11 Facts About Viktor Shklovsky

1.

Viktor Shklovsky is one of the major figures associated with Russian formalism.

2.

Viktor Shklovsky's father was a Lithuanian Jewish mathematician who converted to Russian Orthodoxy and his mother was of German-Russian origin.

3.

Viktor Shklovsky returned to St Petersburg in early 1918, after the October Revolution.

4.

Viktor Shklovsky integrated into Soviet society and even took part in the Russian Civil War, serving in the Red Army.

5.

Viktor Shklovsky is perhaps best known for developing the concept of ostranenie or defamiliarization in literature.

6.

Viktor Shklovsky explained the concept in 1917 in the important essay "Art as Technique" which comprised the first chapter of his seminal Theory of Prose, first published in 1925.

7.

Viktor Shklovsky argued for the need to turn something that has become over-familiar, like a cliche in the literary canon, into something revitalized:.

8.

Viktor 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.

9.

Viktor Shklovsky's thought influenced western thinkers, partly due to Tzvetan Todorov's translations of the works of Russian formalists in the 1960s and 1970s, including Tzvetan Todorov himself, Gerard Genette and Hans Robert Jauss.

10.

Viktor Shklovsky was one of the very early serious writers on film.

11.

Viktor Shklovsky was a close friend of director Sergei Eisenstein and published an extensive critical assessment of his life and works.