BEYOND LANGUAGE: VIKTOR SHKLOVSKY, ESTRANGEMENT, AND THE SEARCH FOR MEANING IN ART A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF SLAVIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Scott Bartling March 2015 © 2015 by Scott William Rowan Bartling. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/wk536ws4497 ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Gabriella Safran, Primary Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Hans Gumbrecht I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Alma Kunanbaeva Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost for Graduate Education This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives. iii Acknowledgements Graduate school has taught me two invaluable lessons. The first is that if you look for answers long enough, you’ll find that the answer is to ask the right questions. The second is that more often than not, the people around you are the answers to your questions, if you know how to listen to what they have to tell you. This dissertation is all about the first of these lessons. As for the second, all I can say is that I have had some unbelievably good fortune during my years at Stanford. My first thanks must go to my adviser, Gabriella Safran, for her unfailing support, her warmth and generosity, her openness to new ideas and new approaches, her high but always fair and constructive standards of academic rigor, and—last but certainly not least—her superhuman patience as I made every mistake there was to be made, and even a few that hadn’t been invented yet. Gabriella has been a model mentor from the first day I arrived at Stanford. I am immensely grateful to Sepp Gumbrecht for his enthusiasm, frankness, good humor, and willingness to go down unexpected paths. Alma Kunanbaeva opened my mind to completely new ways of thinking about art, always offering a fresh perspective and exactly the story I needed to hear to get my bearings and, as Shklovsky would say, start seeing instead of recognizing. I am indebted to Lazar Fleishman, Gregory Freidin, and especially Monika Greenleaf for pushing me to think more deeply and rigorously than I ever thought possible. Outside of the Slavic Department, I thank especially Márton Dornbach, Bissera Pentcheva, Anaïs Saint-Jude, Éva Sóos Szőke, Monica White, and Izaly Zemtsovsky. Among the brilliant graduate students who have become friends and interlocutors, I would like to single out Amber Allemand, Biliana Kassabova, Bill Leidy, Gabriel iv Rodriguez, Robin Colomb Sugiura, and Deb Tennen. Rujuta Parikh listened to my first thoughts on this dissertation many years ago, helped me develop them, and has lent her ear ever since. Nicole Gounalis spent long hours with me discussing our mutual passion for Futurism; she offered a different perspective from a different discipline and kept me thinking about the big picture. Above all, I cannot express enough gratitude to Brian Kim, who was there through all the ups and downs of exams and writing, who suffered heroically through what must amount to thousands of pages of drafts, and who always made sure I was living po-chelovecheski, even when deadlines were approaching. I am grateful to the Whiting Foundation for a year of support and to the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) for one summer of support each. I would like to thank Howard Shen for his patience, good humor, and willingness to help at a moment’s notice. I would also like to thank Dre Loretto-Zanella, for keeping me presentable and being a consistent source of encouragement and positive energy over the years. Finally, I would like to thank my family for seeing me through this with boundless enthusiasm, patience, and understanding. I would like to thank Mary for her support (and her cookies) and Brian for making me laugh. In particular, I would like to thank my mother, Ellen, my greatest support and my greatest teacher. None of this would have happened without her confidence and encouragement. This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my grandparents, Glenn and Kathryn Bartling. v Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1 Formalism: An Outline 15 Methodology and Chapter Outline 34 I. SHKLOVSKY AND JAKOBSON: ESTRANGEMENT AND SYSTEM 44 A Scientific Error 54 Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry 71 Continuous Motion and the Antinovel: Shklovsky’s Definition of System 98 II. SHKLOVSKY AND TOLSTOY: THE ARTIST AND THE CREATIVE PROCESS 120 The Energy of Delusion and the Person out of Place 131 Religious Consciousness and the Unfreedom of the Writer 149 Creativity and System 171 III. SHKLOVSKY AND MAYAKOVSKY: LOVE AND CONTRADICTION Love and Plot 189 Context and Preliminary Remarks 202 Love and the Expansion of the Self: Why Love is Revolutionary for Mayakovsky 216 Texts Not about Love: How “About This” and Zoo Are Made 236 CONCLUSION 260 APPENDIX 267 BIBLIOGRAPHY 271 vi A Note on Translations and Transliterations Because the intended audience of the dissertation is comparative and interdisciplinary, I have opted wherever possible to use and cite published translations of Russian originals, adjusting them when necessary. For example, if a text by Shklovsky exists in translation, I double cite it: the first citation refers to the Russian original, while the second citation (after the semicolon), refers to the English translation—e.g., Viktor Shklovskii, Energiia zabluzhdeniia: Kniga o siuzhete (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1981); Viktor Shklovskii, The Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, trans. Shushan Avagyan (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007). Brackets within quotations indicate places where I have altered the translation. If a Russian text is cited alone, the English translation is mine. All translations of Mayakovsky’s poetry are my own. It is my hope that this will allow readers without Russian to have greater access in particular to Shklovsky’s literary theoretical texts. While I have adhered to the Library of Congress transliteration system in my footnotes and bibliography, I have taken a more practical approach to Russian names in the body of the text, preferring, for example, Shklovsky to Shklovskii and Mayakovsky to Maiakovskii, for familiarity and ease of reading. vii Introduction Viktor Shklovsky’s (1893-1984) concept of ostranenie, or estrangement,1 has become part of the basic vocabulary of literary theory and is familiar even to those who know little about its origins in Russian Formalism. The definition of estrangement first appeared in print in Shklovsky’s essay “Art as Device” (Iskusstvo kak priem) in 1916.2 The essay would later be reprinted in Shklovsky’s book Theory of Prose (O teorii prozy) in 1925 and 1929; it is his best-known work and probably the most anthologized text of Russian Formalism. In this essay, Shklovsky defines estrangement in the following terms: Thus life is reduced to nothingness and vanishes. Automatization swallows up things, clothing, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. “If the entire complex life of many people passes by unconsciously [bessoznatel’no], then it’s as if this life had never been.”3 And so it is in order that one may recover the sensation [oshchushchenie] of life and the feeling of things that that which is called art exists; art exists in order to render the stone its stony quality. The purpose of art is to convey the sensation of things as they are seen, not as they are recognized. The device of art lies in the “estrangement” of objects [ostraneniia veshchei] and the complicating of forms; it is a device that increases the difficulty and length of perception, as the process of 1 It is also translated as “defamiliarization” and “making strange.” Despite certain drawbacks, the concept will be referred to as “estrangement” throughout this dissertation, for several reasons. The translation “defamiliarization” is favored by some scholars (Fredric Jameson, R. H. Stacy, Peter Steiner, Jurij Striedter), but it will be avoided here due to the fact that use of this term, established as a translation of Bertolt Brecht’s (1898-1956) term Verfremdungseffekt, may suggest a conflation of Brecht’s and Shklovsky’s conceptions. Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt has specific political and dramatic features that are not emphasized in Shklovsky’s ostranenie, and Shklovsky’s ostranenie has specific formal and existential features that are not emphasized in Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt; the two conceptions are similar (and arguably related), but they are not identical. “Making strange” (or “making it strange”), favored by Victor Erlich, is perhaps the most accurate translation of ostranenie, considering this translation’s emphasis on making and the process of creativity; however, it is less familiar to students of theory and is somewhat awkward if used at length. Despite the potential disadvantage of connoting a strained relationship (for example with a text or an object), the translation “estrangement” may be the most satisfactory compromise, since it features, like ostranenie, the word “strange” (strannyi) and, interpreted in a certain way, implies an active process of making something strange.