Russian Formalist Criticism Four Essays Second Edi... - (Art As Technique)

Art as Technique
Victor Shklovsky is certainly the most erratic and probably the most important of the
Formalist critics. A charter member of the group, he had that rare combination of brilliant
originality, combativeness, and theoretical flexibility required of a propagandist during the
early years of a movement. As Eichenbaum shows (“The Theory of the ‘Formal Method’”),
Shklovsky touched most of the fundamentals of Formalist theory, was often the first to
define a problem, and frequently pointed towards its solution. He saw issues clearly and
stated them sharply—perhaps too sharply. Like T. E. Hulme or T. S. Eliot, he was a master
of the kind of statement that disciples make slogans of and opponents find embarrassingly
easy to attack. Because he was the most obvious and the most vulnerable target for the
Marxists and because his attitude toward the Russian Revolution was unusually complex,1
he was one of the first of the Formalists to attempt a compromise. By 1926 he was trying to
include sociological material in his study of literature; his work on Tolstoy in 1928 analyzes
War and Peace as a product of two irreconcilable forces—the social class Tolstoy
represented and the novel as a genre.2
“Art as Technique” (1917) is the most important statement made of early Formalist
method, partly because it announces a break with the only other “aesthetic” approach
available at that time and in that place, and partly because it offers a theory of both the
methodology of criticism and the purpose of art. Although we have discussed the
Formalists’ quarrel with Potebnya in general terms, more specific comment is appropriate
here. Shklovsky attacks the views, both typical of Potebnyaism, that “art is thinking in
images” and that its purpose is to present the unknown (most often the abstract or
transcendent) in terms of the known. Theoretically, the views recognized neither the
richness of poetry nor its intrinsic value. Empirically, the views were inadequate, as
Shklovsky points out. To use an example from Wordsworth, the lines
The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Copyright © 2012. University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.
are certainly poetic, yet it would be rash to argue that the poetic quality comes from the
deeply latent imagery. And at the end of his sonnet, Wordsworth resurrects Proteus and
Triton as images to evoke a feeling that many persons have had first hand; the image here is
less familiar than the thing it stands for. The Potebnya-Symbolist description of poetry,
then, was inadequate both theoretically and practically.
At this time the Formalists needed a critical formula that would define the difference
between literature and non-literature more precisely and more generally than had been
done, and that would at the same time state the purpose of literature. Shklovsky’s concept of
“defamiliarization”3 did both. It was appropriate historically, since, in effect, it simply
turned Potebnyaism upside down. Shklovsky’s argument, briefly stated, is that the habitual
Russian Formalist Criticism : Four Essays, Second Edition, edited by Lee T. Lemon, and Marion J. Reis, University of Nebraska Press, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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way of thinking is to make the unfamiliar as easily digestible as possible. Normally our
preceptions are “automatic,” which is another way of saying that they are minimal. From
this standpoint, learning is largely a matter of learning to ignore. We have not really
learned to drive an automobile, for example, until we are able to react to the relevant
stoplights, pedestrians, other motorists, road conditions, and so on, with a minimum of
conscious effort. Eventually, we may even react properly without actually noticing what we
are reacting to—we miss the pedestrian but fail to see what he looks like. When reading
ordinary prose, we are likely to feel that something is wrong if we find ourselves noticing
the individual words as words. The purpose of art, according to Shklovsky, is to force us to
notice. Since perception is usually too automatic, art develops a variety of techniques to
impede perception or, at least, to call attention to themselves. Thus “Art is a way of
experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.”4 The object is
unimportant because as art the poem does not have to point to anything outside itself; the
poem must “not mean/But be.”
This is not the place to debate the merits of conflicting aesthetic systems, but we should
note that Shklovsky’s position is more subtle than its opponents would admit. To the extent
that a work of art can be experienced, to the extent that it is, it is like any other object. It
may “mean” in the same way that any object means; it has, however, one advantage—it is
designed especially for perception, for attracting and holding attention. Thus it not only
bears meaning, it forces an awareness of its meaning upon the reader. Although Shklovsky
did not follow this line, it does widen the range of his theory without inconsistency. He
prefers to argue, as does I. A. Richards, that perception is an end in itself, that the good life
is the life of a man fully aware of the world. Art, to paraphrase Richards and to summarize
Shklovsky, is the record of and the occasion far that awareness.5
According to Shklovsky, the chief technique for promoting such perception is
“defamiliarization.” It is not so much a device as a result obtainable by any number of
devices. A novel point of view, as Shklovsky points out, can make a reader perceive by
making the familiar seem strange. Wordplay, deliberately roughened rhythm, or figures of
speech can all have the same effect. No single device, then, is essential to poetry. Poetry is
recognized not by the presence of a certain kind of content or of images, ambiguities,
symbols, or whatever, but by its ability to make man look with an exceptionally high level of
awareness.
“Art is thinking in images.” This maxim, which even high school students parrot, is
nevertheless the starting point for the erudite philologist who is beginning to put together some
kind of systematic literary theory. The idea, originated in part by Potebnya, has spread.
“Without imagery there is no art, and in particular no poetry,” Potebnya writes.6 And
elsewhere, “Poetry, as well as prose, is first and foremost a special way of thinking and
knowing.”7
Poetry is a special way of thinking; it is, precisely, a way of thinking in images, a way which
permits what is generally called “economy of mental effort,” a way which makes for “a
sensation of the relative ease of the process.” Aesthetic feeling is the reaction to this economy.
