Background

Ethnicity: His father was Jewish and his mother was of German/Russian origin.

Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky was born January 21, 1893 in Saint Petersburg City, Russian Empire (now Russian Federation). His father was Jewish (with ancestors from Shklov) and his mother was of German/Russian origin.

Education

Viktor Borisovich studied at the faculty of Philology of Saint Petersburg University.

Career

During the First World War, Viktor Borisovich volunteered for the Russian Army and eventually became a driving trainer in an armoured car unit in Saint Petersburg. There, in 1916, he founded OPOYAZ (Obshchestvo izucheniya POeticheskogo YAZyka - Society for the Study of Poetic Language), one of the two groups (with the Moscow Linguistic Circle) that developed the critical theories and techniques of Russian Formalism.

Viktor Borisovich participated in the February Revolution of 1917. Subsequently, the Russian Provisional Government sent him as an assistant Commissar to the Southwestern Front where he was wounded and got an award for bravery. After that he was an assistant Commissar of the Russian Expeditionary Corps in Persia (now the Islamic Republic of Iran).

Viktor Borisovich returned to Saint Petersburg in early 1918, after the October Revolution. He opposed bolshevism and took part in an anti-bolshevik plot organised by members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. After the conspiracy was discovered by the Cheka, he went into hiding, traveling in Russia and the Ukraine, but was eventually pardoned in 1919 due to his connections with Maxim Gorky, and decided to abstain from political activity.

Viktor Borisovich integrated into Soviet society and even took part in the Russian Civil War, serving in the Red Army. However, in 1922, he had to go into hiding once again, as he was threatened with arrest and possible execution for his former political activities, and he fled via Finland to Germany. In Berlin, in 1923, Viktor Borisovich published his memoirs about the period 1917-1922 under the title Sentimental'noe puteshestvie, vospominaniia (A Sentimental Journey), alluding to A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne, an author he much admired and whose digressive style had a powerful influence on Shklovsky's writing. In the same year Viktor Borisovich was allowed to return to the Soviet Union, not least because of an appeal to Soviet authorities that he included in the last pages of his epistolary novel Zoo, or Letters Not About Love.

Viktor Borisovich died in Moscow in 1984.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Knight's Move

    (Collection of essays first published in the Soviet theatr...)

    1923
  • Zoo, or Letters Not About Love

    (Translated in 1971 by Richard Sheldon – epistolary novel.)

    1923
  • Life of a Bishop's Assistant

    (Translation by Valeriya Yermishova published in 2017.)

    1931
  • The Hamburg Score

    (Translation by Shushan Avagyan published in 2017.)

    1928
  • Mayakovsky and His Circle

    (About the times of poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.)

    1941
  • A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922

    (Translated in 1970 by Richard Sheldon.)

    1923
  • Third Factory

    (Translated in 1979 by Richard Sheldon.)

    1926
  • Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot

    (Translated in 2007.)

    1981
  • A Hunt for Optimism

    (Translated in 2012.)

    1931

Politics

Viktor Borisovich opposed bolshevism and took part in an anti-bolshevik plot organised by members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. After the conspiracy was discovered by the Cheka, he went into hiding, traveling in Russia and the Ukraine, but was eventually pardoned in 1919 due to his connections with Maxim Gorky, and decided to abstain from political activity.

Views

Quotations: And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By "enstranging" objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and "laborious." The perceptual process in art has a purpose all its own and ought to be extended to the fullest. Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity. The artifact itself is quite unimportant.

Membership

• OPOJAZ , Russian Federation

  1916 - 1930

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• David Bellos: "One of the most lively and irreverent minds of the last century."
  
  Tzvetan Todorov: "One of the most fascinating figures of Russian cultural life in the twentieth century."
  
  The Yugoslav scholar Mihajlo Mihajlov visited Shklovsky in 1963 and wrote: "I was much impressed by Shklovsky's liveliness of spirit, his varied interests and his enormous culture. When we said goodbye to Viktor Borisovich and started for Moscow, I felt that I had met one of the most cultured, most intelligent and best-educated men of our century."

Interests

• Writers

  Laurence Sterne

Connections

His two brothers were executed by the Soviet regime (one in 1918, the other in 1937) and his sister died from hunger in Saint Petersburg in 1919.

Friend:

Maxim Gorki

Friend:

Sergei Eisenstein