The directory «Plots»

Shklovsky (Шкловский) Viktor Borisovich
(1893—1984)

Viktor Shklovsky was a Russian and Soviet critic, writer, and pamphleteer.

He was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and attended St. Petersburg University. During the war served as a Commissar in the Russian army, as described in his memoirs, «A Sentimental Journey». He was the founder of the OPOYAZ (Society for the Study of Poetic Language), one of the two groups, with the Moscow Linguistic Circle, which developed the critical theories and techniques of Russian Formalism.

In addition to literary criticism and biographies about such authors as Laurence Sterne, Maxim Gorky, Leo Tolstoy, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, he wrote a number of semi-autobiographical works disguised as fiction.

Shklovsky's work pushes Russian Formalism towards understanding literary activity as integral parts of social practice, an idea that becomes important in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Russian and Prague School scholars of semiotics.

He died in Moscow in 1984.

Russia, 2004, Birth Centenary of Boris Livanov