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126 viktor shklovsky Plotless Literature Vasily Rozanov The Russian Formalists were a group of avant-garde Russian literary theorists who emerged in the decade prior to World War I and the Russian Revolution. The term “formalism,” then and now, has been a contested one, both aesthetically and politically.The autonomous and claustrophic (closed) formalism championed by the New Critics was attacked, for both aesthetic and cultural reasons, by American avant-garde poetry from the 1950s—with Charles Olson’s projective verse, Robert Duncan’s open field composition, Denise Levertov’s organic form, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s political poetry. At the same time, many cultural studies critics from the 1970s on have seen literary form and “formalism” as separating art and society . However, concepts like Shklovsky’s ostranenie (defamiliarization), the “semantic shift,” “foregrounding” or “laying bare of the device,” and the motivation of art by byt (everyday life) bridge the gap between art and society and have widely influenced Left aesthetics and ideology critique. In publishing Shklovsky’s “Plotless Literature” (in Richard Sheldon’s exemplary translation) as the opening essay of Poetics Journal, we meant not only to revive interest in the Formalists’ work but also to show how attention to radical form is motivated by political and social concerns. In his essay on the forgotten dilettante Vasily Rozanov, Shklovsky reveals the constructive potential of nonnarrative form, in its refusal of generic expectations, as a new form of literaturnost (literariness). I Wilhelm Meister contains a section entitled “The Confession of a Beautiful Soul.” The heroine of this confession says that she used to view the beauty of a work of art in the same way that people view the beauty of the typeface in a book: “It’s nice to have a beautifully printed book, but who reads a book just because it’s beautifully printed?” Both she and Goethe knew that people who speak in that fashion understand nothing about art. And yet that attitude is as prevalent among contemporary art critics as slant eyes in a Chinaman. That view may have become ridiculous in music and provincial in the visual arts, but it is still rampant in literature. But that contemporary theoretician who concludes from his examination of a work of literature that its so-called form is a sort of veil that must be pierced, jumps over the horse that he is trying to mount. plotless literature 127 A work of literature is pure form; it is not a thing and not material, but a relation between materials. And like each and every relation, it is a relation of zero dimensionality. Consequently, the scope of the work, the arithmetic value of its numerator or denominator, is inconsequential: what matters is the relation between them.All works—whether humorous or tragic,universal or parochial—and all juxtapositions, whether of world to world or cat to rock, are equivalent. That is precisely why art is benign, self-contained, and unassuming. The history of literature moves forward along a broken, staccato line. If we line up all the literary saints canonized in Russia between the seventeenth and the twentieth century, the line that results will not enable us to trace the history of how literary forms developed. What Pushkin wrote about Derzhavin is not acute and not true. Nekrasov clearly does not derive from the Pushkin tradition. Among the prose writers, Tolstoy just as clearly derives neither from Turgenev nor from Gogol, and Chekhov does not derive from Tolstoy. These gaps are not due to the chronological distances between the designated names. No, the fact of the matter is that in the shift of literary schools, the line of succession goes not from father to son but from uncle to nephew. Let us begin by developing the formula. In each literary epoch, there exists not one but several literary schools. They exist in literature simultaneously, one of them constituting its canonized apex. The others exist in uncanonized form, subliminally , as, for example, in Pushkin’s time, the Derzhavin tradition existed in the poetry of Kuchelbecker and Griboedov simultaneously with the tradition of Russian vaudeville verse, and with a set of other traditions, such as, for example , the pure tradition of the adventure novel in Bulgarin’s work. The Pushkin tradition did not continue after him—another example of the phenomenon whereby geniuses fail to produce exceptionally gifted children. Meanwhile, though, new forms come into being on the lower stratum, where they coexist with the old art forms that are no...

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