Viktor Shklovskii and Georg Lukács in the 1930s

Author(s): Galin Tihanov

Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 78, No. 1 (Jan., 2000), pp. 44-65
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of
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SEER, Vol.78, No. I,_Januaiy
2000

Viktor Shklovskii and Georg Lukacs

in the I930S
GALIN TIHANOV

INthis article I attempt to reconstruct, on the basis of archival evidence

and published texts, an unknown episode in the history of Soviet
intellectual life in the 1930S and in the biographies of two of the most
outstanding European literary theorists of the twentieth century. It is
also hoped that by analysing their exchange new light may be shed on
the last stage in the evolution of Russian Formalism and its echoes in
the I930s.
Despite the fact that both Shklovskii and Luk'acswere prominent
figures on the Moscow literary scene and significantcontributorsto the
ongoing theoretical debates of the time, up to now, surprising as this
might be, there has been no record of any relations between them.'
The two men, however, met at least once in public and, on a second
occasion, an unpublished text by Shklovskiidetermined the fate of one
of Luk'acs'sbooks submitted for publication by a Soviet publisher. I will
start by analysing this latter text and will move backwards in time to
reveal its context and roots in Shklovskii's and Luk'acs's earlier
encounter and in their previous writings.

Galin Tihanov is Junior Research Fellow in Russian and German Intellectual History,
Merton College, University of Oxford.
This article began life as a paper at the Ninth International Tynianov Readings in
Rezekne (8 August I 998); a fuller version was presented at the Annual BASEES Conference
in Cambridge (27 March I999). I should like to thank A. Dolinin, 0. Ronen, G. S. Smith,
D. Shepherd, R. Sheppard and the anonymous referees of SEER for their comments at
various stages of my work on this text.
1 On Lukacs's activities in the Soviet Union, see L. Sziklai, GeorgLukdcsund seine Zeit
(I930-I945), Budapest, I986 (for a slightly modified version in English see L. Sziklai, After
the ProletarianRevolution. GeorgLukacs'sMarxist Development,I930-I945, Budapest, I992);
D. Pike, GermanWritersin SovietExile, i933-1945, Chapel Hill, NC, I982; D. Pike, Lukdcs
and Brecht,Chapel Hill, NC, I985; and A. Kadarkay, GeorgLukdcs:Life, Thought,and Politics,
Oxford, I 99 I (although superseding the other books in the wealth of information provided,
Kadarkay's study contains a number of inaccuracies as well as some poor translations from
German).

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 SHKLOVSKII AND LUKACS 45
I
The text in question is an internal review of Lukacs'sbulky (339 pages)
typescript Istoricheskii
roman(The Historical Novel).2 Lukacs'sproposed
book was completed in September I937 and then submitted to the
Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, the same
publisherwho in I937 and I939 producedtwo of Lukacs'sbooks in
Russian.3
As is well known, Lukacs did indeed write a book under the same
title as that of the typescript considered in I939 by the high-profile
Moscow publishing house. But this book was published, not in Russian
in 1939, when Lukacs was lobbying for its publication, but only in
1955, in Germanin (East)Berlin.4Between I937 and 1938 Lukacs
succeeded in nothing more than publishing his book in the form of
serialized articles in Literaturnyi kritik,5 a journal on whose editorial
board Lukacs had considerable influence. In the Preface to the first
(German) edition, written in Budapest in March I954, Lukacs misled
his readers by telling only part of the truth: 'This book was composed
during the winter of I 936-7 and appeared soon after its completion in
Russian'.6 His work was indeed written and published in Russia, yet
not in book form, as he tried to suggest to his readership, but, as we
have seen, only in the form of interconnected articles.
In order to analyse adequately Shklovskii'stext, we have to bear in
mind that the genre of the internal review had a peculiar significance
in Soviet literarylife. It was often used as a form of informal censorship
and was resorted to when the publication of a book had to be prevented
without the employment of overtly administrative measures.7 It is
telling that, in the vast file of documents pertaining to Lukacs'sliterary
careerin Moscowduringhis secondstaythere(I933-45), thereare no
other reviews of his book typescripts. The two typescripts which in
1937 and I939 were published as books seem to have been stamped
with the necessary official approval without much ado, yet the book on
the historical novel was to have a different destiny. Shklovskii'sreview,

2 V. Shklovskii, 'Retsenziia na knigu Georgiia Lukacha "Istoricheskii roman"', Rossiiskii

gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (hereafter RGALI), fond 562, opis' I, ed. khr.
126, 11. i-8 (typescript dated 29 November 1939); further referred to as 'R' with page
numbers in brackets in the main text.
3 See G. Lukacs, Literaturnye teoriiXIX vekai marksizm,Moscow, I937, and idem, K istorii
reallzma,Moscow, 1939.
4 G. Lukacs, Der HistorischeRoman,Berlin, 1955.
5 For bibliographical details concerning the publication of these articles, see J.
Ambrus,
'A Selected Bibliography of Works by Gyorgy Lukacs' in L. JIles et al. (eds), HungarianStudies
on GydrgyLukacs,2 vols, Budapest, 1993, II, pp. 62 I-97, entry nos. 157, I58, i6I, i68, 172.
6 G. Lukacs, 'Vorbemerkung zur deutschen Ausgabe' [I 954] in Georg Lukacs, Werke,17
vols, Neuwied and Berlin, I 962-8 I, VI, p. 17.
7 For a rich recent overview of practices of censorship in Soviet literature, see
H. Ermolaev, Censorship in SovietLiterature,I9I7-199 i, Lanham, MD, 1997.

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46 GALIN TIHANOV

then, ought to be regarded to some extent as a political commission

and should, at least in part, be read as such.
Having said this, one has to stress that Shklovskii's arguments are
professionally solid and generally objective, albeit often missing the
specificity of Luk'acs'sviews. On the whole, Shklovskii's review is
vehemently critical, with traces of irritationand ill-disguisedirony. The
gist of his criticism may be summarized in a few points.
To begin with, Shklovskiidisliked the fact that Luk'acsrefused, as is
evident from his articles and the later book edition, to give a definition
of the genre of the historical novel (R, p. i). Lukacs'srefusal was a free
and rather logical decision: his approach to literary genre had been all
along anything but thematic. For Lukacs, genre exists only as far and as
long as it can guarantee the reflection of a specific life content. By
specific life content he does not simply mean specific topics, but rather
specific attitudes to the world. In his analysis of the historical novel,
Lukacs is persistently reluctant to recognize it as a separate genre, for,
ultimately, it is not the sheer range of facts depicted that determines a
given genre. 'A specific form, a genre', Lukacs states, 'must be based
upon a specific truth of life.'8 For Lukacs, the decisive criterion for a
group of texts to be singled out as a genre on its own is epistemological:
not simply different content and differentform but, in the first place, a
different vantage point and, therefore, a different knowledge of the
world. This logic of discrimination is carried out throughout Lukacs's
book, in which the second chapter (a comparison between historical
novel and historical drama in their irreducibility as noveland drama)
offers the most original and persuasive arguments on the subject.9
Lukacs's assault on thematic genre criticism anticipates a number of
later objections to the traditional morphology of genre: 'The genre
theory of later bourgeois aesthetics which splits up the novel into
various "sub-genres" -adventure novel, detective novel, psychologi-
cal novel, peasant novel, historical novel etc., and which vulgar
sociology has taken over as an "achievement" has nothing to offer
scientifically' (HN, pp. 287-89). Much earlier, the predicament of the
theoretical programme criticized by Lukacs can be found brilliantly
formulated in Friedrich Schlegel's Athenaeum Fragment no. i I 6, which

8 G. Lukacs, The HistoricalNovel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, Harmondsworth,

I976, p. 289; further quotations are from this edition, abbreviated as 'HN' with page
numbers in brackets in the main text.
9 One ought not to forget that Lukacs's first significant work was a panoramic history of
European drama that appeared in Hungarian in the same year as Die Seeleund die Formen
(I91 I); a posthumous German translation was published seventy years later (G. Lukacs,
Entwicklungsgeschichte Dramas, ed. F. Benseler [ = Lukacs, Werke,xv], Darmstadt
des modernen
and Neuwied, I 98 I).

