It is a semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
and
SovietThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
criticThe word critic comes from the Greek , "able to discern", which in turn derives from the word , meaning a person who offers reasoned judgment or analysis, value judgment, interpretation, or observation...
,
writerA writer is anyone who creates a written work, though the word usually designates those who write creatively or professionally, as well as those who have written in many different forms.-Profession:...
, and
pamphleteerA pamphleteer is a historical term for someone who creates or distributes pamphlets. Pamphlets were used to broadcast the writer's opinions on an issue, for example, in order to get people to vote for their favorite politician or to articulate a particular political ideology.A famous pamphleteer...
.
He was born in
St. PetersburgSaint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city's other names were Petrograd and Leningrad...
, Russia, and attended St. Petersburg University. During the war, he served as a
CommissarCommissar is the English transliteration of an official title used in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution.The title was mostly associated with a number of Cheka and military functions in many Bolshevik and Soviet government military forces during the Russian Civil War; the White Army widely used...
in the Russian army, as described in his memoirs,
Sentimental'noe puteshestvie, vospominaniia (
A Sentimental Journey).
He was the founder of the OPOYAZ (Obshchestvo izucheniya POeticheskogo YAZyka—Society for the Study of Poetic Language), one of the two groups, with the
Moscow Linguistic CircleThe Moscow linguistic circle was a group of important thinkers in semiotics, literary theory, and linguistics active in Moscow from 1915 to ca. 1924. Its members included Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur, and Petr Bogatyrev. The group was a counterpart to the St...
, which developed the critical theories and techniques of
Russian FormalismRussian formalism was an influential school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur who revolutionised...
.
In addition to literary criticism and biographies about such authors as
Laurence SterneLaurence Sterne was an Irish-born English novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...
,
Maxim GorkyAleksey Maksimovich Peshkov , better known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian/Soviet author, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist...
,
Leo TolstoyLeo Tolstoy, or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy , was a Russian writer widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists. His masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina represent in their scope, breadth and vivid depiction of 19th-century Russian life and attitudes, the peak of realist...
, and
Vladimir MayakovskyVladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was a Russian and Soviet poet and playwright, among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.- Early life :...
, he wrote a number of semi-autobiographical works disguised as fiction.
Shklovsky developed the concept of
ostranenie or
defamiliarizationDefamiliarization or ostranenie is the artistic technique of forcing the audience to see common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar...
in literature.
Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (or Shklovskii; ;
Saint PetersburgSaint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city's other names were Petrograd and Leningrad...
, ;
MoscowMoscow is the capital and the largest city of Russia. It is also the largest metropolitan area in Europe, and ranks among the largest urban areas in the world. Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a...
, 6 December 1984) was a
RussianRussia , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia . It is a semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
and
SovietThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. The name is a translation of the , tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated СССР, SSSR. The common short name is Soviet Union, from , Sovetskiy Soyuz...
criticThe word critic comes from the Greek , "able to discern", which in turn derives from the word , meaning a person who offers reasoned judgment or analysis, value judgment, interpretation, or observation...
,
writerA writer is anyone who creates a written work, though the word usually designates those who write creatively or professionally, as well as those who have written in many different forms.-Profession:...
, and
pamphleteerA pamphleteer is a historical term for someone who creates or distributes pamphlets. Pamphlets were used to broadcast the writer's opinions on an issue, for example, in order to get people to vote for their favorite politician or to articulate a particular political ideology.A famous pamphleteer...
.
Life and work
He was born in
St. PetersburgSaint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city's other names were Petrograd and Leningrad...
, Russia, and attended St. Petersburg University. During the war, he served as a
CommissarCommissar is the English transliteration of an official title used in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution.The title was mostly associated with a number of Cheka and military functions in many Bolshevik and Soviet government military forces during the Russian Civil War; the White Army widely used...
in the Russian army, as described in his memoirs,
Sentimental'noe puteshestvie, vospominaniia (
A Sentimental Journey).
He was the founder of the OPOYAZ (Obshchestvo izucheniya POeticheskogo YAZyka—Society for the Study of Poetic Language), one of the two groups, with the
Moscow Linguistic CircleThe Moscow linguistic circle was a group of important thinkers in semiotics, literary theory, and linguistics active in Moscow from 1915 to ca. 1924. Its members included Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur, and Petr Bogatyrev. The group was a counterpart to the St...
, which developed the critical theories and techniques of
Russian FormalismRussian formalism was an influential school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Grigory Vinokur who revolutionised...
.
In addition to literary criticism and biographies about such authors as
Laurence SterneLaurence Sterne was an Irish-born English novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics...
,
Maxim GorkyAleksey Maksimovich Peshkov , better known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian/Soviet author, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist...
,
Leo TolstoyLeo Tolstoy, or Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy , was a Russian writer widely regarded as among the greatest of novelists. His masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina represent in their scope, breadth and vivid depiction of 19th-century Russian life and attitudes, the peak of realist...
, and
Vladimir MayakovskyVladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was a Russian and Soviet poet and playwright, among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.- Early life :...
, he wrote a number of semi-autobiographical works disguised as fiction.
Shklovsky developed the concept of
ostranenie or
defamiliarizationDefamiliarization or ostranenie is the artistic technique of forcing the audience to see common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar...
in literature. He explained this idea as follows:
- "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 BakhtinMikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language...
and Russian and Prague School scholars of
semioticsSemiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of sign processes , or signification and communication, signs and symbols, into three branches:...
.
He died in Moscow in 1984.