Rehabilitation of Formalism or “A Monument to the Scientific Error 2.0”: Viktor Shklovsky’s Zhili-byli

Viktor Shklovsky’s book of memoirs, Zhili-byli (Once Upon A Time, hereafter ZB), was a uniquely expansive project that included а serialized publication (Znamia, 9–12/1961), two first editions (1964 and 1966) and later a TV series of documentaries. However, despite its multi-media character, it was overshadowed by such memoirist blockbusters of the 1960s–early 1970s as Liudi, Gody, Zhizn’ (People, Years, Life) by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vospominania (translated as Hope Against Hope) by Nadezhda Mandelstam. It was not Shklovsky’s ZB, but these two memoirs that defined two main paradigms for post-Stalinist intelligentsia’s self-identification. Ehrenburg offered a concept of Soviet culture as the integral part of European modernism and avant-garde, equally persecuted by Stalinism and fascism. Mandelstam, on the contrary, perceived everything Soviet, including Soviet avant-garde, as the destructive anticultural catastrophe, to which her husband and his peers heroically resisted. Both concepts suffered from mythological elements but, thanks to them, they generated a massive following.

It would be tempting to construe Shklovsky’s ZB as a wise but misunderstood compromise between these approaches, as the truth hidden in middle. However, this would require too much epistemological violence. Shklovsky obviously falls into Ehrenburg’s paradigm, but politically represents its moderate, rather than radicalized version: He routinely praises the revolution and obfuscates his and his heroes’ disagreements with the Soviet regime. Not only does he avoid the terms avant-garde and modernism, but also he tries hard to present Alexander Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, and Isaac Babel as steadily moving towards realism as the highest mark of cultural distinction.

However, unlike Ehrenburg, Shklovsky’s autobiographic narrative has a not-so-secret theoretical goal: to re-introduce (with necessary adjustments) formalism and its main ideas after the decades of hounding and silencing. Apparently, this goal was central for Shklovsky and most irritating for censors, which explains why the first book publication of ZB in 1964 excluded a segment Youth Ends (40 pp.) with its focus on OPOYAZ, and the new publication of the book in 1966, where this segment was restored, contrary to expectations, was not marked as the 2nd edition but as the first edition once again that symbolically obliterated the 1964 version as erroneous. Nevertheless, the resonance of ZB among literary scholars, even supported by a simultaneous publication of Povesti o proze (Novella About the Prose, 1966), was incomparably lower than the resonance of Mikhail Bakhtin’s books on Dostoevsky (Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, translated as Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 1963) and Rabelais (Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaya kul’tura srednevekovya i Renessansa, translated as Rabelais and His World, 1965).

In short, ZB appeared to be stuck between memoirs and theory, failing to achieve an expected impact in either sphere. Keeping this in mind, I’d like to propose an approach to ZB as to an experimental genre of cultural scholarship, in which literary methods of montage and subtext complement and even substitute for theoretical arguments. I am not arguing that Shklovsky used this method for the first time in ZB—certainly, Zoo and Tretia Fabrika (Third Factory) have a priority in this respect, but ZB reestablished this method (and included Zoo along with a more or less enigmatic essay about Tretia fabrika), and while refreshing the formalist theory by non-academic methods, arrived to some unexpected—even for the author and his theories—results.

While dealing with the formalist theory, Shklovsky operates in several modes simultaneously. First, he profusely speaks about his and his friends’ mistakes and philosophical misunderstandings.

Boris Mikhailovich began an extremely interesting work. He saw something that others had not been seen before, but thanks to the mistakes of OPOYAZ, he incorrectly put his observation on the map. The case was not brought to its negation, that is, to a new affirmation of the unity of form and content. /…/ I did not reach it because I misidentified my attitude toward the world, and what was given to us by time, youth, and talent directly into our hands, was completed because of philosophical errors. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 131)

Our approach to literature was not holistic, but it was based on certain conventions; the thirst to convey in a book his holistic feeling about the writer led Tynianov to literature. /…/ Yuri Tynianov did not finish his novel: illness interfered. I visited Tynianov when he was dying. He did not immediately recognize me, and then his eyes changed, a smile appeared on his face. He could begin talking with me right away. He recited Pushkin’s poems to me, and then we talked about theory. Let’s get back to theory, then. Yuri Tynianov was a knight of Soviet literary studies. (Шкловский, 1964, pp. 133–134)

