{"id":258726,"date":"2007-12-17T15:19:20","date_gmt":"2007-12-17T15:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2007\/12\/17\/viktor-shklovsky-in-forward\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:34:47","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:34:47","slug":"viktor-shklovsky-in-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2007\/12\/17\/viktor-shklovsky-in-forward\/","title":{"rendered":"Viktor Shklovsky in Forward"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been out for a couple weeks, but Joshua Cohen’s overview<\/a> of Viktor Shklovsky’s work in The Jewish Daily Forward<\/i> is worth reading.<\/p>\n

Shklovsky was one of the founders of Russian Formalism, a very interesting literary movement that Cohen adequately summarizes:<\/p>\n

\n

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\u2019s historic, political and cultural context, directing attention, instead, to the very materials of that art \u2014 to its methodology, its technical systems, or component construction. Here, the famous last words of the European 19th century, l\u2019art pour l\u2019art, became finally refined: Russian \u201cart for art\u2019s sake\u201d \u2014 already brave in the 1920s, what with the early organization of Soviet censorship \u2014 was now \u201cart\u2019s sake for art\u2019s sake,\u201d and the language of criticism would forever be changed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Six of Shklovsky’s books are available from Dalkey Archive, the most recent being Energy of Delusion<\/i>, which sounds quite good:<\/p>\n

\n

Apropos of its various interests, Shklovsky\u2019s theoretical work is not for the reader in search of specifically academic or party line pleasure. Like the entirety of Shklovsky\u2019s critical corpus, Dalkey Archive\u2019s most recent translation, \u201cEnergy of Delusion,\u201d is best intended for the inhumanly well read. Essentially, \u201cEnergy\u201d is an assembly line of scholarly digressions on the work of Tolstoy, interspersed with appreciations of Boccaccio, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Pushkin and Turgenev \u2014 and the focus is on \u201cappreciation,\u201d always; never does Shklovsky wag a finger, or exhort. Shklovsky\u2019s late thesis on plot was the one with which he began: that plot self-proliferates, that a book\u2019s form \u2014 after an author\u2019s initial theme, or pretext, is decided upon \u2014 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1836,8876],"class_list":["post-258726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cwp","tag-viktor-shklovsky"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258726"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":360416,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258726\/revisions\/360416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}