Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar

by Victor Shklovsky, Shushan Avagyun (Translator)

Dalkey Archive Press s favorite writer of them all.

Genres: Nonfiction, Russian Literature, Criticism, Writing, Books About Books

467 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (Russian: Виктор Борисович Шкловский) was a Soviet literary theorist, critic, writer, and pamphleteer.

Reviews

[Dont · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to this book after having read Silvija Jestrovic's "Theatre of Estrangement." As the online gloss says, Shklovsky wrote this in 1970 at the age of 77. That fact gives the reader fair indication that these pages will be filled with an old man's review of the authors, books and ideas that have resided in the years of his life. For the literary scholar, the centerpiece of the book is Shklovsky's continual reappraisal of his earliest ideas as one of the architects of formalist poetics; the idea that language "does" rather than merely "means" or "expresses." And for the young Shklovsky writing in the gathering storm of the Revolution, poetics makes the world grown thin through habit, thick with details for perception. Here, over fifty years later with so many of his loved ones dead and his literary heroes destroyed by the decades of Stalinism, Shklovsky throws much doubt on the brash pronouncements of his youth. He also returns once more (as he had several times over his life) to his criticism of the more well-known Mikhail Bakhtin. If the early Shklovksy is faulted for ignoring the importance of sentiment in art, the limitations of Bakhtin stemmed from too much fondness in his own ideas at the expense of a commonsense reading of his sources. The devil, he seems to be chiding the author of "Rabelais and His World" is in the details. But here, in my own account of having read Shklovsky's book, I just can't muster the will to go into these more scholastic matters. What impresses me most about "Bowstring" is the writing itself. A lifetime of studying literature produced in Shklovsky an incredible literary voice that is at once angry, mournful, and even hopeful against all evidence seen. The book itself moves casually between recapitulations of novellas by Tolstoy, accounts of long-dead literary scholars that Shklovksy refers to with great affection as among his friends, and simply exquisite observations. On page 280 I read this sentence; "I have lived a long life, I have seen crowds, been on many roads, and I know what a wet overcoat smells like." The sentence pierced me with a force that Barthes has called the punctum. In fact, it was because of these sorts of prizes that I read the entire book. While, in the end, Shklovsky sounds like a weary humanist devoted to art like a religion of universalism, the greater wisdom lies in these short poetic observations. They appear often in the most unexpected place; pulling you out of a long recapitulations of Thomas Mann's novel on the Biblical Joseph or one of the author's many lengthy discussions about the value of art, its social function in recuperating the dissimilar within the similar. And then, suddenly, one reads: "Mythology is not a place for leisurely walks; it's a battlefield" (374). This is the sort of book that teaches one about the possibilities of a different kind of writing by the way it's written, more so than by it's own declarations about literature. Having said that, Shklovsky's comparison between the aforementioned Mann novel and the economy found in the original Biblical "novella" has had a profound impact on my thinking. But for now, I am quite moved by having come to the end of this book. I have lived with "Bowstring' for the past two months. Having finished it, I feel like I have come to the end of a especially precious day that I know will never be lived again.

[Sunny · Rating 3 out of 5]

In places this was pretty good but overall I have to admit that I’m not sure what Viktor was going on about most of the time. If you are a big fan of Russian literature and know your Russian literature beyond Gogol, Solzhenitsyn, Dosto, Tolsty, Bulgakov, Turgenev and Gorky then you may like this book because the dude goes on about hundreds, I’m sure super talented, but totally obscure unheard of, Russian writers. The book spoke eloquently on many topics such as poetry and fairy tales and their importance to mankind amongst lots of other topics such as language and thought in That Stalin Russian era.
Some of the best bits in the book were:
• “A fool who’d have us all believe, that God speaks through his lips alone”
• “We grope the world with our words the same way as the blind grope with their hands, and unintentionally project the interrelations of our language structure onto the world, perceiving the world as a linguistic phenomenon.”
• “Sometimes I feel as if imagery were only the surrogate of real poetry, that when a poet lacks ingenuity to simply express his thought he turns to imagery.”

[Michael]

Too subtle for me -- and I'm not being snide. Perfectly readable, and I can tell that there is something significant there, but it eludes me. Maybe I'll try it again when I'm a little older.