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 SHKLOVSKII AND LUKACS 47
suggests that it would be impossible to decide whether there are
infinitely many literary genres or just one.10
The reason for Shklovskii's dissatisfaction with Lukacs's unwilling-
ness to commit himself to a more precise generic definition of the
historical novel is twofold. On the one hand, the roots of his criticism
lie in the early legacy of the Formalist school and its fortunes after the
late 1920s when Shklovskii had to admit, largely under duress, that his
activity amounted to no more than 'a monument to a scholarly mistake'
(to recall the title of his well-known article of I 930). On the other hand,
however, Shklovskii's objections are the result of his unqualified
aversion to the spirit of normativism informing Lukacs's text. Let us
briefly consider these two interrelated aspects of Shklovskii's reaction.
In its earlier stages, Formalism envisaged the evolution of the various
literary genres as a set of transformations that follow predictable
patterns. Replete with dynamics, this picture of alternating ups and
downs is nevertheless bereft of history. Since genre is conceived
predominantly as an indwelling system of devices for, in Shklovskii's
words, the 'deformation of the material"'1 and its estrangement, it is
placed beyond time and social change. Admittedly, the position of
particular genres can vary within the literary system, for they descend
from supremacy to the periphery and ascend back to the centre to
assume a leading role. In these struggles for domination, however, the
generic repertoire, Shklovskii asserts, remains essentially the same all
along. 12 The question of the genesis of literary genres loses its relevance
and is supplanted by attention to the change in their status.'3 Literary
forms are not born and do not disappear, they only change their
resonance and their place on the map of literature. The war they have
to fight has a somewhat melodramatic flavour, for it lacks the authentic
severity of a struggle for survival. Inferior species never wither away:
they are assigned a secure place, whether on the bottom or on the top,
and periods of oblivion are inevitably followed by feasts of canonization.
Tynianov's account of this process almost assumes the tone of a fairy
tale: 'In the epoch of the decomposition of a certain genre, it moves
from the centre to the periphery, while from the trivialities of literature,

'1 Lukacs's familiarity with German Romanticism is evident in his earliest works and in
almost everything he subsequently wrote. Between I909 and I9IO he was working on a
book about Schlegel, which he finally abandoned (cf. G. Lukacs, SelectedCorrespondence,
I902-I920, ed. and trans. J. Marcus and Z. Tar, Budapest, I 986, pp. I 1, 110 II 3-I 4).
11 V. Shklovskii, Mater'ial i stil' v romaneL'va Tolstogo'Voinai mir', Moscow, I 928 (hereafter
Mater'iali stil'), p. 9.
12 'As regards literary genres, one has to say the following: there cannot be an unspecified
number of literary series [. . .] there is a set number of genres, connected by a set plot
crystallography': V. Shklovskii, Gamburgskii'schet, Leningrad, 1928, p. 41.
3 'The celebrated sequentiality in literary history epic, lyric, drama -is not a
sequentiality of origin, but rather a sequentiality of canonization and ousting': V. Shklovskii,
'Ornamental'naia proza' in Shklovskii, 0 teoriiprozy, Moscow, 1929, p. 205.

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48 GALIN TIHANOV

from its backyard and lowlands, a new phenomenon emerges in its

place." 14
By excluding history from the factors shaping the fortunes of genre,
the Formalistssought to locate the principle source of transformation
within literature itself. Literary genres, then, are regarded as self-
developing and changing entities, and their alterations are ascribed to
inner flexibility and suppleness. Applying this explanation directly to
the genre of the novel, Shklovskii wrote: 'the canon of the novel as
genre is perhaps more often than any other [canon] capable of
parodying and modifying itself'.'5 Thus, for Shklovskii,the limits of the
novel become remarkably flexible and loose, and the canon of the
genre much more permeable. For him, the existence of the novel
(TristramShandybeing, of course, Shklovskii's most extreme and
aggressive example of a novel) entails self-parody as a means of
examining and reaffirmingthe identity of the genre.
We can thus see why Shklovskii's Formalist baggage was such a
heavy burden upon him in the years when Formalismgrew by degrees
not only less confident of its own postulates (suffice it to mention
Tynianov and Jakobson's later 'Problems of Research in Literature
and Language' [I928]), but also less acceptable vis-a-visthe imposing
developments towards sociologism and political historicization of
literature. Subtle and original as it was, Shklovskii'slargely ahistoricist
approach was very difficult to reconcile with the trends that were to
dominate the scene of Soviet literary theory after the First Congress of
the Writers' Union of the USSR in I934. An early, and still mild,
admonition had come from the Bakhtin Circle. Pavel Medvedev wrote
in his TheFormalMethodin Literagy (1928) that the Formalists
Scholarship
had only belatedly arrived at the problem of genre: 'They arrived at
the problem of genre when the basic elements of the construction were
already studied and defined without taking genre into consideration
[pomimozhanra],when the whole of their poetics was actually ready'.16
According to Medvedev's perceptive account, genre had always been
overshadowed in the discourse of the Formalistsby a strong interest in
poetic language: since the Formalists (Medvedev confines himself to
examining almost exclusively their early texts) were after a precise

14
Iu. Tynianov, 'Literaturnyi fakt' (I924) in Tynianov, Arkhaistyi novatogy,Leningrad,
I 929, p. 9. Cf. Shklovskii's description of the 'non-canonized, isolated [glukho]existence' of
Derzhavin's tradition in the poetry of Kiukhel'beker and Griboedov in his article 'Literatura
vne "siuzheta"' in 0 teoriiprozy,p. 227.
15
Ibid., p. 230.
16
P. N. Medvedev, Fornal'nyimetodv literaturovedenii (Bakhtinpod maskoiseries, 2), Moscow,
I993, p. 144; the existing English translation by Albert Wehrle (P. N. Medvedev/M.
M. Bakhtin, 7he FormalMethod in Literay Scholarship,Baltimore, MD and London, I99I,
p. 129) is inaccurate at this point.

