Knowra Viktor Shklovsky Viktor Shklovsky Viktor Shklovsky was a Russian and Soviet literary theorist, critic, and writer who helped found Russian Formalism and developed the concept of defamiliarization.
Russian Formalism : A school of literary theory that studies the devices and structures distinguishing literary works. Shklovsky helped establish this movement and shaped its focus on literary devices.
Art as Technique : Shklovsky’s 1917 essay arguing that artistic devices renew perception by making objects unfamiliar. This essay gives the clearest early statement of his theory of artistic technique.
OPOYAZ : The Society for the Study of Poetic Language, a Saint Petersburg group central to Russian Formalism. Shklovsky helped lead this circle, where formalist methods were developed collectively.
Yuri Tynianov : A Russian Formalist literary theorist and novelist who studied literary evolution and the relations among artistic systems. Tynianov’s work extended formalist inquiry into literary change and influenced Shklovsky’s intellectual circle.
Prague Linguistic Circle : A group of linguists and literary scholars that developed structuralist approaches to language and literature. Russian Formalist ideas, including Shklovsky’s, helped shape the Circle’s later theories of poetic language.
Defamiliarization : An artistic technique that makes familiar things seem strange, renewing perception through unusual form or description. Shklovsky named this technique as art’s central means of renewing perception.
Device (literary theory) : A formal feature or procedure whose arrangement contributes to a literary work’s effects. Shklovsky treated devices, rather than themes alone, as the working materials of literature.
Russian Symbolism : A Russian literary movement that used symbolism, mysticism, and musical language to suggest spiritual realities. Formalists such as Shklovsky defined their methods partly against Symbolist approaches to literature.
Boris Eikhenbaum : A Russian Formalist scholar who wrote influential studies of literary form, prose, and Russian writers. Eikhenbaum collaborated in defining Formalism’s methods and defended its scholarly aims.
Structuralism : An approach that explains cultural phenomena through relations among elements in an underlying system. Structuralist literary theory inherited Formalist questions about devices, systems, and literary function.
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