I plead guilty entirely to not having understood, while living in the USSR, what B. Shaw understood in 1921 in England. I did not understand “the problem of social reorganization”. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 136)

I was proving the complete independence of art from the development of life. I had a wrong theory of self-developing poetic genes. /…/ A wrong understanding of the world corrupted the theory, or rather created a wrong theory. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 359)

These and similar “repentances” are full of irony, noticeable to an attentive reader. For example, a few paragraphs after saying that Boris Eikhenbaum didn’t develop the formalist theory to its own negation, Shklovsky suddenly adds a contradictory statement, “Boris Mikhailovich went beyond his young work, stepped over it and learned to negate it” (Шкловский, 1964, p. 132), leaving the reader to guess whether Eikhenbaum succeeded or failed in the self-negation.

While speaking abоut the idea of art’s independence from political ideology as a wrong idea that damaged the life, Shklovsky solidifies this connection by referencing to his own trauma: “The only thing I can say in my defense, and not even as an excuse, but as a comment, is that I carry a lot of real wounds from that time on me” (Шкловский, 1964, p. 359). With the motif of “real injuries” resonates an earlier repentance, when admitting his guilt in the lack of attention to the “problem of social change”, Shklovsky brings in an anecdote about Evgeny Polivanov:

Details blocked the whole for me. It was possible to see. I saw people who were able to break away from the past. Such was Evgeny Dmitriyevich Polivanov—a relative of Lobachevsky, a man of conservative views before the revolution. He changed in the revolution.

In his youth he considered everything possible for himself. Once he put his hand on the rails under the moving train, his goal was to surpass Kolya Krasotkin from The Brothers Karamazov—that boy just lay between the rails.

Evgeny Dmitriyevich did not pull his hand away. The wheel cut it off. The boys scattered. Polivanov stood up, took the severed hand by the fingers and went with it. He told me how with horror, whipping the horses, the cabbies drove away from him. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 136)

This anecdote, in its own turn, echoes the finale of Zoo, which even in the redacted version preserves the sentence Я поднимаю руку и сдаюсь (I raise my hand and give up). However, more obviously it resonates with the commentary to this sentence, which concluded the original version of Zoo:

On either side of the road laid the hacked-out Askers [soldiers]. All of them had saber blows to their right hand and head.

My friend asked:

“Why did they all take a blow to the hand and head?”

The answer was:

“Very simply, the Askers always raise their right hand when they surrender.” (Шкловский, 2002, p. 332)

Severed hand, body injuries, emigration, death (of Eikhenbaum and Tynianov)—all these motifs resonate with each other, creating a web of subtexts, as Tamara Silman used to formulate, “Subtext consists of repetitions separated by a distance” (Сильман, 1969, p. 90). This subtext operates as a counter-weight to Shklovsky’s self-blame for the “the lack of understanding” and “philosophical errors”. This and similar subtexts tangibly and painfully connect the formalists’ alleged mistakes with their personal experience of historical traumas, with scars left on their bodies and minds by the revolution and its consequences. The relations between the history and theory that allegedly separated the art from politics, obtains here a more complex and far more ambivalent meaning.

Next to this web of traumatic motifs, a sentence “One shouldn’t think that the work of the OPOYAZ was interrupted, so to speak, on the fly by some administrative orders” (Шкловский, 1964, pp. 139–140), sounds ironic, as a lip service to the official version of formalism’s history. The independence of the art from a political ideology, in this context, turns into a powerful political idea in its own right, an idea that requires real sacrifices as its evidence. By including traumatic corporeal motifs, Shklovsky uses affective arguments to undermine the ritualistic formulas of repentance. In this respect, he imitates Eisenstein’s method of intellectual montage aimed at the management of affects, or rather his own interpretation of this method, “The human psyche operates with words, with meanings, in which relatively small differences denote large semantic changes. This system is based upon conventions. Eisenstein wanted to return from conventional systems to unconditioned sensations, like the cry of pain” (Шкловский, 1964, p. 504).