This is how the academician Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky,8 who undoubtedly read the works of
Potebnya attentively, almost certainly understood and faithfully summarized the ideas of his
teacher. Potebnya and his numerous disciples consider poetry a special kind of thinking—
thinking by means of images; they feel that the purpose of imagery is to help channel various
objects and activities into groups and to clarify the unknown by means of the known. Or, as
Potebnya wrote:
The relationship of the image to what is being clarified is that: (a) the image is the fixed predicate of that which
undergoes change—the unchanging means of attracting what is perceived as changeable…. (b) the image is far clearer
and simpler than what it clarifies.9
In other words:
Since the purpose of imagery is to remind us, by approximation, of those meanings for which the image stands, and since,
apart from this, imagery is unnecessary for thought, we must be more familiar with the image than with what it
clarifies.10
It would be instructive to try to apply this principle to Tyutchev’s comparison of summer

lightning to deaf and dumb demons or to Gogol’s comparison of the sky to the garment of
God.11
“Without imagery there is no art”—“Art is thinking in images.” These maxims have led to
far-fetched interpretations of individual works of art. Attempts have been made to evaluate
even music, architecture, and lyric poetry as imagistic thought. After a quarter of a century of
such attempts Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky finally had to assign lyric poetry, architecture, and music
to a special category of imageless art and to define them as lyric arts appealing directly to the
emotions. And thus he admitted an enormous area of art which is not a mode of thought. A part
of this area, lyric poetry (narrowly considered), is quite like the visual arts; it is also verbal.
But, much more important, visual art passes quite imperceptibly into nonvisual art; yet our
perceptions of both are similar.
Nevertheless, the definition “Art is thinking in images,” which means (I omit the usual
middle terms of the argument) that art is the making of symbols, has survived the downfall of
the theory which supported it. It survives chiefly in the wake of Symbolism, especially among
the theorists of the Symbolist movement.
Many still believe, then, that thinking in images—thinking in specific scenes of “roads and
landscape” and “furrows and boundaries”12—is the chief characteristic of poetry.
Consequently, they should have expected the history of “imagistic art,” as they call it, to consist
of a history of changes in imagery. But we find that images change little; from century to
century, from nation to nation, from poet to poet, they flow on without changing. Images belong
to no one: they are “the Lord’s.” The more you understand an age, the more convinced you
become that the images a given poet used and which you thought his own were taken almost
unchanged from another poet. The works of poets are classified or grouped according to the
new techniques that poets discover and share, and according to their arrangement and
development of the resources of language; poets are much more concerned with arranging
images than with creating them. Images are given to poets; the ability to remember them is far
more important than the ability to create them.
Imagistic thought does not, in any case, include all the aspects of art nor even all the aspects
of verbal art. A change in imagery is not essential to the development of poetry. We know that
frequently an expression is thought to be poetic, to be created for aesthetic pleasure, although
actually it was created without such intent—e.g., Annensky’s opinion that the Slavic languages
are especially poetic and Andrey Bely’s ecstasy over the technique of placing adjectives after
nouns, a technique used by eighteenth-century Russian poets. Bely joyfully accepts the
technique as something artistic, or more exactly, as intended, if we consider intention as art.
Actually, this reversal of the usual adjective-noun order is a peculiarity of the language (which
had been influenced by Church Slavonic). Thus a work may be (1) intended as prosaic and
accepted as poetic, or (2) intended as poetic and accepted as prosaic. This suggests that the
artistry attributed to a given work results from the way we perceive it. By “works of art,” in
the narrow sense, we mean works created by special techniques designed to make the works as
obviously artistic as possible.
Potebnya’s conclusion, which can be formulated “poetry equals imagery,” gave rise to the
whole theory that “imagery equals symbolism,” that the image may serve as the invariable
predicate of various subjects. (This conclusion, because it expressed ideas similar to the
theories of the Symbolists, intrigued some of their leading representatives—Andrey Bely,
Merezhkovsky and his “eternal companions” and, in fact, formed the basis of the theory of
Symbolism.) The conclusion stems partly from the fact that Potebnya did not distinguish
between the language of poetry and the language of prose. Consequently, he ignored the fact
that there are two aspects of imagery: imagery as a practical means of thinking, as a means of
placing objects within categories; and imagery as poetic, as a means of reinforcing an
impression. I shall clarify with an example. I want to attract the attention of a young child who
is eating bread and butter and getting the butter on her fingers. I call, “Hey, butterfingers!” This
is a figure of speech, a clearly prosaic trope. Now a different example. The child is playing
with my glasses and drops them. I call, “Hey, butterfingers!”13 This figure of speech is a
poetic trope. (In the first example, “butterfingers” is metonymic; in the second, metaphoric—
but this is not what I want to stress.)