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 SHKLOVSKII AND LUKACS 49
definitionof literariness,that is, that essencewhich inherentlyconsti-
tutesthe verbalworkof art, theyhad to thinkmore aboutthe features
that differentiateliteraturefrom all other cultural'series'ratherthan
aboutits innermorphology.Thusthe categoryof languagecameto the
fore,leavingto genrethe role of littlemorethan a proofthatthe ideas
of literarinessand the self-propelledevolution of literaturewere
plausibleand sufficientlyviable.
The extent to which Shklovskiifelt vulnerable in the face of
Medvedev'scriticismcan be gatheredfroma letterin whichTynianov
does his best to console him: 'It seems you have reacheda point of
attempting to believe that you write and think poorly, whereas
Medvedevwritesand thinkswell."7 As criticismof andpressureon the
Formalists,and Shklovskiiin particular,mountedin the late 1920s, he
indeed reached a point of utmost sensitivityand thought it wise to
revise his position.Thus his previouslyflamboyant,witty and unre-
servedahistoricismgaveway to a quasi-Marxistapproachto literature
and to a demonstrativeimmersionin historyin the 1930s.18 As partof
this process,Shklovskiihad to reconsidergenre and to place it at the
centre of his critical attention, this time in the light of the newly
consecratedapproachesto literature.
Yetone has to emphasizethatShklovskii's Formalistpaststayedwith
him even in the I930s. While demandingthat genrebe given a strict
definition, at the same time he objected vehemently to Lukacs's
normativism,thuslendingsupportto his earlierviewsof the novel as a
flexibleand self-parodying genre.Shklovskiiexposesthe clashbetween
Lukacs'srefusalto regardthe historicalnovel as a separategenre, on
the one hand, and his rigid normativism,on the other,with scathing
irony:'Atthe core of the booklies the analysisof WalterScott'snovels,
which ComradeLukacsconsidersto be classical[examples]of this
non-existinggenre'(R, p. 2).19 So Shklovskii'sfirstmajorobjectionis
the resultof both his enhanced(andmodified)attentionto genre and
his attemptto embracea historicistversusa normativistapproachto it.
The secondmajorobjectionraisedby ShklovskiiconcernsLukacs's
visionof how a historicalnovel shouldbe constructed.ForLukacs,the
birth of the historicalnovel coincided in time with the process of

17 G. Grigor'eva, "'Razzhimaiu ladoni, vypuskaiu Vazira": Iz pisem Iu. N. Tynianova

V. B. Shklovskomu(1927-I940)', Soglasie,1995, 30, pp. 178-214 (p. 201) ['Ty, kazhetsia,
doshel do togo, chto probuesh' verit', chto ty plokho pishesh' i dumaesh', a Medvedev
khorosho'].
18 Cf. Shklovskii's books Matvei Komarov:Zhitel' gorodaMoskvy (1929), Chulkovand Levshin
(I933), KapitanFedotov(1936) and Minin i Pozharskii,the script version of which appeared in
I 939, the year when Shklovskii wrote the internal review of Lukacs's book on the historical
novel, with a book version following in I 940.
19 'V osnove knigi lezhit analiz romanov V. Skotta, kotorye tov. Lukach schitaet
klassicheskimi v etom nesushchestvuiushchem zhanre.'

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50 GALIN TIHANOV

formation of the bourgeois nation and mirrored these new develop-

ments. Hence, Luk'acsinsisted, the historical novel must show the
entire nation ('the people') as the true moving force of history. To be
able to do this, the novelist should abstain from concentrating on the
exceptional and should instead foreground the ordinary as a manifesta-
tion of the typical. The average person, ratherthan the grand historical
figure, seemed to be the best material for a novel. For Shklovskii,
however, the average character is nothing but an embodiment of
uninspiringpedestrianism:'it is the norm of the historicalnovel (I speak
according to Comrade Lukacs) to show events through the average
character, through mediocrity. [... .] One has, like Stendhal, to show a
small town, a little residence, Parme, but not Paris' (R, p. 2).20
Shklovskii'smost powerful counter-example is not particularlydifficult
to guess. The author of an earlier study analysing, among other issues,
Tolstoi's use of historical evidence in WarandPeace,21Shklovskiidrew
from Tolstoi's work illustrationof the indisputable role great personali-
ties play in the historical novel. Not surprisingly, then, Lukacs is
accused of not allocating sufficientspace to Tolstoi and of disregarding
his ties with Russian literature: 'How exactly is Tolstoi connected with
Russian literatureis not known from the book' (R, p. 4).22
This objection brings us to the third of Shklovskii's substantial
disagreements:the neglect of Tolstoi stands for the neglect of Russian
and Soviet literaturein Lukacs'sbook. Shklovskiiappears unreconciled
with the fact that a giant figure like Tolstoi should be discussed less
than, say, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer or roughly as much as Lion
Feuchtwanger, two authors writing in German, whose oeuvrecould
hardly be said to match that of Tolstoi. Shklovskii spends two-and-a-
half pages (out of eight) complaining that Tolstoi and Russian literature
in general are either absent from or, at best, misinterpretedin Lukacs's
book. Soviet literature seems to fare even worse: 'There is not a single
word in the book about the contemporary Soviet novel, about Aleksei
Tolstoi, for example, or about Tynianov' (R, p. 5).23
The reasons for Shklovskii's discontent are to be explained with
recourse to both his recent (and in some respects ongoing) strong

20
'Normoi v istoricheskom romane iavliaetsia pokaz (govoriu po tov. Lukachu) sobytiia
cherez srednego geroia, cherez posredstvennost'. [...] Nado po Stendaliu pokazat'
malen'kii gorod, malen'kuiu rezidentsiiu, Parmu, a ne Parizh.'
21 See Shklovskii, Mater'iali stil'.
22
'Kak imenno sviazan Tolstoi s russkoi literaturoi iz knigi neizvestno.'
23 'Pro sovremennyi sovetskii roman, pro Alekseia Tolstogo, naprimer, ili pro Tynianova,

v knige net ni odnogo slova.'

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 SHKLOVSKII AND LUKACS 5I

affiliation with the Formalists24 and to the ideological climate prevailing

in the latter half of the 1930s.
The presence of Tynianov's name in the review of I 939 is indicative
of Shklovskii's yet unbroken, if complicated, ties with him and the
(former) Formalist movement. As early as 1933 he devoted attention to
Tynianov as a historical novelist,25 and I937 saw the first clash between
Shklovskii and Luk'acs on the issue of the historical novel: a silent but
unambiguously polemical exchange on Pushkin, Scott, Tynianov and
the historical novel.26 In his article 'Pushkin and Walter Scott', Lukacs
failed to mention Tynianov's novel Pushkin,portions of which had been
serialized in Literaturnyisovremennik between I935 and I 937; moreover,
Lukacs reduced Pushkin (and Scott) to mere followers of Shakespeare.
To this Shklovskii replied a few months later, without mentioning
Lukacs's name, by declaring Scott's understanding of the historical
novel to be increasingly obsolete and by giving Tynianov high praise.27
Thus the reference to Tynianov in the internal review had its roots in
this earlier encounter between Shklovskii and Lukacs and in Shklov-
skii's unexpired loyalty to his own past.
One should also remember that Shklovskii's review was written in
November I939 when, after the inception of the Second World War,
illusions about possible co-operation with Germany were evaporating
more quickly than ever. The problems of narodnost'and of Russian
supremacy were felt to be again on the agenda, and sensitivity to these
issues sharpened in official circles. What is more, Stalin's personality
cult was assuming dismal forms. In this atmosphere, it would have been
unwise to condone Lukacs's eulogy of the average character. Until the
mid- I930s it was still possible to hold this view, but, with severe
criticism against vulgar sociologism and national nihilism in historiog-
raphy intensifying after the death of historian Mikhail Pokrovskii in
1932, it grew not only old-fashioned but also defiant. Stalin's special
attention to the genre of the historical novel was clearly manifested in
the party-sanctioned election of Aleksei Tolstoi to an academicianship

