One of the founders of Russian Formalism, Viktor Shklovsky is a key figure within twentieth-century literary history. This book explores Shklovsky's participation in early-Soviet debates about the relations between agency, volition and bodily functions. Viktor Shklovsky's Involuntary Modernism shows how his writings engage with new ideas about the body, focusing on those physiological influences that were believed to affect human agency, such as nutrition and metabolism, energy preservation and kinaesthetic economy, reflexes and automatic actions, and hormones associated with reproduction and sexuality. Drawing on the work Shklovsky published during his exile in Berlin in 1922-1923, this book argues that his immersion in one of the major centres of modernist culture resulted in writing that responded to growing restrictions on freedom of movement by exploring the limits and possibilities of control over the body and its functions. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it uncovers a critical yet neglected area of early-Soviet literary and cultural history. Its in-depth exploration of the centrality of the body represents a new perspective on Shklovsky's work and offers an original contribution to current scholarship on Russian Formalism and its place in the larger context of modernist culture and literary theory.

With the emergence of numerous literary groups and organizations after the Russian revolution, artists, writers, and scholars faced a difficult task of finding safe working environments. The article focuses on Viktor Shklovsky’s surprising choice of affiliation – The Great Liberal Order of Monkeys, a playful literary “secret society” founded by modernist Alexei Remizov. Presented with an opportunity to subvert the anthropocentric model of institutionalized collectivity and assume nonhuman agency, Shklovsky, among other artists and literary figures, readily gave up his human identity and adopted the title of a “bobtailed monkey.” In engaging with vulnerability, the article examines how Shklovsky and Remizov’s writings suggest a new form of ethics, which focuses on the sustainability of communal existence, by juxtaposing animal migration and communal-nomadic life with solitary and often dangerous trajectories of post- revolutionary emigration. During his exile in Berlin, Shklovsky details his encounter with a solitary ape in Berlin’s zoo, which challenges his experience of interspecies empathy as the ape begins to masturbate. I argue that in focusing on practices and experiences shared by human and nonhuman animals, such as expressing sexual needs, requiring privacy, depending on food, and experiencing constraint, these writings contrast Shklovsky’s isolating experiences of exile with trans- species mutuality and collectivity.

The article examines early-Soviet figurations of cinema as a vaccine capable of inoculating workers with corporeal efficiency. Within this cultural fantasy, Charlie Chaplin was appropriated by the Soviet avant-garde to play an unlikely role of an expert in the theory and practice of labor. Tracing the cultural contexts of Chaplin's cameo in Iprit (1925), a science-fiction novel by Viktor Shklovsky and Vsevolod Ivanov, this article shows that the search for immunity from labor exhaustion opens wider vistas of the history of labor that run through the biocapital of slavery into the Soviet adoption of Taylorist practices of bodily standardization.

In Viktor Shklovsky’s essay “Art as Device” habitual perception is described as a dangerous practice, which renders one insensitive to the experiences of modernity. Importantly, the subjects’ automatized relationship with the surrounding world disrupts their ability to engage with objects. Rather than being experienced through the senses, the object is recognized through an epistemological (preconceived) framework. As a result, Shklovsky argues, “we do not see things, we merely recognize them by their primary characteristics. The object passes before us, as if it were prepackaged.” By making the usual strange Shklovsky’s technique of estrangement promises a relief from an alienating, consumerist experience of modernity, which “automatizes the object” instead of enabling perception: “in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.” In this article I trace the development of Shklovsky’s views on literature and the arts as an alternative way of experiencing objects in his writings during and after the Russian Revolution. I will pay particular attention to the relationship between things and words in Shklovsky’s writings produced during his exile in Berlin in 1923. The publication of the Berlin-based magazine Veshch/ Objet /Gegenstand in 1922, shortly before Shklovsky’s arrival, signals a rejection of both recognition and observation as passive consumerist practices. Instead, the manifesto published in the first issue of the magazine invites its readers to create new objects, which here is inseparable from thecreation of new social formations. I will argue that Shklovsky’s 1923 writings provide a rethinking of the word “object” in society, literature and the arts. The function of art is not to “express what lies beyond words and images,” in other words, not to point to a referent that exists as a ‘real’ object, but rather to create a world “of independently existing things.”

From its first publication in 1923, Viktor Shklovsky’s book Zoo, or Letters Not about Love has been discussed as a text that takes up a borderline position between literature and literary theory. The fact that the book was written and first published in Berlin ensured its place in studies of émigré literature concerned with geographic borders. In light of this twofold understanding of border as a boundary between genres and a category of literary cartographies, this article offers a rethinking of the notion of border in Shklovsky’s early poetics. It suggests that the subject’s geographic displacement (e.g., exile) provides a vantage point from which a reevaluation of established genres and discourses of textual production becomes possible. The experience of exile allows Shklovsky to challenge such categories as fiction (in literary and historical narratives) and nonfiction (both theory and autobiography). This becomes possible because in Zoo, or Letters Not about Love language is no longer presented as a medium of representation but rather as a means of re-creating the writer’s unstable literary and ideological position in postrevolutionary Russia and abroad. During his exile, which disrupted his contribution to the development of “the science of literature” undertaken by the formalist clique in Moscow and Petrograd, Shklovsky used writing as a way of constructing the Soviet writer’s experience of émigré life. To further investigate the link between language and exile, the article draws parallels between Shklovsky’s writings on the subject and Jacques Derrida’s theories of writing, which link the inherent instability of language to its essential foreignness.