Zoo, or Letters Not about Love

A native of St. Petersburg, Viktor Shklovsky was a leading literary theorist and critic, the founder of the Opoiaz (Obshchestvo Izucheniia Poeticheskogo Ia-zyka, or Society for the Study of Poetic Language), and one of the intellectual architects of Russian formalism. Within the framework of this latter school of thought, he developed the influential and daring concept of ostranenie (“to make strange”), whereby the familiar is made novel through literature and arts. While Shklovsky defended freedom for the arts from ideology in the early Soviet period, he largely succumbed to the pressures of the Stalinist era toward methodological conformity and gave up literary criticism in favor of other genres of writing for several decades. Shklovsky returned to his earlier and bolder style later in life, producing complex works that combined fiction, memoir, documentary, and criticism all within a single given work.