Along with repenting in mistakes, Shklovsky outlines and recaps the formalists concepts almost verbatim. For example, he cites Grigory Vinokur and through him “R. Jakobson argued ‘that our young literary history has finally found its hero’. The ‘hero’ is the structure of the literary work as such” (Шкловский, 1964, p. 374). Enhancing the significance of this statement, Shklovsky adds: “The notion of structure, the knowledge of which is the basis in the knowledge of language and poetics, seems to me to be introduced here for the first time” (Шкловский, 1964, p. 374). Furthermore, he reiterates the central formalist concept of the form as the multi-directional relations of meanings.

The change of literary schools is connected with the change of the tasks which art sets for itself. At the same time, each literary form, using common linguistic thinking, sets itself a program for the use of universal thinking, redefines the meaning of the beautiful, the touching, the necessary, and the terrible, and redefines the relationship of meanings, that is, the form of the work. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 103)^[1]

Indeed, this is only a digest of formalism, but considering the dark clout surrounding this school in Soviet culture until the 1960s, this is a true breakthrough.

Frequently, Shklovsky surrounds these digests with commentaries, which sound misleading. For example:

A phenomenon that had been perceived many times and no is longer noticed, or rather, the method of such extinguished perception, I called “recognition” as opposed to “vision”. The goal of imagery, the goal of creating new art, was to return the object from recognition to vision. In the language of modern physiology, it comes down to inhibition and excitation. The signal, given many times, acts soporific, and inhibitory. Lev Gumilevsky pointed out to me this coincidence of my then statements with Pavlov’s work. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 342)

A reference to Ivan Pavlov’s theory seemingly devalues Shklovsky’s thought, making ostranenie indistinguishable from a trivial physiological process and cutting off its revolutionary effects. However, on the following page Shklovsky clearly devalues Pavlov’s physiology as well by reproducing an anecdote about his “return” to damned and banned psychology.

The above quote does not prove that OPOYAZ was right. Nor does it prove that Pavlov was right. Those were the ideas of the time. Pavlov partially abandoned them. It is known that Pavlov forbade the use of the word “psychology” in his laboratory and even fined him for it. Subsequently, he became involved in the study of higher brain activity in humans. Once he came to the laboratory and, laughing harshly, said:

– All reflexes and reflexes. It is time to invent a new term for so many reflexes, for example, psychology. We have not invented such a term. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 343)

However, formalists did invent such a term as ostranenie, and Shklovsky is well aware of this!

Even more interesting are his indirect commentaries to summarized formalist concepts. Thus, Shklovsky cites his theses for the paper The Place of Futurism in the History of Language, an embryo of many formalist ideas.

The attitude of criticism to the new trend. The word as an elementary form of poetry. The word-image and its petrification. Epithet as a means of renewing the word. “The history of the epithet as the history of poetic style” (A. Veselovsky). The fate of the works of the old writers is the same as the fate of the word itself: They light the way from poetry to prose, covered by the glass armor of habituality. “Market art” as proof of the death of old art, the death of things. Strangeness as a means to fight habituality. The theory of the shift. The task of futurism is the resurrection of things, the return of the human experience of the world. Kruchenykh’s “tight language” and Vladimir Korolenko’s “polished surface”. Swear words and affectionate words as altered and mutilated words. Connection of the techniques of the futurists with the techniques of general linguistic thinking. The half-understood language of ancient poetry. Futurist language. Gamma of vowels. The resurrection of things. (Шкловский, 1964, pp. 306–307)

This extended self-quotation is introduced by the following text: “I had my own theory, my own window on the world, as Baudouin de Courtenay used to say. I believed that art was not a way of thinking, but a way of restoring the tangibility of the world, and that the form of art was changing in order to preserve the tangibility of life” (Шкловский, 1964, p. 306). Тhe reference to Jan Baudouin de Courtenay is highly meaningful, since it subtextually connects this part with an earlier fragment, in which Shklovsky speaks about his admiration of linguistics and describes Baudouin de Courtenay’s reaction to his first book Voskreshenie slova (Resurrection of the Word).

