Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (1893 – 1984) was a critic and writer who lived in Russia. He wrote about literature, and was a major figure in the Formalism movement in Russian literature of the 1920s.
Shklovsky studied at the University of St. Petersburg and helped found OPOYAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, in 1914. He was also a writer and he met other writers in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). They were called the Serapion Brothers. Both groups agreed that literature is important because it is a means of creating new language. Shklovsky believed that literature is all about using stylistic and formal devices to help the reader see the world in a new and different way. Ostranenie – “making it strange” was a big part of Russian Formalist theory, and it helped to create new and unique styles of writing.
Shklovsky helped to bring about the February Revolution in 1917. After the Russian Provisional Government was formed, they sent him to the Southwestern Front to be an assistant commissar. He was wounded in battle and received an award for bravery. After that, he worked as an assistant commissar for the Russian Expeditionary Corps in Persia.
Shklovsky came back to St. Petersburg after the October Revolution. During the Civil War, he fought against Bolshevism and helped to organize an anti-Bolshevik plot with members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. After the conspiracy was discovered by the Cheka, Shklovsky went into hiding. He traveled around Russia and the Ukraine, but was eventually pardoned in 1919 due to his connections with famous writer Maxim Gorky. He decided not to participate in politics anymore. One of his brothers was executed by the Soviet regime in 1918 and the other was executed in 1937.
In 1923, Shklovsky wrote a memoir about his life between 1917-1922, called “A Sentimental Journey”. In the work he alludes to a book by Laurence Sterne, which he really admired. The style of that book was very digressive, and it had a big impact on Shklovsky’s writing.
Shklovsky returned to the Soviet Union in the latter year, and at that time the Soviet authorities dissolved OPOYAZ, forcing him to join other state-sanctioned literary organs. He finally decided to obey the authorities’ wishes by bowing to their criticism of Formalism.
After trying to follow the accepted doctrine of Socialist Realism, he decided to try his own way of doing things. He wrote a lot of different kinds of writing, including historical novels, film criticism, and studies of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. With those last bits of his work, he died 1984, in Morocco.