Poetic imagery is a means of creating the strongest possible impression. As a method it is,
depending upon its purpose, neither more nor less effective than other poetic techniques; it is
neither more nor less effective than ordinary or negative parallelism, comparison, repetition,
balanced structure, hyperbole, the commonly accepted rhetorical figures, and all those methods
which emphasize the emotional effect of an expression (including words or even articulated
sounds).14 But poetic imagery only externally resembles either the stock imagery of fables and
ballads or thinking in images— e.g., the example in Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky’s Language and
Art in which a little girl calls a ball a little watermelon. Poetic imagery is but one of the
devices of poetic language. Prose imagery is a means of abstraction: a little watermelon
instead of a lampshade, or a little watermelon instead of a head, is only the abstraction of one
of the object’s characteristics, that of roundness. It is no different from saying that the head and
the melon are both round. This is what is meant, but it has nothing to do with poetry.
The law of the economy of creative effort is also generally accepted. [Herbert] Spencer
wrote:
On seeking for some clue to the law underlying these current maxims, we may see shadowed forth in many of them,
the importance of economizing the reader’s or the hearer’s attention. To so present ideas that they may be apprehended
with the least possible mental effort, is the desideratum towards which most of the rules above quoted point…. Hence,
carrying out the metaphor that language is the vehicle of thought, there seems reason to think that in all cases the friction
and inertia of the vehicle deduct from its efficiency; and that in composition, the chief, if not the sole thing to be done, is
to reduce this friction and inertia to the smallest possible amount.15
And R[ichard] Avenarius:

If a soul possess inexhaustible strength, then, of course, it would be indifferent to how much might be spent from, this
inexhaustible source; only the necessarily expended time would be important. But since its forces are limited, one is led to
expect that the soul hastens to carry out the apperceptive process as expediently as possible—that is, with comparatively
the least expenditure of energy, and, hence, with comparatively the best result.
Petrazhitsky, with only one reference to the general law of mental effort, rejects [William]
James’s theory of the physical basis of emotion, a theory which contradicts his own. Even
Alexander Veselovsky acknowledged the principle of the economy of creative effort, a theory
especially appealing in the study of rhythm, and agreed with Spencer: “A satisfactory style is
precisely that style which delivers the greatest amount of thought in the fewest words.” And
Andrey Bely, despite the fact that in his better pages he gave numerous examples of
“roughened” rhythm16 and (particularly in the examples from Baratynsky) showed the
difficulties inherent in poetic epithets, also thought it necessary to speak of the law of the
economy of creative effort in his book17 —a heroic effort to create a theory of art based on
unverified facts from antiquated sources, on his vast knowledge of the techniques of poetic
creativity, and on Krayevich’s high school physics text.
These ideas about the economy of energy, as well as about the law and aim of creativity, are
perhaps true in their application to “practical” language; they were, however, extended to
poetic language. Hence they do not distinguish properly between the laws of practical language
and the laws of poetic language. The fact that Japanese poetry has sounds not found in
conversational Japanese was hardly the first factual indication of the differences between
poetic and everyday language. Leo Jakubinsky has observed that the law of the dissimilation of
liquid sounds does not apply to poetic language.18 This suggested to him that poetic language
tolerated the admission of hard-to-pronounce conglomerations of similar sounds. In his article,
one of the first examples of scientific criticism, he indicates inductively, the contrast (I shall
say more about this point later) between the laws of poetic language and the laws of practical
language.19
We must, then, speak about the laws of expenditure and economy in poetic language not on
the basis of an analogy with prose, but on the basis of the laws of poetic language.
If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes
habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the
unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a
foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action
for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. Such habituation explains the principles by
which, in ordinary speech, we leave phrases unfinished and words half expressed. In this
process, ideally realized in algebra, things are replaced by symbols. Complete words are not
expressed in rapid speech; their initial sounds are barely perceived. Alexander Pogodin offers
the example of a boy considering the sentence “The Swiss mountains are beautiful” in the form
of a series of letters: T, S, m, a, b.20
This characteristic of thought not only suggests the method of algebra, but even prompts the
choice of symbols (letters, especially initial letters). By this “algebraic” method of thought we
apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their
entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We see the object as though it
were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its
silhouette. The object, perceived thus in the manner of prose perception, fades and does not
leave even a first impression; ultimately even the essence of what it was is forgotten. Such
perception explains why we fail to hear the prose word in its entirety (see Leo Jakubinsky’s
article21) and, hence, why (along with other slips of the tongue) we fail to pronounce it. The
process of “algebrization,” the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy
of perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned only one proper feature—a number, for
example—or else they function as though by formula and do not even appear in cognition:
I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn’t remember whether or not I had
dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to
remember—so that if I had dusted it and forgot—that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If
some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or looking
on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never
been.22
And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s
wife, and the fear of war. “If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously,
then such lives are as if they had never been.” And art exists that one may recover the sensation
of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart
the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is
to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of
perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be
prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not
important.
The range of poetic (artistic) work extends from the sensory to the cognitive, from poetry to
prose, from the concrete to the abstract: from Cervantes’ Don Quixote—scholastic and poor
nobleman, half consciously bearing his humiliation in the court of the duke—to the broad but
empty Don Quixote of Turgenev; from Charlemagne to the name “king” [in Russian “Charles”
and “king” obviously derive from the same root, korol]. The meaning of a work broadens to the
extent that artfulness and artistry diminish; thus a fable symbolizes more than a poem, and a
proverb more than a fable. Consequently, the least self-contradictory part of Potebnya’s theory
is his treatment of the fable, which, from his point of view, he investigated thoroughly. But
since his theory did not provide for “expressive” works of art, he could not finish his book. As
we know, Notes on the Theory of Literature was published in 1905, thirteen years after
Potebnya’s death. Potebnya himself completed only the section on the fable.23
After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us
and we know about it, but we do not see it24— hence we cannot say anything significant about
it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways. Here I want to
illustrate a way used repeatedly by Leo Tolstoy, that writer who, for Merezhkovsky at least,
seems to present things as if he himself saw them, saw them in their entirety, and did not alter
them.
Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an
object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first
time. In describing something he avoids the accepted names of its parts and instead names
corresponding parts of other objects. For example, in “Shame” Tolstoy “defamiliarizes” the
idea of flogging in this way: “to strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the
floor, and to rap on their bottoms with switches,” and, after a few lines, “to lash about on the
naked buttocks.” Then he remarks:
Just why precisely this stupid, savage means of causing pain and not any other—why not prick the shoulders or any part
of the body with needles, squeeze the hands or the feet in a vise, or anything like that?
I apologize for this harsh example, but it is typical of Tolstoy’s way of pricking the
conscience. The familiar act of flogging is made unfamiliar both by the description and by the
proposal to change its form without changing its nature. Tolstoy uses this technique of
“defamiliarization” constantly. The narrator of “Kholstomer,” for example, is a horse, and it is
the horse’s point of view (rather than a person’s) that makes the content of the story seem
unfamiliar. Here is how the horse regards the institution of private property:
I understood well what they said about whipping and Christianity. But then I was absolutely in the dark. What’s the
meaning of “his own,” “his colt”? From these phrases I saw that people thought there was some sort of connection
between me and the stable. At the time I simply could not understand the connection. Only much later, when they
separated me from the other horses, did I begin to understand. But even then I simply could not see what it meant when
they called me “man’s property.” The words “my horse” referred to me, a living horse, and seemed as strange to me as
the words “my land,” “my air,” “my water.”
But the words made a strong impression on me. I thought about them constantly, and only after the most diverse
experiences with people did I understand, finally, what they meant. They meant this: In life people are guided by words,
not by deeds. It’s not so much that they love the possibility of doing or not doing something as it is the possibility of
speaking with words, agreed on among themselves, about various topics. Such are the words “my” and “mine,” which
they apply to different things, creatures, objects, and even to land, people, and horses. They agree that only one may say
“mine” about this, that, or the other thing. And the one who says “mine” about the greatest number of things is, according
to the game which they’ve agreed to among themselves, the one they consider the most happy. I don’t know the point of
all this, but it’s true. For a long time I tried to explain it to myself in terms of some kind of real gain, but I had to reject
that explanation because it was wrong.
Many of those, for instance, who called me their own never rode on me—although others did. And so with those who
fed me. Then again, the coachman, the veterinarians, and the outsiders in general treated me kindly, yet those who called
me their own did not. In due time, having widened the scope of my observations, I satisfied myself that the notion “my,”
not only in relation to us horses, has no other basis than a narrow human instinct which is called a sense of or right to
private property. A man says “this house is mine” and never lives in it; he only worries about its construction and upkeep.
A merchant says “my shop,” “my dry goods shop,” for instance, and does not even wear clothes made from the better
cloth he keeps in his own shop.
There are people who call a tract of land their own, but they never set eyes on it and never take a stroll on it. There
are people who call others their own, yet never see them. And the whole relationship between them is that the so-called
“owners” treat the others unjustly.
There are people who call women their own, or their “wives,” but their women live with other men. And people strive
not for the good in life, but for goods they can call their own.
I am now convinced that this is the essential difference between people and ourselves. And therefore, not even
considering the other ways in which we are superior, but considering just this one virtue, we can bravely claim to stand
higher than men on the ladder of living creatures. The actions of men, at least those with whom I have had dealings, are
guided by words—ours, by deeds.
The horse is killed before the end of the story, but the manner of the narrative, its technique,
does not change:
Much later they put Serpukhovsky’s body, which had experienced the world, which had eaten and drunk, into the ground.
They could profitably send neither his hide, nor his flesh, nor his bones anywhere.
But since his dead body, which had gone about in the world for twenty years, was a great burden to everyone, its
burial was only a superfluous embarrassment for the people. For a long time no one had needed him; for a long time he
had been a burden on all. But nevertheless, the dead who buried the dead found it necessary to dress this bloated body,
which immediately began to rot, in a good uniform and good boots; to lay it in a good new coffin with new tassels at the
four corners, then to place this new coffin in another of lead and ship it to Moscow; there to exhume ancient bones and
at just that spot, to hide this putrefying body, swarming with maggots, in its new uniform and clean boots, and to cover it
over completely with dirt.
