Viktor Shklovsky, in full Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky, (born January 24 [January 12, Old Style], 1893, St. Petersburg, Russia—died December 8, 1984, Moscow), Russian literary critic and novelist. He was a major voice of Formalism, a critical school that had great influence in Russian literature in the 1920s. Educated at the University of St. Petersburg, Shklovsky helped found OPOYAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language, in 1914. He was also connected with the Serapion Brothers, a collection of writers that began meeting in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1921. Both groups felt that literature’s importance lay primarily not in its social content but rather in its independent creation of language. In O teori prozy (1925; “On the Theory of Prose”) and Metod pisatelskogo masterstva (1928; “The Technique of the Writer’s Craft”), Shklovsky argued that literature is a collection of stylistic and formal devices that force the reader to view the world afresh by presenting old ideas or mundane experiences in new, unusual ways. His concept of ostranenie, or “making it strange,” was his chief contribution to Russian Formalist theory. Shklovsky also wrote autobiographical novels, chiefly Sentimentalnoye puteshestvie: vospominaniya (A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922), a widely acclaimed memoir of life during the early years of Bolshevik rule; and Zoo. Pisma ne o lyubvi, ili tryetya Eloiza (Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, or the Third Héloise). Both of these books were published in 1923, during a period (1922–23) when he lived in Berlin. He returned permanently to the Soviet Union in the latter year, at which time the Soviet authorities dissolved OPOYAZ, obliging Shklovsky to join other state-sanctioned literary organs. With his essay “Monument to a Scholarly Error” (1930), he finally bowed to the Stalinist authorities’ displeasure with Formalism. Thereafter, he tried to adapt the theory of the accepted doctrine of Socialist Realism. He continued to write voluminously, publishing historical novels, film criticism, and highly praised studies of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Roman Jakobson, Russian Roman Osipovich Jakobson, (born Oct. 11 [Sept. 29, Old Style], 1896, Moscow, Russia—died July 18, 1982, Boston, Mass., U.S.), Russian born American linguist and Slavic-language scholar, a principal founder of the European movement in structural linguistics known as the Prague school. Jakobson extended the theoretical and practical concerns of the school into new areas of study. Jakobson left Moscow for Prague in 1920. In 1928, with his colleagues of the Prague school, Nikolaj S. Trubetzkoy and S.I. Karcevskij, he announced his hypothesis that phonemes, the smallest units of speech sounds that distinguish one word from another, are complexes of binary features, such as voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated. Among his early works were Remarques sur l’évolution phonologique du russe comparée à celles des autres langues slaves (1929; “Comments on Phonological Change in Russian Compared with That in Other Slavic Languages”) and Kharakteristichke yevrazi-yskogo yazykovogo soyuza (1931; “Characteristics of the Eurasian Language Affinity”). Jakobson began his association with Masarykova University of Brno, Czech., in 1933, becoming professor of Russian philology (1934) and Czech medieval literature (1937) there. The European political situation, however, compelled him to flee successively to the universities of Copenhagen, Oslo, and Uppsala, Swed., where he served as visiting professor. In 1941 he reached New York City, where he taught at Columbia University (1943–49). He was professor of Slavic languages and literature and general linguistics at Harvard University (1949–67). The titles of Jakobson’s works indicate the expanding scope of his research—e.g., Kindersprache and Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze (both 1941; Studies in Child-Language and Aphasia). Among his later works are Preliminaries to Speech Analysis (1952), a pioneering work in the distinctive feature analysis of speech sounds, written in collaboration with C. Gunnar, M. Fant, and Morris Halle, and Fundamentals of Language (1956; rev. ed. 1971), also with Halle. Jakobson’s Selected Writings, 6 vol. (1962–71), are concerned with phonological studies, the word, language, poetry, grammar, Slavic epic studies, ties, and traditions. His The Sound Shape of Language, with Linda R. Waugh, was published in 1979.

1. literariness

2. defamliarization

3. story and plot

4. motivation

5. foregrounding

6. the dominant