“I Know What Motivation is”: The Politics of Emotion and Viktor Shklovskii's Sentimental Rhetoric

Abstract

This article discusses Viktor Shklovskii's exilic narratives of the early 1920s,Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922, andZoo, or Letters Not about Love. I suggest that in these texts, published in Berlin shortly after the show trial against the right Socialist Revolutionariès, Shklovskii casts himself as a "sentimental hero," evoking sympathy for the narrator's plight by mobilizing some of the devices of the sentimental novel but also struggling with the implications of this sentimentalism. The article outlines Shklovskii's attempts to prove his political reliability during his exile, juxtaposing his private correspondence with his memoirs, and argues for a more nuanced interpretation of Shklovskii's political biography through the prism of the history of emotions.