Baudouin de Courtenay stood up and, even before the debate, made a speech about the fact that today, at the beginning of 1914, it is as impossible to tear word from meaning as it is to tear literature from life. /…/ In his speech he not only spoke of national oppression, but also predicted that it would lead to the deserved destruction of the empire. He was to spend a year in the casemates, which were like hell in its St. Petersburg incarnation. So far, all the places there were occupied. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 96)

By this means, the tangibility of the world is re-conceptualized as an enhanced connection between the word and its meaning and appears as implicitly political. Baudouin de Courtenay’s readiness to spend a year in the hellish prison only emphasizes this connection. This subtext certainly contradicts Shklovsky’s self-accusations concerning “the separation of the form from the content” (Шкловский, 1964, p. 138) and the misinterpretation of the problem of social change. In this context, one may recognize a cunning Aesopian hint even in the following passage.

Bourgeois theorists did not regard literature alone as a self-developing idea. The history of state forms, the history of law, etc., were considered in the same way.

With OPOYAZ, the change of literary forms was explained by the obsolescence of a form no longer being experienced, by its automatization.

According to the OPOYAZ scholars of that time, the new form, was taken from the old, same canonical phenomena of art. Art was enclosed in a kind of waveguide. This work, detaching form from content, gave an idealistic picture of the development of the phenomenon. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 138)

If ostranenie is inherently political by its ability to destroy old associations between concepts and things and create new ones, then its work indeed can be projected on the history of power institutions, law, social norms, etc. Thus, “the bourgeois theoreticians” are developing the intellectual lineage that OPOYAZ was forced to interrupt. In another fragment, Shklovsky continues this thought once again disguising it as a repentance. Here Bernard Shaw and Berthold Brecht appear as the “bourgeois theoreticians”:

There was much that we did not complete, much that we wrote incorrectly, much that we gave up incorrectly. Now I think, after reading Shaw’s opinion of Tolstoy and Brecht’s articles on drama, that my thoughts on ostranenie, particularly as applied to Tolstoy, were correct but incorrectly generalized.

Ostranenie is the showing of a subject outside the range of the familiar, describing a phenomenon in new words, drawn from a different circle of relation to it.

Shaw sees Tolstoy in history. He spoke not only of the breakdown of Tolstoy’s worldview, of Tolstoy’s projects for rearranging the world but also of the problem, the resolution of which, as Lenin found, is met with vicious resistance. (Шкловский, 1964, pp. 135–136)

Quotations from Shaw also suggest a political reading of ostranenie as the method of political critique rather than an escape from history. Tellingly, while naming Brecht, Shklovsky does not say anything about his alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt)—a direct heir to ostranenie (through the mediation of Sergei Tretyakov), since here the political meaning of the Formalist principle is laid bare and turned against emotional manipulations.

Thus, we see how Shklovsky under the guise of critique of formalism, reveals and advances its unrealized potential. These adjustments do not undermine fundamental principles of formalism, but instead continue implications that were already present in the early works, including a famous passage from O teorii proze (Theory of Prose, 1929), where ostranenie is likened to violence against a symbolic order, violence of the revolution or … terror.

In order to make an object a fact of art, it is necessary to extract it from among the facts of life. To do this, one must first of all “shake up the thing”, as Ivan the Terrible “shuffled” (perebiral) the people. You have to tear the thing out of the row of habitual associations in which it is located. One must turn the thing like a log in a fire. /…/ The poet removes all signs from their places. The artist is always the instigator of the rebellion of things. Things revolt for poets, throwing off their old names and taking on a new appearance with a new name. /…/ By this the poet makes a semantic shift. He takes a concept out of the semantic row in which it was and moves it by means of a word (trope) into another semantic row, whereby we feel the novelty of finding the object in a new row. (Шкловский, 1929, pp. 79–80)

ZB also contains some other re-readings of formalism that obviously contradict its core principles. Mainly, this concerns Shklovsky’s attempts to inscribe into his theoretical vision concepts of ideology and the real. Both of these concepts were radically questioned in the early formalist writings. Now Shklovsky tries to depict ideology as a driving force behind formal, i.e., aesthetic, transformations. For example: “In his book Archaists and Innovators, he [Tynianov] raised the question of the changing meaning of literary form, of its different uses for different ideologies. In doing so, he seemed to refute the formalism that followed in the footsteps of the ‘literary reception’” (Шкловский, 1964, p. 134). It doesn’t matter that this statement has nothing to do with Tynianov’s actual thoughts about the literary evolution. The fact that Shklovsky inserts ideology into formalism through Tynianov suggests that in this case he is not ironic, but actually attempts to make an adjustment rather than imitates it.