Thus we see that at the end of the story Tolstoy continues to use the technique even though
the motivation for it [the reason for its use] is gone.25
In War and Peace Tolstoy uses the same technique in describing whole battles as if battles
were something new. These descriptions are too long to quote; it would be necessary to extract
a considerable part of the four-volume novel. But Tolstoy uses the same method in describing
the drawing room and the theater:
The middle of the stage consisted of flat boards; by the sides stood painted pictures representing trees, and at the back
a linen cloth was stretched down to the floor boards. Maidens in red bodices and white skirts sat on the middle of the
stage. One, very fat, in a white silk dress, sat apart on a narrow bench to which a green pasteboard box was glued from
behind. They were all singing something. Whey they had finished, the maiden in white approached the prompter’s box. A
man in silk with tight-fitting pants on his fat legs approached her with a plume and began to sing and spread his arms in
dismay. The man in the tight pants finished his song alone; then the girl sang. After that both remained silent as the music
resounded; and the man, obviously waiting to begin singing his part with her again, began to run his fingers over the hand
of the girl in the white dress. They finished their song together, and everyone in the theater began to clap and shout. But
the men and women on stage, who represented lovers, started to bow, smiling and raising their hands.
In the second act there were pictures representing monuments and openings in the linen cloth representing the
moonlight, and they raised lamp shades on a frame. As the musicians started to play the bass horn and counter-bass, a
large number of people in black mantles poured onto the stage from right and left. The people, with something like
daggers in their hands, started to wave their arms. Then still more people came running out and began to drag away the
maiden who had been wearing a white dress but who now wore one of sky blue. They did not drag her off immediately,
but sang with her for a long time before dragging her away. Three times they struck on something metallic behind the
side scenes, and everyone got down on his knees and began to chant a prayer. Several times all of this activity was
interrupted by enthusiastic shouts from the spectators.
The third act is described:

… But suddenly a storm blew up. Chromatic scales and chords of diminished sevenths were heard in the orchestra.
Everyone ran about and again they dragged one of the bystanders behind the scenes as the curtain fell.
In the fourth act, “There was some sort of devil who sang, waving his hands, until the boards
were moved out from under him and he dropped down.”26
In Resurrection Tolstoy describes the city and the court in the same way; he uses a similar
technique in “Kreutzer Sonata” when he describes marriage—“Why, if people have an affinity
of souls, must they sleep together?” But he did not defamiliarize only those things he sneered
at:
Pierre stood up from his new comrades and made his way between the campfires to the other side of the road where,
it seemed, the captive soldiers were held. He wanted to talk with them. The French sentry stopped him on the road and
ordered him to return. Pierre did so, but not to the campfire, not to his comrades, but to an abandoned, unharnessed
carriage. On the ground, near the wheel of the carriage, he sat cross-legged in the Turkish fashion, and lowered his head.
He sat motionless for a long time, thinking. More than an hour passed. No one disturbed him. Suddenly he burst out
laughing with his robust, good natured laugh—so loudly that the men near him looked around, surprised at his
conspicuously strange laughter.
“Ha, ha, ha,” laughed Pierre. And he began to talk to himself. “The soldier didn’t allow me to pass. They caught me,
barred me. Me—me— my immortal soul. Ha, ha, ha,” he laughed with tears starting in his eyes.
Pierre glanced at the sky, into the depths of the departing, playing stars. “And all this is mine, all this is in me, and all
this is I,” thought Pierre. “And all this they caught and put in a planked enclosure.” He smiled and went off to his
comrades to lie down to sleep.27
Anyone who knows Tolstoy can find several hundred such passages in his work. His method
of seeing things out of their normal context is also apparent in his last works. Tolstoy
described the dogmas and rituals he attacked as if they were unfamiliar, substituting everyday
meanings for the customarily religious meanings of the words common in church ritual. Many
persons were painfully wounded; they considered it blasphemy to present as strange and
monstrous what they accepted as sacred. Their reaction was due chiefly to the technique
through which Tolstoy perceived and reported his environment. And after turning to what he
had long avoided, Tolstoy found that his perceptions had unsettled his faith.
The technique of defamiliarization is not Tolstoy’s alone. I cited Tolstoy because his work is
generally known.
Now, having explained the nature of this technique, let us try to determine the approximate
limits of its application. I personally feel that defamiliarization is found almost everywhere
form is found. In other words, the difference between Potebnya’s point of view and ours is
this: An image is not a permanent referent for those mutable complexities of life which are
revealed through it; its purpose is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special
perception of the object—it creates a “vision” of the object instead of serving as a means for
knowing it.
The purpose of imagery in erotic art can be studied even more accurately; an erotic object is
usually presented as if it were seen for the first time. Gogol, in “Christmas Eve,” provides the
following example:
Here he approached her more closely, coughed, smiled at her, touched her plump, bare arm with his fingers, and
expressed himself in a way that showed both his cunning and his conceit.
“And what is this you have, magnificent Solokha?” and having said this, he jumped back a little.
“What? An arm, Osip Nikiforovich!” she answered.
“Hmm, an arm! He, he, he!” said the secretary cordially, satisfied with his beginning. He wandered about the room.
“And what is this you have, dearest Solokha?” he said in the same way, having approached her again and grasped her
lightly by the neck, and in the very same way he jumped back.
“As if you don’t see, Osip Nikiforovich!” answered Solokha, “a neck, and on my neck a necklace.”
“Hmm! On the neck a necklace! He, he, he!” and the secretary again wandered about the room, rubbing his hands.
“And what is this you have, incomparable Solokha?” … It is not known to what the secretary would stretch his long
fingers now.
And Knut Hamsun has the following in “Hunger”: “Two white prodigies appeared from
beneath her blouse.”
