Russian Formalism: The Theory of Literary Estrangement and the Estrangement of Social Practices

Ilya Kalinin, Associate Professor, Liberal Arts and Sciences, St.-Petersburg State University; Professor, National Research University “Higher School of Economics”

The theoretical and revolutionary project, which was announced by the leading figure of Russian Formalism, Viktor Shklovsky, in 1914, aspired to go much further than just a renewal of philological knowledge, or even the arts as such. Moreover, in its focus on ordinary things, Russian Formalism did not limit itself to either the tendency towards “total aestheticization” of everyday life, or the reductionist aesthetic “isolation of things from their primary everyday context”. In his first manifesto, “Resurrection of the Word” (1914), Shklovsky assesses the everyday context of his time in the following way:  “The old art is dead now… and the things are dead too, – we lost the feeling of the world; we are like a fiddler, who ceased to feel strings, we stopped being artists in everyday lives, we stopped loving our homes and our clothes and all too easily part with life, which we do not feel”. And he conceives of the “new artistic forms”, which are deemed capable to “bring back the experience of the world to the man, resurrect the things and kill the pessimism”, as the means of reviving the lost sensibility towards the material aspect of the world. This way, “the resurrection of words” calls for the resurrection of things and social practices.

Ilya Kalinin is Associate Professor at the Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St.-Petersburg State University and Professor at the National Research University “Higher School of Economics”.  He is the editor of the Moscow-based intellectual journal “Emergency Rations: Debates on Politics and Culture (Neprikosnovennyj Zapas/NZ: Debaty o politike i culture)” and the editor of the two book series on cultural and social theory published by the leading private Russian publisher, “The New Literary Observer” 

His two main research interests are early Soviet intellectual and cultural history and historical and cultural politics in contemporary Russia. Professor Kalinin’s publications in English include, but are not limited to: “Why ‘Two Russias’ are less than ‘United Russia’. Cultural Distinctions and Political Similarities: Dialectics of the Defeat,” in The Shrew Untamed: Cultural Mechanisms of Political Protest in Russia, ed. Birgit Beumers, Alexander Etkind and Olga Gurova (London, 2017);“Petropoetics: The Oil Text in Post-Soviet Russia,” Russian Literature since 1991, ed. E. Dobrenko, M. Lipovetzky (Cambridge, 2015); “The ‘Russian World’:Genetically Modified Conservatism or Why Culture matters,” in Russia: Art Resistance and the Neoconservative Zeitgeist, ed. Lena Jonson and Andrei Erofeev (London and New York, 2017) and others. His latest book, “History as Art of Articulation. Russian Formalists and Revolution,” is forthcoming in New Literary Observer Publishing House (Moscow).