24 On Shklovskii's attempt to intervene at the Central Committee of the Party in support

of his fellow Formalists as late as I932, see A. Galushkin, 'Neudavshiisia dialog (Iz istorii
vzaimootnoshenii formal'noi shkoly i vlasti)' in M. 0. Chudakova et al. (eds), Shestye
TynianovskieChteniia.Tezisydokladovi materialydlia obsuzhdeniia,Riga, 1992, pp. 210-I 7.
25 See V. Shklovskii, 'Ob istoricheskom romane i o Iurii Tynianove', Zvezda, 1933, 4,
pp. I67-74.
26 See G. LukAcs, 'Pushkin i Val'ter Skott', Literaturnyikritik, 1937, 4, pp. io6-II, and
V. Shklovskii, 'Roman Iuriia Tynianova Pushkin',Literaturnyikritik, 1937, 8, pp. 123-33
(reprinted in V. Shklovskii, Dnevnik, Moscow, 1939, pp. 45-62). Ol'ga Panchenko has
recently revealed that Shklovskii's article (or an earlier version of it) was submitted no later
than the beginning of October 1936 to Pravda, but could not be published there: see
0. Panchenko, 'Viktor Shklovskii: Tekst mif real'nost", Druzhba narodov,I996, 4,
p. I 84; Tynianov's Pushkinfigured prominently in the exchange of letters between him and
Shklovskii in 1936 and I 937: ibid., pp. I 8 I -85).
27 For Shklovskii's criticism of Scott, see Shklovskii, Dnevnik,pp. 53-55.

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52 GALIN TIHANOV

in I 939; in the same year the Stalin LiteraryPrize was established,with

Tolstoi, as author of PetertheFirst,becoming its first recipient in I 941.
Thus Shklovskii had no real choice but to mention Aleksei Tolstoi as
well, thus doing the job he was hired for: he had to glorify the
achievements of Russian literature, to assert the uniqueness of excep-
tional personalities in history and, through all this, to put the
cosmopolitan (and German-speaking) Luk'acsin his place. The rejec-
tion of Lukacs'sbook was designed to instructhim that the benevolence
of the Soviet political and cultural elite was not to be taken for granted.
The 'teaching skills' Shklovskii demonstrated in this review came,
however, at a price. He had to abandon his Formalistideas of (literary)
history as an anonymous process subject to the action of universal
(artistic) laws. In his youth, he was inclined to share Osip Brik's
aphoristic belief that EvgeniiOneginwould have been written even if
Pushkin himself never existed. All this was now gone. History rapidly
became a stage-set on which great heroes acted (AlekseiTolstoi's Peter
I or Lev Tolstoi's Kutuzov); by the same token, literature had already
to be thought of as the accomplishment of exceptional individual
talents. The best example thereof was found in Tynianov's novel
Pushkin,where the poet, as Shklovskiiwrote elsewhere, is shown at work
('What are important for him [Tynianov] are not the interims of
human life, which are discharged of man's main labour, but this very
labour itself')28and where literature is presented controversially
not only as generated by the goings-on of the epoch, but also as the
creation of an extraordinary individuality. One can observe here the
complex dialectics of Shklovskii'sdistancing himself from his Formalist
ideas at the expense of accepting the pseudo-Romantic notions of the
strong personality fostered by Stalin's cult.
Shklovskii'sfourth, and final, objection against Lukacs'sbook proves
once again, however, that despite all pressure to the contrary the
Formalist legacy was still alive and resilient in him. Unlike Lukacs,
Shklovskiidid not think it possible to derive the genre of the historical
novel from the novel at large or from drama: 'Not even a tenth part of
my objections apropos Comrade Lukacs's interesting book have been
raised by now. In particular, his attempt to deduce the [historical]
28
Ibid., p. 58 ('Dila nego vazhny ne promezhutki v zhizni cheloveka, razgruzhennye ot
ego osnovnoi raboty, emu vazhna samaia eta rabota'); the appeal to represent Pushkin at
work can also be found in Shklovskii's article 'Veresaev o Pushkine' (Detskaialiteratura,193 7,
3), republished in I939 as 'Kak pisat' o Pushkine' (Shklovskii, Dnevnik,pp. 33-38, esp.
pp. 34 and 37). Needless to say, both Tynianov's novel and Shklovskii's articles were part of
the massive Pushkiniana geared towards the i ooth anniversary of the poet's death in I 937.
For a fuller list of Shklovskii's works on Pushkin in 1937, see R. Sheldon, ViktorShklovsky:An
InternationalBibliographyof WorksBy andAboutHim, Ann Arbor, MI, 1977, pp. 41-43; recent
addenda to Shklovskii's bibliography have not augmented the list of his Pushkiniana written
in the latter half of the I930s (see A. Galushkin, 'Novye materialy k bibliografii V. B.
Shklovskogo', Devisu, 1993, I, pp. 64-77).

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 SHKLOVSKII AND LUKACS 53
novel straight from the novel or to link the historical novel to the
historical drama seems to me incorrect. As a matter of fact, we see the
influence of the ballad on Walter Scott' (R, p. 5).29 It could be said that
by pointing out the role of the ballad Shklovskiiwas emphasizing the
rise of national consciousness in the writings of the Romantics. But
beneath the surface, there is a hidden agenda in this foregrounding of
the ballad. Faithful to his Formalist years, Shklovskii maintained the
idea that great (canonical) genres originate in small non-canonical
genres which enjoy 'isolated' (see note I4) existence or are side-lined
on the margins of literature.The ballad was an especially fitting and sly
example: alongside the great narrative tradition established through
the novel, in the early years of its promotion by the Romantics the
ballad looked inconspicuous and unrepresentative; yet at the same
time, owing to its inherent connection to folkloric imagination, it
provided the convenient alibi of narodnost', so desperately needed by
Shklovskii. In intimating that the origins of the novel are to be sought
not in other great genres but in the stylized folk ballad, Shklovskiiwas
sustaining his notion of literary evolution adumbrated in the essay on
Rozanov of I92 1, where a classical formula of the transformation of
small genres into great literaryforms was proposed.30
Summarizing his disagreements in an unmistakeably sarcastic
manner, Shklovskiiwrote at the end of his review: '[Lukacs's]erudition
is great but somewhat random, as far as literature is concerned' (R,
p. 7). The concluding recommendation leaves little doubt as to
Shklovskii's genuine opinion and his wish to warn against the
publication of the book, notwithstanding all courteous and solemn
declarations to the contrary:
ComradeLukacs'sbook is very interesting,somewhatlong-windedand,
from my point of view, somewhatnormative.It establishesprematurely
laws,on whosegroundhistoryis being rethoughtas a departurefromthe
norm.
The appearanceof such a book may prove interesting,for it will call
fortha hugepolemic;and, besides,it is the firstattemptto drawsomekind
of picture of the historyof the novel's developmenton the basis of the

29 'Ia ne ischerpal i desiatoi doli svoikh

vozrazhenii po povodu interesnoi knigi tov.
Lukacha. V chastnosti, mne kazhetsia nepravil'noi ego popytka vyvesti roman priamo iz
romana ili sviazat' istoricheskii roman s istoricheskoi dramoi. Real'no, my vidim vlianie
ballady na V. Skotta.'
30
See V. Shklovskii, Rozanov.Iz knigi 'Siuzhetkakiavleniestilia', Petrograd, I92, I pp. 6-7.