Erotic subjects may also be presented figuratively with the obvious purpose of leading us
away from their “recognition.” Hence sexual organs are referred to in terms of lock and key,28
or quilting tools,29 or bow and arrow, or rings and marlinspikes, as in the legend of Stavyor,
in which a married man does not recognize his wife, who is disguised as a warrior. She
proposes a riddle:
“Remember, Stavyor, do you recall
How we little ones walked to and fro in the street?
You and I together sometimes played with a marlinspike—
You had a silver marlinspike,
But I had a gilded ring?
I found myself at it just now and then,
But you fell in with it ever and always.”
Says Stavyor, son of Godinovich,
“What! I didn’t play with you at marlinspikes!”
Then Vasilisa Mikulichna: “So he says.
Do you remember, Stavyor, do you recall,
Now must you know, you and I together learned to
read and write;
Mine was an ink-well of silver,
And yours a pen of gold?
But I just moistened it a little now and then,
And I just moistened it ever and always.”30
In a different version of the legend we find a key to the riddle:

Here the formidable envoy Vasilyushka
Raised her skirts to the very navel,
And then the young Stavyor, son of Godinovich,
Recognized her gilded ring….31
But defamiliarization is not only a technique of the erotic riddle— a technique of euphemism
—it is also the basis and point of all riddles. Every riddle pretends to show its subject either
by words which specify or describe it but which, during the telling, do not seem applicable
(the type: “black and white and ‘red’—read—all over) or by means of odd but imitative
sounds (“ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe”).32
Even erotic images not intended as riddles are defamiliarized (“boobies,” “tarts,” “piece,”
etc.). In popular imagery there is generally something equivalent to “trampling the grass” and
“breaking the guelder-rose.” The technique of defamiliarization is absolutely clear in the
widespread image—a motif of erotic affectation—in which a bear and other wild beasts (or a
devil, with a different reason for nonrecognition) do not recognize a man.33
The lack of recognition in the following tale is quite typical:
A peasant was plowing a field with a piebald mare. A bear approached him and asked, “Uncle, what’s made this mare
piebald for you?”
“I did the piebalding myself.”
“But how?”
“Let me, and I’ll do the same for you.”
The bear agreed. The peasant tied his feet together with a rope, took the ploughshare from the two-wheeled plough,
heated it on the fire, and applied it to his flanks. He made the bear piebald by scorching his fur down to the hide with the
hot ploughshare. The man untied the bear, which went off and lay down under a tree.
A magpie flew at the peasant to pick at the meat on his shirt. He caught her and broke one of her legs. The magpie
flew off to perch in the same tree under which the bear was lying. Then, after the magpie, a horsefly landed on the mare,
sat down, and began to bite. The peasant caught the fly, took a stick, shoved it up its rear, and let it go. The fly went to
the tree where the bear and the magpie were. There all three sat.
The peasant’s wife came to bring his dinner to the field. The man and his wife finished their dinner in the fresh air, and
he began to wrestle with her on the ground.
The bear saw this and said to the magpie and the fly, “Holy priests! The peasant wants to piebald someone again.”
The magpie said, “No, he wants to break someone’s legs.”
The fly said, “No, he wants to shove a stick up someone’s rump.”34
The similarity of technique here and in Tolstoy’s “Kholstomer,” is, I think, obvious.
Quite often in literature the sexual act itself is defamiliarized; for example, the Decameron
refers to “scraping out a barrel,” “catching nightingales,” “gay wool-beating work,” (the last is
not developed in the plot). Defamiliarization is often used in describing the sexual organs.
A whole series of plots is based on such a lack of recognition; for example, in Afanasyev’s
Intimate Tales the entire story of “The Shy Mistress” is based on the fact that an object is not
called by its proper name—or, in other words, on a game of nonrecognition. So too in
Onchukov’s “Spotted Petticoats,” tale no. 525, and also in “The Bear and the Hare” from
Intimate Tales, in which the bear and the hare make a “wound.”
Such constructions as “the pestle and the mortar,” or “Old Nick and the infernal regions”
(Decameron), are also examples of the technique of defamiliarization. And in my article on
plot construction I write about defamiliarization in psychological parallelism. Here, then, I
repeat that the perception of disharmony in a harmonious context is important in parallelism.
The purpose of parallelism, like the general purpose of imagery, is to transfer the usual
perception of an object into the sphere of a new perception— that is, to make a unique
semantic modification.
In studying poetic speech in its phonetic and lexical structure as well as in its characteristic
distribution of words and in the characteristic thought structures compounded from the words,
we find everywhere the artistic trademark—that is, we find material obviously created to
remove the automatism of perception; the author’s purpose is to create the vision which results
from that deautomatized perception. A work is created “artistically” so that its perception is
impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of the perception.
As a result of this lingering, the object is perceived not in its extension in space, but, so to
speak, in its continuity. Thus “poetic language” gives satisfaction. According to Aristotle,
poetic language must appear strange and wonderful; and, in fact, it is often actually foreign: the
Sumerian used by the Assyrians, the Latin of Europe during the Middle Ages, the Arabisms of
the Persians, the Old Bulgarian of Russian literature, or the elevated, almost literary language
of folk songs. The common archaisms of poetic language, the intricacy of the sweet new style
[dolce stil nuovo],35 the obscure style of the language of Arnaut Daniel with the “roughened”
[harte] forms which make pronunciation difficult—these are used in much the same way. Leo
Jakubinsky has demonstrated the principle of phonetic “roughening” of poetic language in the
particular case of the repetition of identical sounds. The language of poetry is, then, a difficult,
roughened, impeded language. In a few special instances the language of poetry approximates
the language of prose, but this does not violate the principle of “roughened” form.
