Chapter IA. Border-Crossings in Postrevolutionary Exile (1919-1924): The Embrace of Shklovskian “Estrangement”

V ictor Shklovsky left the Soviet Union for Berlin in 1922, forced by political circumstances—namely, his affiliation with Socialist Revolutionaries in 1918, which cast a shadow over his political allegiance, even though he switched sides later. In Berlin he became actively engaged in the Russian literary community and its writers’ organizations. Although he returned to Moscow in 1923, this brief interlude abroad turned out to be a period of intense creativity for him—not only critical but literary as well. While in Berlin, Shklovsky published two important books, both printed by Helicon in 1923. The first, The Knight’s Move, was a collection of short pieces, written between 1919 and 1921 in Moscow, Petrograd, and Berlin for the small Petrograd newspaper The Life of Art. The immediately striking detail about The Knight’s Move, dubbed as “irreverent” by Victor Erlich, was its two prefaces—one aimed at the exiles, the other addressed to young literature students at home. The second Berlin publication was Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, an experimental epistolary novel, Because of the Berlin experience, one of the key concepts Shklovsky developed in the early Formalist theory of art, that of estrangement or defamiliarization, found a venue for productive “historical metamorphoses” abroad.1 The etymology of Shklovsky’s term (ostranenie) spans several semantic fields, beginning with its definition as the key artistic device in his early Formalist statement “Art as Technique” (1917). With its root -stranfrom the Russian strana (country) and strannyi (strange), along with the related strannik (wanderer), the term encompasses a broad net of semantic