Viktor Shklovsky’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy

Engaging, uneven, and seminal - very much reflecting the spirit of Shklovsky's own work - , this wide-ranging collection revisits some of his key ideas and tests their relevance today. -- Galin Tihanov, George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature, Queen Mary University of London
Of all the Petrograd Formalists, Viktor Shklovsky wrote the most brashly, loved the most lyrically, coped most pragmatically with the horrors of his era, and lived the longest. As critic, creative writer and closet lay philosopher, Shklovsky was—as one contributor to this volume puts it—always a public figure in history but careful “to avoid being one with it.” It took hard work to survive. To make a living, Shklovsky edited banned film scripts to get them past the censor and ghostwrote books for less gifted colleagues. As he confessed to his Italian interviewer Serena Vitale near the end of his life, there were only two things he never wrote: poetry, and denunciations. This wide-ranging volume celebrates Shklovsky’s legacy in thing theory, feminist formalism, defamiliarization in film, the limits of the translatable, and provides newly-sensitized readings of world literature from Cervantes through Tolstoy, Lewis Carroll, Pynchon and Borges. A fine tribute to Soviet Russia’s most cosmopolitan monolingual critic. -- Caryl Emerson, Princeton University