Fragmentation and Defamiliarization as a Process: V. B. Shklovsky Rereads L. N. Tolstoy

Abstract

The paper examines crucial topics of reflection on the nature of art in L. N. Tolstoy’s works (1890–1900) in the light of their interpretations by V. B. Shklovsky. The principal part of these reflections is the search for a new mode of writing, “beyond any form,” which Shklovsky inherits and analyzes in his fragmentary aphoristic prose. The fragmentary forms in the late period of Tolstoy’s works and Shklovsky’s writing stem from the era of dramatic, rapid, and irreversible changes at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. The paper pays particular attention to aspects of Shklovsky’s interpretation of Tolstoy’s technique of defamiliarization (ostranenie) and examination of the contexts of Tolstoy’s thought, which combine the themes of freedom, memory, and imagination in the existential, ethical, and aesthetic registers. Shklovsky translates Tolstoy’s existential thought into an aesthetic register, considering it as a result of a long process of emerging new forms in art.

Keywords

• fragmentary aphoristic prose
• defamiliarization (ostranenie)
• l. n. tolstoy
• v. b. shklovsky
• memory
• imagination
• freedom
• religious consciousness
• non-aesthetic
• art theory