Viktor Shklovsky’s Involuntary Modernism

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.