A Review of Viktor Shklovsky's Article, 'art as Technique'

A review of Viktor Shklovsky's article, 'Art as Technique', written by M. Sheikhi

'Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important.' This sentence, quoted by Shklovsky in Art as Technique, encapsulates the spirit of formalism in the early decades of the 20th century, that is, the significance of form over content, and resonates the author's emphasis on the importance of 'defamiliarization' in poetic diction in one clean sweep. For a formalist such as Shklovsky, what makes art, or more precisely, the poetic speech, superior to prose, is its ability to make objects 'unfamiliar'; to remove them from our automatic perception, to 'bring sensation of life', to make us feel what our automatism of perception has numbed us to. Habitualization renders life as nothing. Shklovsky, in order to drive his point home, very effectively quotes Tolstoy, whom he reveres in this article as an author having employed the defamiliarization technique most successfully. 'Living unconsciously, doing things automatically, forgetting if you had done it or not, it's as if such lives have never been.' And such is the purpose of poetry: to stop us from living in a void, to make us conscious about the details, to keep our faculties always in motion by making the familiar unfamiliar.

Shklovsky mentions two ways of defamiliarizing a concept in Tolstoy's 'Shame' and 'Kholstomer': In the former, he does so by not naming the familiar object, rather describing it as if seeing it for the first time; such is the case with the word 'flogging'. Tolstoy does not refer directly to this familiar word; instead, he goes on to describe the whole process in a paragraph, as if there is no name for it, thus preventing the readers from glazing over the all-too-familiar concepts, and constantly 'pricking their conscience'.

Another technique, which Tolstoy has used in 'Kholstomer' is to tell the story, not from a human's point of view as expected, but rather from a much stranger entity; in this case, a horse's. But even after the death of the horse, even when the reason for using such a style is gone, the story is narrated the