This adjustment is especially noticeable in the part of ZB dedicated to Eisenstein, where Shklovsky claims, for example: “Behind the rhythm of art lays the regularity of the world as a whole. But what serves a mode of transmission can be falsely understood as the goal of art, that is, the method of inquiry could become the goal [of art]” (Шкловский, 1964, pp. 504–505). This notion reinstates a binary of the form and content that formalist so heroically fought against, and destroys the fulness of the concept of the form, which was so dear to the formalists—see, for example, Eikhenbaum’s formula: “The notion of ‘form’ appeared in a new sense—not as a shell, but as the fullness of something concrete and dynamic, substantial in itself, beyond all correlations” (Эйхенбаум, 1987, p. 385).

Another example suggests a curious intertextual link. “The whole compositional solution is dead water: technology. Living water is ideology. Living water is the purposefulness of art. Only it connects and enlivens. Dead water—technology—does not exist separately or exists as an ugliness” (Шкловский, 1964, p. 450). Ironically, or perhaps, subconsciously, Shklovsky rephrases here a statement from his own Theory of Prose, where the same metaphor acquires an opposite meaning.

Osip Brik noted very wittily that dead and living water represents nothing but a splitting of “healing water” into two concepts (as we know, “dead water” in fairy tales splices a severed body), that is, A is depicted as follows: A1, A2. (Шкловский, 1929, p. 44)^[2]

It’s tempting to apply an early deconstruction of the binary to the later chant about ideology and technology and by this prove that both technology and ideology appear here as the “doubling” of the concept of the form that Shklovsky evocatively tries to avoid, while replacing it by more acceptable equivalents—among which “ideology” appears as the most tolerable one, yet remaining nothing else but a disguise of the “muted” concept of the form.

Even more self-destructive are Shklovsky’s attempts to rehabilitate avant-gardist and modernist art of the 20th century by forcing onto it the orthodox Soviet logic of the progressive movement towards “realism”. According to this logic, Symbolists created abstract reflections of the life, in which the sense of the real only shimmered: “Conventional contours of roles, flickering like live ones. They either become real or cease to be real” (Шкловский, 1964, p. 297). Then, Acmeists (who, as Shklovsky insists, “didn’t create their own school”) and among them, primarily Anna Akhmatova, moved poetry further by discovering the world of real objects.

She was reenacting a specific gesture of love. Her woman in verse had feathers on her hat, and the feathers hit the top of the carriage. Cars were appearing in those days, and cars had a special elevation for ladies’ feathers [on their roof]. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 277)

However, Shklovsky apparently can’t forget Andrei Zhdanov’s definitions of Akhmatova’s “stiffed world” in his fateful speech against Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko in 1947. That is probably why Shklovsky adds negative qualifiers emphasizing the “narrowness” of Akhmatova’s reality.

Akhmatova’s world is as narrow as a streak of light entering a dark room.

It is narrower than a knife.

It has an evening in it. Awakening, separation.

It is a world captured through the pricks.

The telescope pricks the sky, picking the stars out of it and depriving the world of latitude. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 324)

And, finally, it is Mayakovsky who opens poetry for invasion of the unmediated reality.

In Mayakovsky’s drama, he himself, Mayakovsky, is extremely real. He has boots with holes, and the holes are very real, ovals of holes. /…/ There is also a real woman standing there. He just didn’t break through to her. The poet tries the world, and overturns it, goes to the street, to the square, which he so insistently calls “tambourine”. The world itself is fit to become an instrument for making bass sounds. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 297)

Cloud in Pants captures that world that is impossible for Anna Akhmatova. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 324)

This crude evolutionary scheme is highly unconvincing not only because it completely ignores the category of the form, but mainly because the meaning of the “real” remains inevitably shaky. Unfortunately, Shklovsky never asks “what is real”, tacitly implying unquestionable, i.e., ideologically determined, sense of this fundamental concept. However, his own autobiographic narrative implicitly offers answers to this question and by this complicates, if not undermines, his scholarly argument.

