Viktor &Shachek;klovskij's 1917 manifesto byt.
As &Shachek;klovskij famously put
it later, blood [krov&soft;] is not bloody in poetry, it just rhymes with
love [ljubov&soft;].
There are, however, reasons in the article itself to question this
interpretation of &Shachek;klovskij's theory. In an otherwise extremely
laconic, fifteen-page article, &Shachek;klovskij quotes from Lev Tolstoj
repeatedly and at length: his 1897 diary, what is art
are taken from Tolstoj. There is something
perverse, and worthy of investigation, in the fact that
the leading theorist of a movement supposedly devoted to the scientific and
dispassionate research of pure aesthetics as embodied in modern poetry cites
so much Tolstoj, and not just Tolstoj the Prose Artist, but also Tolstoj the
Prophet who constantly railed against art's improper divorce from moral and
social issues.
My paper will investigate this Tolstoj-&Shachek;klovskij connection in
three ways. First, by contextualizing Tolstoj's influence on
&Shachek;klovskij, and by
extension, on all of the avant-garde of the teens and early twenties of this
century. Second, by demonstrating the ways in which &Shachek;klovskij adapted
certain of Tolstoj's notions of art, most notably the ideas that art is an
infectious disease
and that art offers an alternative to the
epistemological methods of science. And third, by closely analyzing several
key passages of
(This article is an already-written part of my dissertation that argues for Tolstoj's place at the head of the avant-garde.)