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54 GALIN TIHANOV

current world-view. I pronounce myself for the publication of this book and
at the same time I consider it half-baked. (R, p. 8)3'
In accounting for Shklovskii's stance, we have so far referred exclusively
to the reigning political and ideological norms of the day or to
Shklovskii's earlier theoretical baggage, but we have scarcely taken into
consideration Lukacs's own position in the ongoing debates of the
1930s, his insecure status as a foreign writer and intellectual, and, even
more importantly, the rather precarious reputation of Literaturnyikritik,
the journal he was associated with. The journal had long been in
conflict with the official line of the Writers' Union, and there was some
incurable animosity between the editorial board and the increasingly
influential Fadeev. On one occasion, an ironic remark by Lukacs (and
one uttered in bad Russian at that) seems to have irritated Fadeev to a
point where his feeling of indignation and his hurt pride had to be
confided to his diary: 'I visited Literaturnyikritiktoday. They don't speak
Russian there and they have broken away from Soviet literature',
Fadeev wrote.32 A special session of the Presidium of the Writers' Union
was held in April 1939 to analyse the journal's work.33 The attacks
intensified in September of the same year,34 just two months before
Shklovskii wrote his review. What is worse, soon after that, in the
process of settling scores, a campaign was organized against Lukacs's
book K istorii realizma (Towards a History of Realism), which was
published earlier in 1939. The campaign started in November I939,35
the same month as Shklovskii was working on the internal review of
Lukacs's book on the historical novel, and continued until April 1940.
Eventually, the bad blood between the journal and Fadeev's supporters
led to the closing down of Literaturnyikritikin 1940.
It is instructive to see, in retrospect, what the unforgivable offences
of the journal were in the eyes of those empowered to suspend it. In a
memorandum (dokladnaia zapiska)of I8 November I940, G. Aleksan-
drov, Head of the Department of Propaganda of the Central Commit-
tee of the Party, and A. Puzin, Aleksandrov's deputy, wrote the
following to the Secretaries of the Central Committee Andreev,
Zhdanov and Malenkov: 'This journal deals predominantly with
31 'Kniga tov. Lukacha ochen' interesna, neskol'ko rastianuta i s
moei tochki zreniia
neskol'ko normativna. Ona prezhdevremenno ustanavlivaet zakony, i na osnovanii zakonov
etikh pereosmyslivaet istoriiu kak otkhod ot normy. Poiavlenie takoi knigi mozhet okazat'sia
interesnym, potomu chto ona vyzovet bol'shuiu polemiku, i krome togo eto pervaia popytka
na osnove sovremennogo mirovozzrenia dat' kakuiu-to kartinu o istorii razvitiia romana.
Ia vyskazyvaius' za pechatanie etoi knigi, i v to zhe vremia schitaiu ee nedorabotannoi.'
32 Quoted in A. Kadarkay, Georg Lukdcs.Life, 7hought,andPolitics, Oxford, I991, p. 346.
33 For more on this, see H. Gunther, Die Verstaatlichung der Literatur,Stuttgart, I984,
pp. 152-63.
34 See V. Ermilov, 'O vrednykh vzgliadakh "Literaturnogo kritika"', Literaturnaia gazeta,
i o September1939, p. 3.
35 See E. Knipovich, 'Kniga o realizme', Literaturnaia gazeta, 15 November I939, p. 3.

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 SHKLOVSKII AND LUKACS 55
problems of literary history. Out of 563 articles published in Literaturnyi
kritikover three years (I 936-38), only eight relatively short articles are
devoted to Soviet literature.'36These figures enable us to judge with
precision the extent to which the journal preferred to stay away from
the fever of contemporary criticism and the day-to-day reviewing of
literature. The escapist trends were all the more conspicuous and
deplorable, given the strong ambition of the party to control public
opinion about newly published books by having them reviewed in the
countlessjournals and newspapers under its control. The impossibility
of meeting these exacting quantitative standards is regretted in the
same document: 'Suffice it to say that only 23 per cent of the books
published in 1939 were reviewed in the press.'37Against this back-
ground, Literaturnyi kritik'sdeliberate neglect of current literary life
amounted to its disapproval.Thejournal consciouslypreferredpublica-
tions on aesthetics, philosophy and literary history. With Luk'acs'sand
Lifshits'sactive intercession, important portions from Hegel's Aesthetic
saw the light of day;38 Vico, too, was popularized in the pages of the
journal,39and this brought about accusations of Spenglerian revision-
ism and destruction of the sanctified idea of unilinear historical
progress.40But also those instances when the journal did pay attention
to Soviet literature were ambiguous, verging on stubbornness and a
challenging independence of judgement. Notably, Literaturnyi kritik
went out of its way as a journal of criticism to publish two stories by
Andrei Platonov,41 at a time when most of the well-establishedjournals
(with the exception of Krasnaianov')would not have dared to do this.
Lukacs welcomed Platonov's stories42and was certainly among those
encouraging Platonov's not entirely orthodox contributions of literary

36 D. L. Babichenko (ed.), 'Literaturnyifront': IstoriiapoliticheskoitsenzuIy1932-1946gg. Sbornik

dokumentov,Moscow, I994 (hereafter Literaturnyi front), p. 6o ('Zhurnal etot zanimaetsia
preimushchestvenno istoriko-literaturnymi problemami. Iz 563 statei, napechatannykh v
"Literaturnom kritike" za tri goda (0936-1938), voprosam sovetskoi literatury posv-
iashcheno lish' 8 nebol'shikh statei').
37 Ibid., p. 6o ('Dostatochno skazat', chto lish' 23% khudozhestvennoi literatury, vysheds-

hei v 1939 g., poluchili otzyvy v pechati').

38 See, for example, Gegel', 'Epicheskaia poeziia', Literaturnyi kritik, 1935, 6, pp. 57-76,
and ibid., 8, pp. 87- I I 0.
3 See M. Lifshits, 'Dzhambattista Vico', Literaturnyi kritik,1939, 2, pp. I9-4 .
40 See, for example, N. Vil'iam-Vil'mont, 'Vozvedenie na prestol Osval'da Shpenglera',
Internatsional'nazaliteratura,8940, 5-6, pp. 280-303.
41 See A. Platonov, 'Fro' and 'Bessmertie', Literaturnyi kritik, 1936, 8; Platonov's stories are
preceded by an editorial ('O khoroshikh rasskazakh i redaktorskoi rutine', pp. io6-13),
stating that Platonov's stories are not part of the 'grey stream' of literature and have been
rejected by most journals out of sheer 'routine'.
42 See G. Lukacs, 'Emmanuil Levin', Literaturnoeobozrenie, 1937, I9 20, pp. 55-62;
Lukacs's article is a praise for Platonov's story 'Bessmertie'; for more on Lukacs's defence
of Platonov and the polemics triggered of by the publication of his stories in Literaturnyi
kritik,see Gunther, Die Verstaatlichung derLiteratur,pp. I1 2-20.