As much as ZB is an autobiographic book, Shklovsky, in accordance to Boris Tomashevsky’s definition, creates “an ideal biographic legend”. This legend includes his friendship with Maykovsky and Maxim Gorky, as well as varied relationships with many other writers and artists, but it omits his political biography as a member of the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who had to hide and run from the Cheka persecuting his party and the ensuing harassment. Notably, he tries to place himself as the friend of otherwise incompatible figures: Babel and super-odious Socialist Realist Petr Pavlenko, Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko, etc. His ideal biographic legend attempts to be all-embracing and therefore appears hollow like a rubber-band.

However, when Shklovsky doesn’t try too hard to meet contradictory expectations, his text betrays rather innovative ways of constructing the auto-biographic narrative. Thus, the first part of ZB dedicated to the childhood and youth memoirs, contains a large number of autoreferential meta-characteristics disguised as reminiscences. Some of them may be read as keys for what Shklovsky is trying to accomplish in this book as a whole. These meta-descriptions frequently contradict each other but we already could see that the coexistence of mutually contradictory modes of writing/reading constitutes a central device of Shklovsky’s method.

1. I want to remind myself of his [father’s] words. He used to say that learning is very easy. You just have to take it easy.

   1. The main thing is not to try too hard. /…/

      When he died, the doctor after the autopsy came up with burning eyes to my mother … [and] said: “Amazing case—your husband didn’t have brain sclerosis at his age.” (Шкловский, 1964, pp. 37–38)

2. It is also necessary not to link the general with the particular, not to screw everything to the plot, to a straightforward narrative, or even a chronicle-memoir. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 59)

3. I do not write in a jerky way because this is My style: My memories are jerky. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 67)

4. A poetess was asked—she’s gray-haired and ill-aged—why she dared to speak so directly and frankly about her personal matters in verse. She replied, defensively:

   1. It’s rhymed.

      I don’t write poetry. Don’t possess that voice. My confessions and collisions of images of memories are not protected by the consonances of rhyme and the return of word structure. (Шкловский, 1964, pp. 69–70)

5. I still loved Andersen, but his tale of the darning needle, not The Ugly Duckling. Maybe, I was already forming the understanding that the world I was seeing was not real, that it was not forever. It is boring, and it can be undone in a fairy tale. (Шкловский, 1964, pp. 74–75)

What modes of reading do these quotations suggest?

One is based on the assumption that spontaneity is the manifestation on an undamaged, healthy mind (1). Spontaneity, in turn, corresponds to a disjointed and fragmented nature of memory (3), which by default predicates the decentered nature of the past resisting straightforward conceptualization. This mode of writing explains why ZB consists of loosely connected anecdotes—historical and not only—whereas each of these anecdotes strives to operate as a parabola. Such a proto-postmodernist approach to history transforms a memoirist text into an attempt to liberate a personal narrative from grand narratives of the epoch (2, 3).

Another mode of reading/writing highlights the autonomy of the form, thanks to which an author can say more than one would dare to say outside of the literary convention (4). Here Shklovsky seems to return to the central thesis of his old article about Vasily Rozanov, in which he argued that “He used the confessional tone as a device” (Шкловский, 1929, p. 233).^[3] In turn, this mode of reading implies a freedom to reinvent the world that is prototypically represented by the fairy tale (hence, Hans Christian Andersen). Notably, the title of Shklovsky’s entire book refers to Russian fairy-tale’s idiomatic beginning and by this means, supports such highly provocative approach (5).

Certainly, ZB contains multiple examples that either correspond or contradict to at least one of these principles—however, they never create an effect of totality, which is also quite characteristic of Shkovsky’s project. The parts on childhood seem to fit the thesis about spontaneity and fragmentariness as the means toward independence from grand narratives. A severely cut version of Zoo, included in ZB, nevertheless, well illustrates the “defense of the form”. At the same time, emphatically self-censored parts On Mayakovsky and Friends and Encounters most of all remind of the fairy-tale “method” applied to the reinvention of the history of literature and culture according to the needs and possibilities of the given moment.

If the real is designed by either spontaneous fragmented affects, or by fairy-tale-like anecdotal narratives, then the declared ascension of the modernist literature to the “real man”, “real woman” and “real” oval-shaped holes in the shoe soles, does not lead the writer and reader beyond literature. On the contrary, as Shklovsky predicated in his early works, what is being perceived as the new discovery of the “real” either revitalizes marginal, alternative and “low” forms of culture (in this case, literary or biographic anecdote), or articulates through ostranenie previously unregistered affects, thus transforming them into new literary tropes, i.e., forms.

