The Off-Modern Turn: Modernist Humanism and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in Shklovsky and Mandelshtam

This chapter examines the Russian literary critic Victor Shklovsky and poet Osip Mandelshtam to discuss the relationship between theory and Jews, exploring their autobiographical narratives to articulate what can be called the off-modern turn. That turn is a zigzag movement that defies the demands of systematic thinking and that does not follow any of the popular “isms” of Jewish intellectual engagement of the day: idealism, Marxism, nationalism, or messianism. Indeed, both Shklovsky and Mandelshtam look for artistic, political, and existential practices that defy theoretical conceptions along with their hierarchies and logics, for modes of art and thinking that undercut prescribed rules. Such practices bear the promise of freedom, of seeing the world anew, of a new beginning.