Her sister was called Tatyana.
For the first time we shall
Wilfully brighten the delicate
Pages of a novel with such a name.
wrote Pushkin. The usual poetic language for Pushkin’s contemporaries was the elegant style of
Derzhavin; but Pushkin’s style, because it seemed trivial then, was unexpectedly difficult for
them. We should remember the consternation of Pushkin’s contemporaries over the vulgarity of
his expressions. He used the popular language as a special device for prolonging attention, just
as his contemporaries generally used Russian words in their usually French speech (see
Tolstoy’s examples in War and Peace).
Just now a still more characteristic phenomenon is under way. Russian literary language,
which was originally foreign to Russia, has so permeated the language of the people that it has
blended with their conversation. On the other hand, literature has now begun to show a
tendency towards the use of dialects (Remizov, Klyuyev, Essenin, and others,36 so unequal in
talent and so alike in language, are intentionally provincial) and of barbarisms (which gave
rise to the Severyanin group37). And currently Maxim Gorky is changing his diction from the
old literary language to the new literary colloquialism of Leskov.38 Ordinary speech and
literary language have thereby changed places (see the work of Vyacheslav Ivanov and many
others). And finally, a strong tendency, led by Khlebnikov, to create a new and properly poetic
language has emerged. In the light of these developments we can define poetry as attenuated,
tortuous speech. Poetic speech is formed speech. Prose is ordinary speech— economical,
easy, proper, the goddess of prose [dea prosae] is a goddess of the accurate, facile type, of the
“direct” expression of a child. I shall discuss roughened form and retardation as the general
law of art at greater length in an article on plot construction.39
Nevertheless, the position of those who urge the idea of the economy of artistic energy as
something which exists in and even distinguishes poetic language seems, at first glance, tenable
for the problem of rhythm. Spencer’s description of rhythm would seem to be absolutely
incontestable:
Just as the body in receiving a series of varying concussions, must keep the muscles ready to meet the most violent of
them, as not knowing when such may come: so, the mind in receiving unarranged articulations, must keep its perspectives
active enough to recognize the least easily caught sounds. And as, if the concussions recur in definite order, the body may
husband its forces by adjusting the resistance needful for each concussion; so, if the syllables be rhythmically arranged,
the mind may economize its energies by anticipating the attention required for each syllable.40
This apparently conclusive observation suffers from the common fallacy, the confusion of the
laws of poetic and prosaic language. In The Philosophy of Style Spencer failed utterly to
distinguish between them. But rhythm may have two functions. The rhythm of prose, or of a
work song like “Dubinushka,” permits the members of the work crew to do their necessary
“groaning together” and also eases the work by making it automatic. And, in fact, it is easier to
march with music than without it, and to march during an animated conversation is even easier,
for the walking is done unconsciously. Thus the rhythm of prose is an important automatizing
element; the rhythm of poetry is not. There is “order” in art, yet not a single column of a Greek
temple stands exactly in its proper order; poetic rhythm is similarly disordered rhythm.
Attempts to systematize the irregularities have been made, and such attempts are part of the
current problem in the theory of rhythm. It is obvious that the systematization will not work, for
in reality the problem is not one of complicating the rhythm but of disordering the rhythm—a
disordering which cannot be predicted. Should the disordering of rhythm become a convention,
it would be ineffective as a device for the roughening of language. But I will not discuss
rhythm in more detail since I intend to write a book about it.41
Victor Shklovsky, “Iskusstvo, kak priyom,” Sborniki, II (1917).
1. Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (Vol. IV of Slavistic Printings and Reprintings, ed. Cornelis H. Van
Schooneveld; ’S-Gravenhage: Mouton & Co., 1955), pp. 112–114.
2. Victor Shklovsky, “Voyna i mir Lva Tolstovo (Formalno-sotsiologicheskoye issledovaniye)” [“War and Peace of Leo Tolstoy
(A Formalistic-Sociological Study)”], Novy lef [New Left], No. 1 (1928).
3. The Russian word is ostraneniye, it means literally “making strange.”
4. See below, p. 12.
5. I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry (1926), reprinted in Criticism: The Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment, ed.
Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, and Gordon McKenzie (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 513.
6. Alexander Potebnya, Iz zapisok po teorii slovesnosti [Notes on the Theory of Language] (Kharkov, 1905), p. 83.
7. Ibid., p. 97.
8. Dmitry Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky (1835–1920), a leading Russian scholar, was an early contributor to Marxist periodicals and a
literary conservative, antagonistic towards the deliberately meaningless poems of the Futurists. Ed. note.
9. Potebnya, Iz zapisok po teorii slovesnosti, p. 314.
10. Ibid., p. 291.
11. Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–1873), a poet, and Nicholas Gogol (1809–1852), a master of prose fiction and satire, are mentioned
here because their bold use of imagery cannot be accounted for by Potebnya’s theory. Shklovsky is arguing that writers
frequently gain their effects by comparing the commonplace to the exceptional rather than vice versa. Ed. note.
