Viktor Shklovsky in Forward

It’s been out for a couple weeks, but Joshua Cohen’s overview of Viktor Shklovsky’s work in The Jewish Daily Forward is worth reading.

Shklovsky was one of the founders of Russian Formalism, a very interesting literary movement that Cohen adequately summarizes:

Decades before becoming a Stalinist camp meant to condemn the self-conscious, avant-garde product of Soviet artists, Formalism was a school whose intention it was to ignore an artwork’s historic, political and cultural context, directing attention, instead, to the very materials of that art — to its methodology, its technical systems, or component construction. Here, the famous last words of the European 19th century, l’art pour l’art, became finally refined: Russian “art for art’s sake” — already brave in the 1920s, what with the early organization of Soviet censorship — was now “art’s sake for art’s sake,” and the language of criticism would forever be changed.

Six of Shklovsky’s books are available from Dalkey Archive, the most recent being Energy of Delusion, which sounds quite good:

Apropos of its various interests, Shklovsky’s theoretical work is not for the reader in search of specifically academic or party line pleasure. Like the entirety of Shklovsky’s critical corpus, Dalkey Archive’s most recent translation, “Energy of Delusion,” is best intended for the inhumanly well read. Essentially, “Energy” is an assembly line of scholarly digressions on the work of Tolstoy, interspersed with appreciations of Boccaccio, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Pushkin and Turgenev — and the focus is on “appreciation,” always; never does Shklovsky wag a finger, or exhort. Shklovsky’s late thesis on plot was the one with which he began: that plot self-proliferates, that a book’s form — after an author’s initial theme, or pretext, is decided upon — generates itself, through identifiable if essentially organic or autochthonous technique. In resonant moments, this plot theory becomes transposed to life itself, or to the plot of life.