Victor Shklovsky

Nothing has ended yet ...

Itor in Shklovsky - a great philologist, a master of formalism, a person who has opened a new era in humanitarian science - lived 91 years. He went through the civil war, fled from the Bolsheviks to Germany, was forgiven by the Soviet regime, returned to the USSR, survived the Stalinist times without a single arrest, received orders and a state prize.

“He was bald, unrestrained and ambitious. Women have a continuous cloud around him at times because of the skirts, he did not see either his wife or the sun. ” So Benjamin Kaverin describes Shklovsky of the 20s in the novel “Scandalist”. That was the public image of Shklovsky with his noisy performances, rudeness, on duty and often strained wit. And about this time is described in his autobiographical books - “Sentimental Journey”, “Zoo. Letters are not about love, or the third Eloise ”,“ The Third Factory ”. The first of them tells about the revolutionary years, the second - about the history of Shklovsky’s unfortunate love for Elsa Triola (Lily Brik’s sister and future wife of the famous poet, surrealist and communist Louis Aragon), the third - about the most diverse people, events and books of that era. The readers turned to these books, as contemporaries noted, "a look at the things of a great man and for a great genuine humanity." In the current edition, they were first collected under the same cover and equipped with an excellent commentary on Alexander Galushkin.

Shklovsky was then unusually strong and could afford everything. Having loudly declared the death of former literature and philology, he writes the novel, combining philological observations with private life in one book (“Our business is the creation of new things ... You can’t write a book in the old way ... We introduced an intimate one named after the same need for new material in art”). But with his brilliant philological game, which holds the reader in constant tension, Shklovsky “jumps above” the reception, writes “According to the formal method, the most tender book of our time” (Lidia Ginzburg).

But, in the words of Shklovsky himself, "words revenge." Having made Viktor Shklovsky’s work with the contents of his work, he turned out to be, as mercilessly, he would say about the former teacher Ginzburg, “is tightly separated from another, from any other people's thought”. All the next fifty years, he will endlessly repeat his then ingenious thoughts, which will eventually “echo” and turn into motionless ideas. The irony of the literary fate of Shklovsky is that he, the inventor of “removal” and a fighter with “automation of the reception”, himself became their victim. Elena Stafiev