Shklovsky was constantly generating ideas, which, in fact, came out of him like the pieces of shrapnel. It was he who invented the cultural term
Shklovsky described other devices the author uses: parallelism, contrast, retardation. The critic Prince Dmitri Sviatopolk-Mirsky (D. S. Mirsky) called Shklovsky “the father of almost all ideas by which contemporary aesthetics lives.”86 The ideas Shklovsky generously imparted and that first seemed too radical and lacking in scholarly respectability were quickly picked up and assimilated by the mainstream academic audience. By 1922 Mandelstam wrote that Shklovsky was “the most daring and talented literary critic of new Petersburg, coming to replace Chukovsky, a real literary battleship, all stormy flame, sharp philological wit, and literary temperament for a dozen.”87 Fewer than ten years later, Shklovsky would be forced to renounce formalism in print, to repent his literary “sins,” and to denounce his “mistaken” ideas. But they would flourish in the West.
The similarity between Opoyaz and the Anglo-American New Criticism is striking. But the methodology of Russian formalism was widely used in later years not only in the theory of literature but in linguistics, history, semiotics, and anthropology. Eventually Shklovsky’s categories of automation and alienation found application in the theory of computers.
Shklovsky died in December 1984, two months short of his ninety-second birthday. I visited him in his Moscow apartment in the winter of 1975-1976. He sat in his armchair, his shiny bald head, popularized by caricaturists, resembling a mushroom cap. Explaining why he had married a second time, Shklovsky joked, “My first wife told me I was a genius, my second that I was curly-haired.” He let flow a cascade of brilliant monologues onto his captive listener on every imaginable topic, his favorite, apparently, the life and films of Sergei Eisenstein. Shklovsky spoke the way he wrote, in brief, choppy phrases connected by association—the speech of an incorrigible formalist.
He told me,
Music is not my forte. But I like Shostakovich. I wrote about him. I even wrote about the ballet. There was a time when I went to the ballet, in Petrograd, in the early twenties. Everybody started going then, because it was no fun sitting around in cold, dark apartments, and it was light at the Maryinsky. I saw Mandelstam, and Akhmatova and Kuzmin there. Even Zoshchenko went to the ballet. Probably to meet ballerinas. The audience at the ballet in those years was rather fantastic. My neighbor, some soldier or sailor, would often ask, “And when are they going to start singing or declaiming?”
Shklovsky’s article on ballet, printed in the journal
The Russian classical ballet is an abstract matter.
Its dances are not depicting a mood or illustrating something. Classical dance is not emotional.
This explains the pathetic and silly nature of the old ballet librettos.
They were barely needed. Classical
Classical ballet is as abstract as music, the dancer’s body does not determine the construction of a step so much as serve as one of the loveliest of abstractions in itself.88
Shklovsky transferred his idea of art as a sum of its own devices to ballet. The modern, sophisticated viewer brought up on Balanchine’s choreography is unlikely to argue with Shklovsky’s opinions. But at the time, his article was revolutionary, especially in Russia. Classical ballet was a formalized art to the highest degree. But it flourished—and this was the paradox—in Russia, where art traditionally was given an active social role. It was demanded that art be useful. And the dubious social usefulness of ballet was constantly being debated by many liberal critics. It was fashionable to attack ballet from the right and the left, and its very existence was questioned. The defenders of classical dance preferred to overlook its abstract tendencies and stressed ballet’s “emotional content.”