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56 GALIN TIHANOV

criticism.43Thus Shklovskii'sreproach that Lukacs did not have much

time for Soviet literature was arguably biased and designed to serve
those who a year later, in an atmosphere of growing suspicion and
undisguised dislikefor the journal, got rid of it.
In addition to all these factors, which were heavily undermining
Lukacs's credibility among the upper strata of the Soviet literary
establishment, one also has to take into consideration Shklovskii'sown
unstable situation in the latter half of the 1930s. Shklovskii's career
after I930, the year when he had to denounce publicly his Formalist
views,44was very much that of a hostage of the regime. His membership
in the subsequentlyoutlawed Party of the Socialist Revolutionaries and
his relatively short emigration (firstin Finland and then in Berlin) were
constantly brought home to him, thus severely diminishing his freedom
of thought and action. Not untypically, he was also blackmailed
through a skeleton in the cupboard:his brother Vladimir (I889-I937),
a man of considerable talent and knowledge,45one of the renowned
Russian translators of Dante,46 had been arrested for his religious
activities and sent off to join the thousands of prisoners digging the
White Sea-Baltic Canal. Shklovskiihimself was sent to the building site
as part of an officially appointed group of 120 writers entrusted with
preparing a book that was to glorify one of Stalin's most salient acts of
barbarism.47Shklovskii, together with seven other writers and critics,
contributed a sixty-page chapter under the title 'The GPU, the
Engineers, the Project'.48
Thus throughout the I930S Shklovskii's political reputation was
anything but unquestionable and he had to expiate the sins of his youth
by taking up many a dirty job as vicariousjudge and executor on the
Soviet literary scene. In 1939, the year in which his review determined

See Platonov's articles 'Pushkin nash tovarishch' (Literaturnyikritik, I937, I) and

'Pushkin i Gor'kii' (Literaturnyikritik, I937, 6); on Platonov's Pushkin articles, see
M. Ochadlikova, 'Pushkinsky ideal Andreje Platonova', Slavica Pragensia, 9, I968,
pp. 355-8 I, and Gunther, Die VerstaatlichungderLiteratur,pp. I 20-25.
44 See V. Shklovskii, 'Pamiatnik nauchnoi oshibke', Literaturnaia gazeta, 27 January I 930.
45 A thorough account of Vladimir Shklovskii's life and work can be found in L. G.
Stepanova, 'O Vladimire Shklovskom', a paper presented at the Ninth Tynianov Readings
(Rezekne, 6-8 August I998).
46 See Vladimir Shklovskii's translation of Dante Alighieri, De vulgarieloquio (O narodnoi
rechi)I321-I92I, Petrograd, 1922.
47 On the history of the White Sea Canal, see C. A. Ruder, Making Histo?y for Stalin: The
Stogyof theBelomorCanal, Gainesville, FL, I998. The writers' group included such famous
names in Soviet literature as Leonov, Pil'niak, and Zoshchenko; for a vivid memoir of the
work ofthe group, see A. Avdeenko, 'Otluchenie', Znamia, I989, 3, pp. 5-73, esp. pp. I 2- i8
(I am grateful to G. S. Smith for drawing my attention to this source).
48 See M. Gor'kii et al. (eds), Belomorsko-Baltiiskiikanal imeni Stalina: Istoriia stroitel'stva,
Moscow, I934, pp. 67-I30; a forceful condemnation of the book and the project can be
found in Solzhenitsyn's ArkhipelagGULag. Recently Shklovskii's participation in the volume
has been interpreted as a ransom he had to pay for his brother's release in I933 (see
A. Galushkin, 'Chetyre pis'ma Viktora Shklovskogo', Strannik,I991, 2, p. 77).

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 SHKLOVSKII AND LUKACS 57
the fate of Luk'acs'ssubmitted typescript, Shklovskiiwas included in a
draft list of Soviet writers whose names were to be confirmed by Stalin
as recipients of awards dispensed by the Supreme Council of the USSR.
The list was prepared by Fadeev and Pavlenko and 'examined' by
Beriia. In his draft letter to Stalin, A. Andreev, one of the Secretariesof
the Central Committee, noted that the NKVD held in its possession
discreditingmaterial for thirty-one of the nominated writers, Shklovskii
being one of them. Andreev and Beriia eventually decided that only
five of these writers (Vera Inber and Mikhail Svetlov being the best
known of the five) had to be taken off the list, 'due to the nature of the
discrediting material, but also because their weight in the Soviet
literature of recent years has been rather inconsiderable'.49Andreev's
letter to Stalin was drafted at some point before the end of July I939;
Shklovskii's review was dated, as we have seen, 29 November I939.
That his name remained in the list of nominated writers regardless of
the discrediting material was not a surprise;it was the logical outcome
of his careful balancing between small doses of licensed originality and
numerous acts of submissiveness. Shklovskii's review was a brilliant
manifestation of both, with a touch of dignity preserved in his
principled objections against Luk'acs'spostulates.
We have thus attained a multidimensionalexplanation of the reasons
why Shklovskii'sreview had to adopt the tone and say the things it did.
Part of the background story, as we have seen, was the I937 exchange
between Lukacsand Shklovskiion Pushkin,Tynianov and the historical
novel. But the whole picture would be grossly incomplete if we
disregardedthe roots of Shklovskii'sdisagreement in an earlierpolemic
between him and Lukacs, at which the two men spoke in each other's
presence and before a peer audience of committed supporters and
opponents.

II
The episode in question takes us back to the mid- I 930s, when
Literaturnyikritikand Lukacs were still enjoying a less questionable
political reputation. The discussion on the novel, which took place on
2o and 28 December 1934 and 3 January 1935 in Moscow, was
organized in order to undertake a critical examination of Lukacs's
entry on the novel in the first Soviet literary encyclopaedia under the
general editorship of Lunacharskii. The invitation to Lukacs to
contribute an article on the novel reflected the growing power of a
4 Babichenko (ed.), Literaturnyi
front (see note 36 above), pp. 38-39 ('kak po kharakteru
komprometiruiushchego materiala, tak i potomu, chto za poslednie gody ikh ves v sovetskoi
literature byl sovershenno neznachitel'nym').

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58 GALIN TIHANOV

circle of Marxist scholars in the Institute of Philosophy at the

Communist Academy. Besides Lukacs, this circle featured his closest
Russian friend Mikhail Lifshits and Frants Shiller. They all shared a
considerable advantage over the rest of the scholarly public, for they
were closely engaged in the editing and publication of previously
unknown works by Marx and Engels, some of them bearing directly on
literature and art.50 This circle was largely responsible for the
irreversible canonization of Marx, Engels and Lenin as legislators in
the field of aesthetics. It was thanks to this section of the Institute, with
special credit going to Lifshits, that the first ever volume of Marx and
Engels's writings on art was compiled and published.51 Lunacharskii's
book Lenini literaturovedenie (Lenin and Literary Scholarship) of I932
was another significantstep in the same direction.
Strange as it may seem, there was an element of willing risk and an
almost dissident excitement in this enterprise:because it was clear that
Marx and Engels did not write copiously on art, there were deep-
rooted fears among the official exponents of Communist ideology that
focusing on Marx and Engels as theorists of literature and art might
provoke an uncontrollable interpretative liberty. Concerns about
Lukacs's passion for Hegel appear to have been stronger still. Armed
with convenient support from Lenin's warning that one cannot
understand Marx without first acquainting oneself with Hegel,52
Lukacs was indulging in sustained loyalty to the traditions of classical
German philosophy. Remarkably, his oeuvreon Hegel from the 1930S
onwards ran in close parallel to the interpretation of Goethe.53 Both
Goethe and Hegel enjoyed his zealous protection from the assaults of
the Nazi German press, for they both symbolized to him in equal
measure the 'supremacy of reason',54the triumph of universal values
and of classical rationality. Lukacs, together with Karl Korsch, is the
single most important thinker of the first half of the century to argue
the indissoluble bond between Marxism and Hegel's philosophy or, to

