Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader

Description

Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) was both patriarch and enfant terrible of Formalism, a literary and film scholar, a fiction writer and the protagonist of other people’s novels, instructor of an armoured division and professor at the Art History Institute, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary. His work was deeply informed by his long and eventful life. He wrote for over 70 years, both as a young man in the wake of the Russian revolution and as a ninety year old, never tiring of analyzing the workings of literature. Shklovsky’s work is aphoristic, essayistic, startlingly thought-provoking, and eminently readable. Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader is the first book that collects crucial writings from across Shklovsky’s career, serving as an entry point for first-time readers. It presents new translations of key texts as well as important work that has not appeared in English before. The theoretical writing is interspersed with excerpts from memoirs and letters that illuminate the essays. “What we call art exists in order to give back the sensation of life”, wrote Shklovsky in 1917. Literary and film scholarship, as practiced by him, exist in order to give back the sensation of art. FC Half title Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Translator’s Introduction Viktor Shklovsky: Life and Work Ostranenie and Other Key Concepts Shklovsky in the West: Reception and Heritage The Poker of Russian Formalism: Shklovsky as Protagonist In Fiction In Diaries and Memoirs Shklovsky’s Shorts Shklovsky’s Style Selection, Translation, and Formal Remarks Part One OPOYAZ Publications Part One: Introduction Resurrecting the Word (1914) Art as Device (1917/1919) Literature beyond “Plot” (1921/1925) Literature beyond Theme; Non-Linear Inheritance Literature beyond Genre; Digressions Literature beyond Categories; Seeing like a Child Part Two Autobiographic Hybrids Part Two: Introduction A Letter to Roman Jakobson (1922/1990) Zoo, or Letters Not About Love (1923/1966) Author’s Preface to the First Edition A Second Preface for an Old Book A Third Preface Letter Four Letter Six Letter Eight Letter Eleven Letter Seventeen Letter Twenty-Two Letter Twenty-Eight Letter Thirty A Sentimental Journey (1923) Revolution and the Front The Writing Desk Knight’s Move (1923) Preface One Driving Nails with a Samovar On “The Great Metalworker” A Thousand Herrings The Tsar’s Kitchen Teaser Stallions (1924/1990) The Third Factory (1926) The First Factory The Second Factory The Third Factory Part Three Early Soviet Criticism and Advice to Young Writers Part Three: Introduction Technique of Writing Craft (1927) Introduction: Don’t Hurry to Become a Professional Writer Newspaper Work Narrative Prose Unfolding a Text A Few Words on Poetry Conclusion Hamburg Score (1928) Babel: A Critical Romance (1924) In Defense of the Sociological Method (1927) Ten Years (1927) Hamburg Score (1928) The Way I Write (1930/1990) Part Four After the Freeze Part Four: Introduction Once Upon A Time (1964/1966) Childhood Youth The Ending of Youth Tales about Prose (1966/1983) A Note From the Author On the Novella Some Empirical Remarks on the Methods of Connecting Novellas On the Different Meanings of “Character” when Applied to Literary Works of Different Epochs On the True Unity of Works of Art What Happened after the Plague of 1348? On the Sense of Wonder Scenes of Recognition in Dickens Concept Renewal Letters to Nikita Shklovsky (1965–1969/2002) Bowstring. On the Dissimilarity of the Similar (1970) Energy of Delusion. A Book on Plot (1981) Part Five On the Theory of Prose (1983) Part Five: Introduction Preface Words Free the Soul from Narrowness: About the OPOYAZ The Rhyme of Poetry. The Rhyme of Prose. Structuralism through the Looking Glass: A Farewell The First Unsuccessful Blueprint of a Whale: Chekhov’s “Darling” The Links of Art Do Not Repeat Each Other. Once Again, on the Dissimilarity of the Similar Sterne In the Footsteps of Old Discoveries and Inventions The Problem of Time in Art The Lungs Are for Breathing. Thoughts Out Loud Yet Another Foreword Ostranenie In Reply to a Questionnaire [More Thoughts Out Loud] Part Six In 60 Years: Works on Cinema (1985) Part Six: Introduction Introduction (1985) On Cinema (1919) The Plot in Cinema (1923) Chaplin as Policeman (1923) The Semantics of Cinema (1925) Poetry and Prose in Cinema (1927) On Re-editing Films (1927) Five Feuilletons on Eisenstein (1926) Talking to Friends (1939) Happy Fable-land (1948) What the Character Knows and What the Audience Knows (1959) The Emergence of the Word (1963) Return the Ball into the Game (1970) Unread Dream (1984) A Letter to Evgeny Gabrilovich (1984) Works Cited Index