Standstill as Extinction: Viktor Shklovsky's Poetics and Politics of Movement in the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

In 1923 the Russian formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky returned to the USSR after a year of exile. Tike his entire cohort of “fellow travelers,” he accommodated himself to the new Soviet regime. He did so in the language of travel and other kinds of movement. In the 1920s and 1930s, nomadism—a prominent motif in works by Shklovsky fromA Sentimental JourneythroughMarco Polo—emerges as his central figure for accommodation to official culture. This association occurs through the submerged double meaning of his signature termostranenie—at once defamiliarization and reterritorialization. This duality ofostraneniehas implications for our broader understanding of the way mobility is active in cultural production and intertwined with structures of power. In the Soviet case,ostranenieunderscores that nomadic movement is essential to the operation of cultural agents, whose relative freedom becomes a mechanism of state authority and control.