Victor
Shklovsky was born in St, Petersburg, Russia, on 12th January, 1893.
After finishing his education at the University of St. Petersburg
he established the Society for the Study of Poetic Language.
Shklovsky
wrote about literature and influenced a generation of young writers
in Russia. This included the Serapion Brothers
a group that included Nickolai Tikhonov,
Mikhail Slonimski, Vsevolod
Ivanov and Konstantin Fedin. The Serapions
insisted on the right to create a literature that was independent
of political ideology. This brought them into conflict with the Soviet
government and resulted in them having difficulty getting their work
published.
In 1923
Shklovsky went to live in Germany where
he published the novels, A Sentimental Journey
(1923) and Zoo (1923).
He was persuaded to return to the Soviet Union
and afterwards tended to concentrate on literary criticism. This included
the books such as On the Theory of Prose
(1925) and The Technique of the Writer's
Craft (1928).
In these
books Shklovsky argued that "literature is a collection of stylistic
and formal devices that force the reader to view the world afresh
by presenting old ideas or mundane experiences in new, unusual ways".
He uses the example of coloured glasses on our perception of a landscape.
The coloured glasses distort, but also arouses a curiosity that makes
the landscape totally new and different.
Under pressure
from the Soviet authorities, Shklovsky attempted to embrace socialist
realism in essays such as Monument to
a Scholarly Error (1930). Victor Shklovsky died in Moscow
on 8th December, 1984.
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