50 These included Marx's

Economic-Philosophical
Manuscripts,Engels's letters to Paul Ernst,
Margaret Harkness and Minna Kautsky, and Marx and Engels's correspondence with
Ferdinand Lassalle on his tragedy Franz von Sickingen,most of which were published in
1931-32.
51 K MarksiF. Engelsob iskusstve, Moscow, I 933. Earlier than Lifshits, Valentin Voloshinov
and Pavel Medvedev had plans dating back to 1925 - to publish a similar anthology,
but a letter from senior party officials and 'guardians' of Marx and Engels's legacy denied
them the right to proceed with the project (see Dmitrii Iunov's forthcoming introduction to
the life and work of V. Voloshinov).
52 Later no more than a trivial slogan, this warning was virtually unknown until the early
I 930s, because it was contained in Lenin's PhilosophicalNotebooks,first published in I929-30.
53 The joint discussion and defence of Goethe and Hegel is characteristic of all of Lukacs's

texts on Goethe in the 1930S. The single exception, for the obvious reason of extreme
brevity, is 'Goethe und die Gegenwart', Arbeiter-Sender, 1932, 2.
5 G. LukAcs, 'Der deutsche Faschismus und Hegel', Internatsional'naia literatura,I943, 8,
p. 62.

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 SHKLOVSKII AND LUKACS 59
put it even more precisely, the impossibilityof 'thinkingMarx' without
Hegel. The careful student of Lukacs's texts cannot avoid the impres-
sion that while an uncontested political affiliation was driving him
towards a full embrace of Marx, a lasting sense of measure, historical
continuity and the unrestricted sway of reason was propelling him
towards an appreciation of Hegel as the philosopher par excellence, the
one whose thought, regardless of all delusions and limitations, posited
the true scale and depth of Marxism.
We can thus see that canonizing Marx, Engels and Lenin (to say
nothing of the attention to Hegel) in the mid-1930s, when Stalin's
desire to promote himself as the unrivalledideologue of the regime was
taking on grotesque and sinister forms, was a process fraught with
danger. The intellectual excellence of the few philosophers asserting
Marxist aesthetics as an autonomous discipline, their liberty of
judgement and breadth of views were raising suspicion, and they were
potentially vulnerable to brutal accusations and organized assault. The
heroes of today were likely to become the scapegoats of tomorrow.
Like his 1939 review, and unlike the rest of the exchange at the
discussion about the novel, Shklovskii's contribution was never pub-
lished.55This is even more regrettable given that Shklovskii was the
only (former)Formalistwho spoke at the discussion. Thus the voice of
the Formalists in this important debate remained unheard and it has
been unclear all along what they made of Lukacs'sambitious theory of
the novel.
Shklovskii's contribution opens on an ironical note intended to
disparage the seriousness of Luk'acs'spaper: 'I am ashamed to say that
I looked through Comrade Lukacs's paper only this evening.'56This
frivolous remark sets the tone for Shklovskii's misleadingly humble
statements. (The specificationthat the discussionwas takingplace some
time after the evening hours apparently reveals the work rhythm
gradually imposed on the Moscow political and literary establishment

55 The materials of the discussion were published in Literaturnyi kritik, 1935, 2, pp. 214-49
and ibid., 3, pp. 231-54. The published version differs from the stenographic records in
that it omits the contributions of Viktor Shklovskii and Igor Sats and reproduces the
contribution of Aristova without her remarks pertaining to Shklovskii's contribution (see
'Institut filosofii Komakademii. Pravlennaia stenogramma diskussii po dokladu G. Lukacha
"Problemy teorii romana"', Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow
[hereafter RAN], fond 355, opis' 2, ed. khr. 32,11. 65-66, 69-75 and 97-IOI). There is also
an uncorrected version of the stenographic records which reproduces these contributions
in an unabridged and unrevised form ('Institut filosofii Komakademii. Nepravlennaia
stenogramma diskussii po dokladu G. Lukacha "Problemy teorii romana"', RAN, fond
355, opis' 5, ed. khr. 32-34).
56 All quotations are from the uncorrected typescript of Shklovskii's statement: RAN, fond
355, opis' 5, ed. khr. 34,11. 60-67 (1. 6o), hereafter abbreviated as 'S', with page numbers in
brackets in the main text ('Ia rabotu t. Lukacha prosmotrel, stydno skazat', segodnia
vecherom'). I use the uncorrected version of the stenographic record because it is
considerably fuller than the corrected one.

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6o GALIN TIHANOV

by Stalin's insomnia.) At the outset, Shklovskii is quick to criticize his

own Formalisttheory of genre but only in order to charge Lukacs with
the same faults. He looks back at his Formalist years to find them
representative of what he terms the 'theory of static genres': 'Epic,
poetry, drama: one can argue, and I had been arguing not without
brilliance, that all this is static (Laughter)'
(S, p. 6o).57 The reaction of
the audience could suggest that by late 1934, four years after his first
public self-flagellation,Shklovskiihas adopted a more frolic manner of
self-criticism and has become something of an official jester, whose
performance elicited a predictable response of laughter and smugness
on the part of those who considered themselvesvirtuous and untempted
into political deviation.
Yet, like most jesters, Shklovskii too had serious things to warn
against. The theory of immobile genres resembled in his eyes the theory
of race: like race, genre was alleged to exist outside time; no matter
how many different genres (or races) were combined, each would
remain none the less unaltered. This dangerous ahistoricism owned to
by Shklovskiiwas detectable, he believed, also in Lukacs'spaper on the
novel.58 Valerian Pereverzev, who was the other central protagonist
and Lukacs's major opponent in this discussion, was seen by Shklovskii,
despite his radical opposition to Lukacs, as defending the same
ahistoricist line of reasoning. Pereverzev asked directly how it was
possible for Lukacs to omit from his paper the whole pre-bourgeois
history of the novel. Characteristically just like Bakhtin in his own
later essays on the novel -he adduced as examples Petronius's Satyricon
and Apuleius's The GoldenAss, terming them 'typical novels' and
pointing out that the European novelists, at least in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, learned the craft of writing from the ancient
novel of love and robbery.59 Thus Pereverzev (and a bit later Bakhtin)
drew an unbroken line of the evolution of the novel which was flying in
the face of Lukacs's Hegelian theory of the novel as the exclusive
product and representative genre of the bourgeois epoch. Shklovskii
now faced the challenging task of manoeuvring between these two
Pereverzev's and Lukacs's theories of the novel. He wanted to
remain critical as regards Lukacs's views and at the same time he did
not want to identify himself with Pereverzev. On the one hand, the

57 'Epos, lirika, drama mozhno dokazyvat' i ia eto dokazyval ne bez bleska chto vse
eto nepodvizhno (Smekh).'
58 For an analysis of Lukacs's paper and the other participants' contributions, see
G. Tihanov, 'The Novel, the Epic and Modernity: LukAcs and the Moscow Debate about
the Novel', Germano-Slavica,10, I998, 2, pp. 29-42.
59 See Literaturnyi kritik, 1935, 2, p. 230; Bakhtin knew the materials from the discussion
published in Literaturnyi kritik:see G. Tihanov, 'Bakhtin, LukAcsand German Romanticism:
The Case of Epic and Irony' in C. Adlam et al. (eds), Face to Face. Bakhtinin Russia and the
West,Sheffield,I997, p. 274n.

