St Petersburg полностью

Shklovsky was among the first to respond to A Cloud in Trousers when it was published in 1915: “In Mayakovsky’s new mastery, the street, which had been deprived of art, has found its words, its form.”79 Even earlier, as a twenty-year-old student, Shklovsky, who looked like “a rosy-apple-cheeked boy who had leaped into Futurism straight from the nursery,”80 read an aesthetically and politically radical lecture entitled “The Resurrection of the Word” at The Stray Dog. Shklovsky announced there that the avant-garde was saving culture, returning it to its face and soul: “We are removing filth from precious stones, we are awakening Sleeping Beauty.” Shklovsky warned that Mayakovsky and other futurists, whom their contemporary audience considered at best harmless madmen, were actually “clairvoyants, who sense with their raw nerves the coming catastrophe.”81

That was December 1913, getting onto three in the morning, and the Petersburg nouveaux riches who had come to The Stray Dog to view the fashionable avant-gardists did not quite understand which catastrophe he meant. But Shklovsky’s persuasive powers were such that he forced “the large audience, half made up of ‘tuxedos’ or low-cut ladies to listen without a murmur.”82

Shklovsky quickly became one of the leading figures of avant-garde Petersburg, taking part in the work of the Union of Youth and befriending Mayakovsky, Matiushin, Tatlin, and Zheverzheyev. A group of young linguists who had gathered around Shklovsky created in 1914 the Society for the Study of the Theory of Poetic Language, or Opayaz, the acronym of the Russian name. Shklovsky recalled, “And then we had the idea that poetic language differs from prose in general, that it was a special sphere in which even lip movements are important; as is the world of dance: when muscle movements give pleasure; as is painting: when vision gives pleasure.”83

According to the young Shklovsky and his friends, art was the sum total of the devices (priemy) used in it. The “content” of art dissolved without a trace in its form. Therefore, the “content” of an author’s work had no interest or significance for him. The “content” was merely an excuse for using whatever formal devices the author desired.

These views, first formulated by Shklovsky in a bombastic and categorical manner, unusual for a scholar, created some shock waves. The members of Opoyaz, among whom were the linguists Yevgeny Polivanov, Lev Yakubinsky, Yuri Tynyanov, and Boris Eikhenbaum, were dubbed “formalists.” This militant group made some extraordinary theoretical discoveries. For instance, the formalists introduced the important distinction in the theory of narrative between fabula (story) and suzhet (plot). They used fabula for the chain of events described in the work; suzhet referred to the actual presentation of those events by the author. Fabula is “what actually happened,” and suzhet is “how the reader learned about it.”

Shklovsky wrote “How Don Quixote Is Made,” and his close friend Eikhenbaum wrote “How The Overcoat Is Made” (punning on Gogol’s famous Petersburg story). One of the characters in the tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky is named Old Man with Dry Black Cats, who is several thousand years old. If you pet the cats, Mayakovsky used to say in his public lectures, you get electric sparks. Shklovsky later explained,

The point of the cat was this: you can get electricity from a cat. That’s what the Egyptians did. But it’s more convenient to get electricity using a power station, rather than messing with cats. Traditional art, we thought in those days, obtained artistic effects the way the Egyptians obtained electricity, while we wanted to get pure electricity, pure art.84

Shklovsky created his theoretical works in a completely unacademic setting. Born in Petersburg to a Jewish family he didn’t even finish university because he volunteered for the army during World War I and was awarded the coveted St. George Cross for valor in battle. He took part in the overthrow of the tsar but did not support the Bolshevik revolution and even participated in an anti-Communist conspiracy. He was heavily wounded; while taking a shell apart to retrieve the precious explosive, the shell burst in his hands, peppering him with shrapnel. He recalled, “They couldn’t remove the pieces, there were too many. They came out by themselves. You’d be walking along and your underwear would creak: that was a piece of shrapnel that came out. You could remove it with your finger.”