Research and writing leading to publication of a book on the Russian literary theorist Victor Shklovsky (1893-1984).
Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) is known as the father of Russian formalism, an intellectual movement associated with the beginnings of modern literary theory. Shklovsky wrote his main theoretical texts in the 1910s and early 1920s; formalism as such ended by the mid 1920s. But Shklovsky kept on writing and publishing prolifically. That he “accommodated himself” to the Soviet regime is a truism. But what insights might this very accommodation give us into larger cultural processes? Arts of Accommodation delves into the specific textual strategies that Shklovsky employed to become—and stay—a Soviet cultural worker who still espoused certain key tenets of his original theory, chief among them ostranenie (defamilarization). Shklovsky’s later work adds up to a latent post-formalist cultural theory, in which ideological and institutional constraints are recast as formal ones, directing attention to the mechanisms of accommodation as a structural phenomenon of Soviet culture.