12. This is an allusion to Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Borozdy i mezhi [Furrows and Boundaries] (Moscow, 1916), a major statement
of Symbolist theory. Ed. note.
13. The Russian text involves a play on the word for “hat,” colloquial for “clod,” “duffer,” etc. Ed. note.
14. Shklovsky is here doing two things of major theoretical importance: (1) he argues that different techniques serve a single
function, and that (2) no single technique is all-important. The second permits the Formalists to be concerned with any and all
literary devices; the first permits them to discuss the devices from a single consistent theoretical position. Ed. note.
15. Herbert Spencer, The Philosophy of Style [(Humboldt Library, Vol. XXXIV; New York, 1882), pp. 2–3. Shklovsky’s
quoted reference, in Russian, preserves the idea of the original but shortens it].
16. The Russian zatrudyonny means “made difficult.” The suggestion is that poems with “easy” or smooth rhythms slip by
unnoticed; poems that are difficult or “roughened” force the reader to attend to them. Ed. note.
17. Simvolizm, probably. Ed. note.
18. Leo Jakubinsky, “O zvukakh poeticheskovo yazyka” [“On the Sounds of Poetic Language”], Sborniki, I (1916), p. 38.
19. Leo Jakubinsky, “Skopleniye odinakovykh plavnykh v prakticheskom i poeticheskom yazykakh” [“The Accumulation of
Identical Liquids in Practical and Poetic Language”], Sborniki, II (1917), pp. 13–21.
20. Alexander Pogodin, Yazyk, kak tvorchestvo [Language as Art] (Kharkov, 1913), p. 42. [The original sentence was in
French, “Les montaignes de la Suisse sont belles,” with the appropriate initials.]
21. Jakubinsky, Sborniki, I (1916).
22. Leo Tolstoy’s Diary, entry dated February 29, 1897. [The date is transcribed incorrectly; it should read March 1, 1897.]
23. Alexander Potebnya, Iz lektsy po teorii slovesnosti [Lectures on the Theory of Language] (Kharkov, 1914).
24. Victor Shklovsky, Voskresheniye slova [The Resurrection of the Word] (Petersburg, 1914).
25. See below, pp. 85–86, for a discussion of the motivational aspects of defamiliarization. Ed. note.
26. The Tolstoy and Gogol translations are ours. The passage occurs in Vol. II, Part 8, Chap. 9. of the edition of War and
Peace published in Boston by the Dana Estes Co. in 1904–1912. Ed. note.
27. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, IV, Part 13. Chap. 14. Ed. note.
28. [Dimitry] Savodnikov, Zagadki russkovo naroda [Riddles of the Russian People] (St. Petersburg, 1901), Nos. 102–107.
29. Ibid., Nos. 588–591.
30. A. E. Gruzinsky, ed., Pesni, sobrannye P[avel] N. Rybnikovym [Songs Collected by P. N. Rybnikov] (Moscow, 1909–
1910), No. 30.
31. Ibid., No. 171.
32. We have supplied familiar English examples in place of Shklovsky’s wordplay. Shklovsky is saying that we create words
with no referents or with ambiguous referents in order to force attention to the objects represented by the similar-sounding
words. By making the reader go through the extra step of interpreting the nonsense word, the writer prevents an automatic
response. A toad is a toad, but “ tove” forces one to pause and think about the beast. Ed. note.
33. E. R. Romanov, “Besstrashny barin,” Velikorusskiye skazki (Zapiski Imperskovo Russkovo Geograficheskovo Obschestva,
XLII, No. 52). Belorussky sbornik, “Spravyadlivy soldat” [“The Intrepid Gentleman,” Great Russian Tales (Notes of the
Imperial Rissian Geographical Society, XLII, No. 52). White Russian Anthology, “The Upright Soldier” (1886–1912)].
34. D[mitry] S. Zelenin, Velikorusskiye skazki Permskoy gubernii [Great Russian Tales of the Permian Province (St.
Petersburg, 1913)], No. 70.
35. Dante, Purgatorio, 24:56. Dante refers to the new lyric style of his contemporaries. Ed. note.
36. Alexy Remizov (1877–1957) is best known as a novelist and satirist; Nicholas Klyuyev (1885–1937) and Sergey Essenin
(1895–1925) were “peasant poets.” All three were noted for their faithful reproduction of Russian dialects and colloquial
language. Ed. note.
37. A group noted for its opulent and sensuous verse style. Ed. note.
38. Nicholas Leskov (1831–1895), novelist and short story writer, helped popularize the skaz, or yarn, and hence, because of the
part dialect peculiarities play in the skaz, also altered Russian literary language. Ed. note.
39. Shklovsky is probably referring to his Razvyortyvaniye syuzheta [Plot Development] (Petrograd, 1921). Ed. note.
40. Spencer, [p. 169. Again the Russian text is shortened from Spencer’s original].
41. We have been unable to discover the book Shklovsky promised. Ed. note.

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Art as Technique

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

It would be instructive to try to apply this principle to Tyutchev’s comparison of summer

And R[ichard] Avenarius:

The third act is described:

In a different version of the legend we find a key to the riddle:

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