Viktor Shklovsky by Viktor Shklovsky Alexandra Berlina

Author:Viktor Shklovsky,Alexandra Berlina
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A Reader
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2017-02-13T16:00:00+00:00

Narrative Prose

On the Absence of Clear Demarcations between “Fiction” and “Non-Fiction”

There are no clear demarcations between imaginative literature and what we call non-fiction. Many texts that we ascribe to so-called belles-lettres were originally written as articles. The well-known satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin, for instance, always considered his works as articles; he was surprised and argued when Nekrasov called them short stories. Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy learned how to write from war reports, and war reports are what he apparently meant his “Sevastopol Sketches” to be.

[…]

The Purpose of the Plot

Let’s take a description of the crime committed in Chubarov Lane. In itself, the description of this terrible event [a gang rape] will have the character of an indictment. But if, for instance, one of the rapists suddenly recognized the victim as a woman he had once loved, or else as a relative, the insertion of this motif into the text would have provided it with a plot, a narrative—albeit a banal one. This device is very wide-spread: there are hundreds of folk songs about fathers killing their sons by accident and then recognizing them; there are dozens of stories about men possessing women who turn out to be their daughters or sisters. This is not a suggestion to use this particular motivation to create a narrative; rather, the matter lies in understanding the essence of the device: thanks to the changed situation, the attitude toward things changes in the midst of the story, and the whole text is suddenly interpreted in an entirely different way.

[…]

Sometimes, the meaning of a phenomenon remains unchanged throughout a fragment of prose and then is compared to some other phenomenon; in this case, the plot emerges not in the fragment itself but between two fragments with which we work. This is called a parallelism. This is, for instance, how Lev Tolstoy’s story “Two Hussars” is built.

It describes two hussars. They do more or less the same in different epochs, but they do it differently. The writer compares them, and this comparison constitutes the irony of the text. Another story by Tolstoy, “Three Deaths,” describes the death of a gentlewoman, the death of a coachman, and the death of a tree. The connection is motivated—the three descriptions are justified in appearing together—by the fact that the coachman had driven the gentlewoman, and the tree was felled for the coachman’s cross.

The author’s artistic intention consists in showing these three deaths in their dissimilarity.

[…]

The Novella and the Mystery Novel

There are two ways to tell a story: either we can tell everything in succession, with each new point explained by the preceding one, or else we can make temporal transpositions, i.e. describe the consequence before describing the cause. For instance, we can show vehement enmity between people and only tell about its reasons at the end. This is how Pushkin’s “The Shot” is made.

The novella and the mystery novel are based on a riddle that is only resolved at the end of the text. This device is most often used and easiest to

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