Shklovsky Quotes

And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.

Art makes the familiar strange so that it can be freshly perceived. To do this it presents its material in unexpected, even outlandish ways: the shock of the new.

You have to store up books, becoming acquainted with human experience; let them lie around your thoughts, becoming yours—ring upon ring, as a tree grows, let them rise up from the depths like coral islands. If it gets crowded with all the books and there's nowhere to put your bed, it's better to exchange it for a folding bed

Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarization; of zooming in so close to something, and observing it so slowly, that it begins to warp, and change, and acquire new meaning.

Habitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. If all the complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been. Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object seen, not as recognized. The technique of art is to make things 'unfamiliar,' to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception. The act of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.

Misfortune of this kind comes to many. Life is well ordered, like a nécessaire, but not all of us can find our places in it. Life tailors us for a certain person and laughs when we are drawn to someone unable to love us. All this is simple--like postage stamps.

She is the only island for you in your life. From her there is no turning back for you. Only around her does the sea have color.

Хожу в осеннем пальто, а если бы настал мороз, то пришлось бы называть это пальто зимним.

Of all the contradictions, the most painful to me is that while the lips in question are busy renewing themselves, the heart is being worn to frazzle; and with it go the forgotten things, undetected.

Habitualization,” a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things—words, friends, apartments—as they truly are.

Life is well ordered, like a 'nécessaire', but not all of us can find our places in it.

He had begun to weep in Prague not out of sentimentality, but the way windows weep in a room heated for the first time in many weeks.

Sick birds don’t like to be watched.

The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential - X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We'd pass out every time we saw - actually saw- a flower...'Habitualization,' a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, 'devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war.

In Moscow, city of pedestrians, it was the engine that drove a driver to crime. A weapon makes a man bolder. A horse turns him into a calvryman. Things make of a man whatever he makes from them. Speed requires a goal. Things are multiplying around us--there are ten or even a hundred times more of them now than there were two hundred years ago. Mankind has them under control, but the individual does not.

In 1976, a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham in England demonstrated that randomizing letters in the middle of words had no effect on the ability of readers to understand sentences. In tihs setncene, for emalxpe, ervey scarbelmd wrod rmenias bcilasaly leibgle. Why? Because we are deeply accustomed to seeing letters arranged in certain patterns. Because the eye is in a rush, and the brain, eager to locate meaning, makes assumptions. This is true of phrases, too. An author writes “crack of dawn” or “sidelong glance” or “crystal clear” and the reader’s eye continues on, at ease with combinations of words it has encountered innumerable times before. But does the reader, or the writer, actually expend the energy to see what is cracking at dawn or what is clear about a crystal? The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential—X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw—actually saw—a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs. We need habit to get through a day, to get to work, to feed our children. But habit is dangerous, too. The act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic. The eye sees something—gray-brown bark, say, fissured into broad, vertical plates—and the brain spits out tree trunk and the eye moves on. But did I really take the time to see the tree? I glimpse hazel hair, high cheekbones, a field of freckles, and I think Shauna. But did I take the time to see my wife? “Habitualization,” a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things—words, friends, apartments—as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack. In the Tom Andrews Studio I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.

Сперва меня клонило к тебе, как клонит сон в вагоне голову пассажира на плечо соседа. Потом я загляделся на тебя. Знаю твой рот, твои губы. Я намотал на мысль о тебе всю свою жизнь. Я верю, что ты не чужой человек, - ну посмотри в мою сторону. Я напугал тебя своею любовью; когда, вначале, я был еще весел, я больше тебе нравился. Это от России, дорогая. У нас тяжелая походка. Но в России я был крепок , а здесь начал плакать.

No one can insult us, because we work. No one can make us ridiculous, because we know our value.

This, of course, had long been Teilhard de Chardin’s preferred explanation for the Great Silence. Chardin saw sophidetonation as an implosion inward rather than an explosion outward: a form of centralisation like the evolution of the brain, but threading across the planet rather than rebounding within the skull. This was what he called Point Omega, a form of transcendence where intelligence essentially disappears into its own self-created virtual domain, leaving mundane reality behind all together. Never one to miss a religious resonance, Chardin noted that this ‘supreme synthesis’ is a ‘phenomenon perhaps outwardly akin to death’. In fact, this was the final one of Shklovsky’s ‘internal contradictions’: if reason consists in denying natural inclinations then, of course, it will end up etherealising itself out of existence...

A drunken soldier sobers up on his horse, but a lonely man is drunk beyond repair.

A drunken soldier sobers up on his horse, but a lonely man is drunk beyond repair.

мир запыляется, и мы перестаем его ощущать. Стекло жизни запыляется, и человек живет тускло, а литература, писатель с сюжетом протирает это стекло и делает её опять осознаваемой, яркой, ощущаемой

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 unconscious automatic…[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 an object "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.

Așa trece viața, prefăcându-se în nimic. Automatismul ca fenomen înghite lucrurile, hainele, mobilele, nevasta și teama de război.

Așa trece viața, prefăcându-se în nimic. Automatismul ca fenomen înghite lucrurile, hainele, mobilele, nevasta și teama de război (V.B Șklovski, Arta ca procedeu, 1925, în Mihai Pop, coord., Ce este literatura? Școala formală rusă, p. 386)

Он в картинах не европеец, а витебец. Марк Шагал не принадлежит к "культурному миру". ... Так вот, витебские мальчишки все рисуют, как Шагал, и это ему в похвалу, он сумел быть в Париже и Питере витебцем.

The younger generation has been a force for change in part because it refuses to accept the status quo as a given. Young people are motivated by what the literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky once called the ‘energy of delusion.’ If we knew the true magnitude of a task beforehand, we wouldn’t undertake it in the first place. Thus, the older we get, and the more experience of challenge and failure that we endure, the less likely we are to attempt the impossible.

So what were people getting so excited about? What was this symphony saying to them? We are still arguing about that a whole human lifetime later. Audiences are still trying to decipher the codes in Shostakovich’s symphonies, trying to see under the masks he wore to the true face we expect to find beneath. “It’s very difficult to speak through a mask,” as the writer Viktor Shklovsky said, but “only a few can play themselves without it.

Apropo de digresiuni. La Fielding, în Joseph Andrews, există un capitol, introdus după o descriere de încăierare. Capitolul cuprinde relatarea discuției dintre scriitor și actor și poartă următorul titlu: Introdus anume pentru a frâna acțiunea". (V. B. Șklovski, Literatura fără subiect, în Mihai Pop, coord., Ce este literatura? Școala formală rusă, p. 447)