Book
Viktor Shklovsky’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy
This book is dedicated to Viktor Shklovsky literary and theoretical legacy
In the history of Soviet culture, Viktor Shklovsky achieved far more than the status of original theoretician, keen critic and writer who was able to produce literature corresponding to stylistic, or generic, goals he articulated himself. Above all, he constituted a unique and, at the same time, paradigmatic type of Soviet intellectual. This intellectual type was shaped by the extraordinarily severe demands for cultural and political adaptation (and assimilation) dictated by his times.
This collection of essays was published in a form of a catalogue for one of the propgrams screened at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Fstival in October 2019. The program entitled "The Creative Treatment of Grierson in Wartime Japan" was co-organized by the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival and the National Film Archive of Japan and presented a broad variety of wartime Japanese documentaries as well as British and Soviet films that have influenced them. The collection of essays explores the development of wartime Japanese documentary cinema from variety of historical and theoretical perspectives.
The paper traces the way how the famous non-academic philosopher Vassiliy Rozanov influenced and sometimes even repressed the poetics, ideololgy and literary taste of Viktor Shklovsky - the founder of so-called 'Formalist school' in Russian literary history.
The article is devoted to the formation of the image of the pre-revolutionary history of Russia on the example of Yuri Tarich's film Wings of Serf (1926). In the first post-revolutionary decade, there was a departure from previous standards in the image of national history. Authors searched for new forms of screen representations of past events. Although the film inherits the tradition of depicting the king as a murderer and tyrant, the creators – director Yuri Tarich and screenwriter Victor Shklovsky – tried to transfer on screen revolutionary understanding of history. The film is influenced
by historical theory of Mikhail Pokrovsky, and Shklovsky introduced the economic element in the scenario as the main engine of the plot.
The avant-garde figures who came to cinema (Shklovsky, first of all, was a literary critic) came up with the rules of screenwriting craft on the go and challenged the boundaries of cinema's possibilities in practice. The purpose of Wings of Serf’s screenplay was to move away from the one-sided image of Ivan the Terrible and determine his actions as of economic basis. Shklovsky and Tarich developed the idea of the revolutionary remaking of the image of the past in their next work, the film version of Captain's Daughter.
The article covers the history of foreign screenings of Wings of Serf, focusing on the history of censorship bans and re-editing of the film for USA. The author shows in the article the possible influence of Wings of Serf on Ivan the Terrible by Sergei Eisenstein, which is implicitly present in both artistic and plot terms.
Despite success and foreign distribution, the movie was visually traditional, realistic, and researchers considered, most often, as the prologue before radical change of the relation to Ivan the Terrible in the thirties. The article shows how filmmakers of the first decade after the revolution used to work with historical material.
In the history of Soviet culture, Viktor Shklovsky achieved far more than the status of original theoretician, keen critic and writer who was able to produce literature corresponding to stylistic, or generic, goals he articulated himself. Above all, he constituted a unique and, at the same time, paradigmatic type of Soviet intellectual. This intellectual type was shaped by the extraordinarily severe demands for cultural and political adaptation (and assimilation) dictated by his times.
Abstract
English
In the cultural sphere, the period between the October Revolution and the initiation of the first five‑year plan was marked by a series of heated public debates about the function of visual art and media in the new socialist society. Prominent theorists, including the Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatolii Lunacharskii, and writers associated with the journal Lef, such as Boris Arvatov and Sergei Tret´iakov, participated in these debates, as did modernist artists and realist painters. Photography was a central theme, and by 1925 the question of how the advances in photographic and other forms of mechanical reproduction were changing the nature of the visual had emerged as the debates’ most pressing problem. While all of the debates’ contending factions recognized the significance of photography, they also agreed that the material components of painting—particularly color and surface texture—remained essential to the development of comradely socialist relations. This article brings to light for the first time the aspects of early Soviet thought on aesthetics and communication that led to the firm establishment of painting as a visual medium essential to socialism. It demonstrates in particular that the materiality of painting and its traces were linked to the activation and transmission of the sensations of the body, which were considered necessary for the formation of socialist connections.