Victor Shklovsky
... The civil war raged on. Another brother, Evgeny, was arrested and killed. “Either the Whites or the Reds killed him,” Shklovsky wrote. “I don’t remember which.” Wanted by the Bolsheviks and traveling under a false passport, he re-enlisted in the Red Army. The revolution was still the only thing worth fighting for. He made it to Moscow, where Maxim Gorky smoothed over his problems with the regime (a function the older novelist would be fated to fulfill time and again), freeing Shklovsky to rejoin his old Opoyaz comrades in Petersburg. Food was scarce and the winter fierce. They kept writing, burning furniture and books to stay alive. “Books burn very badly,” Shklovsky later wrote. “They create a lot of ashes.” Shklovsky’s sister died of illness, his aunt of hunger. White armies besieged the city. He took up arms again and joined a demolition squad. A bomb blew up in his hands. “I hardly had time for a fleeting thought about my book, Plot as a Stylistic Phenomenon. Who would write it now?”
Shklovsky would live to publish that book in 1925 under the title Theory of Prose, but not before his Socialist Revolutionary past again became a dangerous liability, forcing him to flee to Berlin, where he joined a growing colony of Russian exiles, finished the memoir and, on the verge of breakdown, fell in love with a beautiful and brilliant émigré named Elsa Triolet, who did not love him back. Triolet, who would go on to marry the French surrealist Louis Aragon and to become a celebrated novelist in France, was the sister of Lili Brik, the longtime lover, muse and primary tormentor of Shklovsky’s good friend Mayakovsky.
Shklovsky made a book of it, an odd epistolary novel titled Zoo, or Letters Not About Love (1923): Triolet had allowed him to write to her on the condition that he not mention love. The constraint proved productive. Zoo is a brilliant, unhinged and tortured work, with little of the romance and all of the self-laceration that marked Mayakovsky’s poems for Lili Brik. “I was bound to be broken while abroad and I found myself a love that would do the job,” Shklovsky wrote. Triolet had little to do with it. (Her own letters, several of which he included in Zoo, suggest she knew as much.) Despite its double bluff, Zoo is less about Shklovsky’s love for Triolet than it is about the pain of exile, the heartbreak of the revolution and, of course, about art, about writing, about being a book.
The latter is in some large part the subject of all of Shklovsky’s works. “This book is an attempt to go outside the framework of the ordinary novel,” Shklovsky confesses in Zoo. “Writing it is physically painful.” Even in his anguish, Shklovsky couldn’t help but play. Letter Nineteen—“Which is not to be read”—is crossed out with big red Xs, a nod to the typographic high jinks of that giddiest and most self-conscious of novels, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Employing a narrative strategy of purposeful digression, A Sentimental Journey toys with a similar range of Sterne-ish tricks. Shklovsky interrupts one long detour (on the gas and oil lines of one variety of rotary engine) by pointing out that “This whole digression is built on the device which in my ‘poetics’ is called retardation.” That intrusion is itself based in another device, which elsewhere in Shklovsky’s poetics is called “baring the device.”
