Uneven and Combined Devices

Abstract

Revisiting the now-habitual opposition between “formalism” and “historicism” in literary studies, this essay focuses on Viktor Shklovsky’s memoirs of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, A Sentimental Journey. Though they detail their author’s participation in world-historical events, these memoirs stridently uphold literary form’s absolute autonomy from the social world. The essay proposes that Shklovsky’s text be read as a conscious deformation of the formal conventions of modern historical narrative. Shklovsky depicts himself traveling through a vast, roving geography of the former Russian Empire, while inverting its spatial dimensions and shunning a clear political center. Temporally, meanwhile, the text fragments the linear and implicitly teleological narrative form that characterizes modern historiography, turning instead to a centrifugal, aphoristic style that highlights the circumstances of its own production. Yet this fragmentary and apparently formalist technique links Shklovsky’s work back to its historical moment in a deeper and more complex way, producing a paratactic form that recapitulates premodern paradigms of historical writing—like the chronicle and the annals—within the framework of a modernist memoir. Consequently, the historical logic of “uneven and combined development,” which Leon Trotsky proposed as the key dynamic of modernity in the soon-to-be Second World, turns out to be already embedded within Shklovsky’s writing, precisely on the level of form itself.