Myths do not flow through the pipes of history, writes Viktor Shklovsky, they change and splinter, they contrast and refute one another. The similar turns out to be dissimilar. Published in Moscow in 1970 and appearing in English translation for the first time, Bowstring is a seminal work, in which [...]
Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) was both patriarch and enfant terrible of Formalism, a literary and film scholar, a fiction writer and the protagonist of other people's novels, instructor of an armored division and professor at the Art History Institute, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary. His work[...]
Drawing on chess terminology, Shklovsky explains his title in the first preface, stating that it has three meanings: 1) the conventions of art: the knight moves in an L-shape because of such a convention; 2) the non-freedom of art: the knight moves sideways because other directions are forbidden to [...]
In this short, brilliant book, Viktor Shklovsky enunciates the function of the arts: what they are and, just as importantly, what they are not. In the course of defining what art is, by implication he also quietly lays to waste the theories and people who view art as a means of representing "the rea[...]