Rehabilitation of Formalism or “A Monument to the Scientific Error 2.0”: Viktor Shklovsky’s Zhili-byli

Abstract

Abstract The article analyzes different strategies that Viktor Shklovsky uses in his book of memoirs, Zhili-byli (1964), to re-articulate and re-introduce previously slandered and banned formalism. Sometimes, these strategies disguise such key formalist concepts as ostranenie (defamiliarization) by the less “provocative” terms or mock the official assessments of formalism by intentional contradictions and yawning omissions. Sometimes, they create associative connections that advance the formalist concepts and project them onto social and historical reality. Sometimes, they lead to the invention of new concepts that either distort or modify the logic of early formalism. Thus, in Zhili-byli Shklovsky reintroduces formalism while seemingly repenting for mistakes of the past and rehearsing orthodox aesthetic mantras about the superiority of realism and socialist realism over modernism and the avant-garde.