In agreement with these implications, while speaking about Mayakovsky, Shklovsky repeatedly mentions that his poetic form absorbed the discoveries of the new avant-garde visual art—a thought that I find extremely productive. The same can be said about Dmitri Prigov and Conceptualism. In other words, a new sense of the real arises not from a “correct” ideology, as Shklovsky continually claims, e.g., “Mayakovsky was a man of the future, the way a communist should be” (Шкловский, 1964, p. 85), but from the shift of the form estranged by the inclusions from other spheres of culture.

Never had poetry been so open to invasions. There was a civil war of form in poetry. And now painting had interfered with it. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 278)

He inserted the image into the image. He worked in verse by the methods of painting of that time. (Шкловский, 1964, p. 284)

On same pages, Shklovsky writes about Blok arguing he sought “an unmediated, non-bookish relation with the world” (Шкловский, 1964, p. 286). However, while specifying how the poet reached out to this non-bookish reality, it turns out that Blok achieved the desired effect by immersing into the “low” spheres of culture as represented by the famously fabricated French wrestling and Nikolai Breshko-Breshkovsky’s popular novels about wrestlers. Thus, classical formalist principle of the ostranenie by the introduction of marginalized and “low” forms takes over an enforced category of the real. Both Blok’s and Maykovsky’s evolutions prove that “A work of art is perceived against the background of and by association with other works of art. The form of a work of art is determined by its relation to other pre-existing forms … The form creates for itself the content^[4]” (Шкловский, 1929, p. 31).

Thus, while trying to adjust and modify the formalist theory, Shklovsky methodically, albeit not necessarily intentionally, demonstrate how the principles of formalism resist “adjustments” and eventually triumph over forcefully added concepts of ideology and the real. With a certain degree of exaggeration, one may interpret the authorial voice in ZB as the voice of the unreliable narrator, whose claims are questioned by the structure of his own texts.

It would be also possible to see in this unmarked interweaving of “spontaneity” and fairy-tale-like reinvention of the past a prototype or even the master principle for post-memorial narratives as conceptualized by Marianne Hirsch (see her The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, 2012) and exemplified by W. G. Sebald in his novels or Maria Stepanova in her Pamiati pamiati (Memory to the Memory, 2017). Unlike present-day examples of postmemory, Shklovsky displays a postmemorial gap between the traumatic experience and its reproduction not only within one generation but also within one subject. In the case of ZB, the traumatic character of post-memory manifests itself through the web of omissions, subtexts, substitutions, allusions, etc.

A shift of attention from the biographic legend to the constructed and fictionalized design of the memoirist narrative is indeed characteristic for postmemorial texts and is highlighted by their autoreferential structure. In ZB, autoreferential level is represented by theoretical arguments, thus deepening the similarity. However, in ZB the relation between memoirs and their analysis is opposite to the one exemplified by contemporary post-memorial writings. In the latter, the auto-commentary reveals a manufactured and yet affectively charged nature of historical and personal memory. In ZB, the fragmented and obviously fictionalized web of postmemories acquires a meaning of reality that Shklovsky places at the top of the hierarchically imagined literary history—and this substitution produces a powerful deconstructive effect that damaged the entire epistemology of Soviet aesthetics that Shklovsky desperately tries to imitate.

Furthermore, as I tried to show in this paper, the artistic logic reminiscent of postmemory not only undermines Shklovsky’s statements but also reveals underneath them alternative concepts. Among these alternative concepts, some are advancing “classical” formalism by expanding its reach. Firstly and most importantly—this is an implication that ostranenie is, by default, political as it shakes and transforms a dominant symbolical order. Secondly, this is the projection of formalists methods onto the construction of the past and, more broadly, on any attempts to capture and conceptualize “the real”—personal or historical experience.

These “adjustments” to formalism not only foreshadowed both Yuri Lotman’s cultural semiotics and Western cultural studies, but also offered methods of analysis that could have bridged the gap between these approaches. Unlike Western cultural studies, Shklovsky’s method embedded the political in literary/cultural forms and its revolutions; unlike late Soviet semiotics, he simultaneously undermined hierarchical and binarist conceptualizations of culture.