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 SHKLOVSKII AND LUKACS 6I
latter still bore the stigma of a 'vulgar Marxist' and this certainly could
not endear him to Shklovskii; on the other hand, earlier in the course
of the discussion, Pereverzev had been ruthlessly accused of denying
any principled differences between capitalism and the pre-capitalist
stages of social development and duly condemned as an apostate of
Marxism by the strong clique of Lukacs's supporters. So Shklovskii had
to meander his way towards a compromise between the lines defended
by Lukacs and Pereverzev.
With this strategy in mind, he declared both Pereverzev (in whose
view the novel allegedly had remained the same all along) and Lukacs
to be defenders of an ahistorical theory of the novel. Lukacs, Shklovskii
charged, had failed to do justice to the fact that 'the novel exists in a
historically continual way' (S, p. 6i)60 and had chosen instead to take
into account only the 'late', that is, bourgeois, novel; he had remained
equally insensitive to the problems arising from the current state of
Soviet literature and its future development:
My objection to Comrade Lukacs comes down to the following his
interesting article takes the novel not in the process and not in the
contradiction [of development], that is, outside history. In particular, the
relation of the novel to the epic, on which I don't have the time to elaborate
right now, for us, for our union, is not a question of the relation of the novel
to Homer, but a question of the relation of our novels of today to the
present epic of those peoples which create their national literatureswithout
having surpassed [the stage of] folklore.6'
What is more, Shklovskii also criticized Lukacs's idea that under
socialism the novel was bound gradually to give way to the epic, whose
return can be fully celebrated only under Communism, when class
conflicts and differentiations are eventually surmounted. This forecast,
Shklovskii noted, was the product of Lukacs's ahistoricism: the novel
will not die; only one of its particular forms the bourgeois novel,
with which Lukacs wrongly identified the genre of the novel as a
whole will inevitably cease to exist.
Thus under the cover of equal aversion to both Lukacs's and
Pereverzev's types of ahistoricism Shklovskii found Pereverzev's argu-
ment to be much less culpable and worth drawing on in the end.
Literary forms, Shklovskii suggests, do change indeed, but this is the
result of their long and continuous evolution. The new bourgeois novel,

60 'Roman istoricheski nepreryvno sushchestvuet.'

61 This quotation comes from the corrected typescript of Shklovskii's statement: RAN,
fond 355, opis' 5, ed. khr. 32, 1. 66v ('Vozrazhenie tov. Lukachu u menia svoditsia k
sleduiushchemu ego interesnaia stat'ia beret roman ne v protsesse i ne v protivorechii,
t. e. vne istorii. V chastnosti, otnoshenie romana k eposu, na kotorom ia seichas ne imeiu
vremeni ostanovit'sia, dlia nas, dlia nashego soiuza, eto ne vopros ob otnoshenii romana k
Gomeru, a vopros otnosheniia nashikh segodniashnikh romanov k segodniashnemu eposu
tekh narodov, kotorye sozdaiut svoi natsional'nye literatury, ne izzhiv fol'klora').

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62 GALIN TIHANOV

for example, gradually transformed itself into a shorter literary form,

due to the practices of serialization and the pressure exercised by
popular literature.
Shklovskiiwent even further along this line to claim that the origins
of the bourgeois novel should be sought in the shorter genre of the
sketch (ocherk).He had turned to the genre of the sketch in the second
edition of his book 0 teoriiprozy(On the Theory of Prose, see note I 3),
in the wake of several years in which the 'literature of fact' (literatura
fakta)was widely discussed in the Soviet literarypress;62 in I 934 he had
published two more pieces on the sketch.63His interest in the sketch in
the context of the discussion about the novel appears to reaffirm his
inclination to explain the emergence of major genres by way of tracing
their modifications out of minor literary forms. Shklovskiiapplies this
hypothesis directly to the current state of Soviet literature to conclude
'that the contemporary novel, as far as the system of organizing its
imagery is concerned, borrowed from [the literature of] the sketch as
did the Russian novel of the age of flourishing, [and] that the
enrichment of the contemporary novel with new material did not
proceed without the influence of the Soviet [literature of] sketch' (S,
p. 66).64In I 938, Shklovskiireturnedonce again to the same hypothesis,
this time in a somewhat modified fashion, to suggest that the themes of
Turgenev's novels were drawn from his sketches in Zapiskiokhotnika
(Notes of a Hunter, 1852).65
We can already see the considerable overlap of argument in
Shklovskii's statement at the discussion about the novel and in his
review of Lukiacs'sbook. The two texts have the following features in
common: (a) strong criticism of Luk'acs'sahistoricist and normativist
genre theory; (b) dissatisfaction with his lack of attention to Soviet
literature;and (c) a residualloyalty to the Formalisttheory of processing

62 See V. Shklovskii, 'Ocherk i anekdot' in Shklovskii, 0 teoriiprozy (see note I3 above),

pp. 246-50.
63 See V. Shklovskii, 'Ocherki ob ocherkakh', Literaturnaia gazeta, 8 April I934, and idem,
'Novyi ocherk', Literaturnaiagazeta, 26 June I934. The latter article voiced Shklovskii's
favourable opinion of Paustovskii's sketches and his discontent with Prishvin's. It is likely
that Shklovskii's article could have triggered an unpublished article by Ivanov-Razumnik,
in which Prishvin's Kashcheevatsep' (The Chain of Kashchei, 1923-54) is considered an
example of the 'organic synthesis of the sketch in the form of the great novel' (quoted in
V. Perkhin, Russkaialiteraturnaiakritikai93o-kh godov,St Petersburg, I997, p. 179).
64 '[.] chto sovremennyi roman v sisteme organizatsii obraza zaimstvoval, tak kak
zaimstvoval russkii roman tsvetushchego perioda, ot svoei ocherkovoi literatury, chto v
sovremennom romane obogashchenie novym materialom ne proshlo bez vlianiia sovetskoi
ocherkovoi literatury.' See also the following text from the corrected stenographic record:
'The new Russian novel was an heir not just of the old novel, but also of the sketch' ('Novyi
russkii roman iavilsia v kachestve priemnika ne tol'ko starogo romana, no i ocherka'): RAN,
fond 355, opis' 5, ed. khr. 32, list 66v.
65 See V. Shklovskii, 'Belinskii i "Zapiski okhotnika"', Literaturnyikritik, 1938, II,
pp. ioi-i6.

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 SHKLOVSKII AND LUKACS 63
and transforming non-canonical, minor genres (the sketch and the
ballad) into canonical forms (the novel). Thus the roots of the I939
review clearly lie in Shklovskii'scontribution to the debate of I 934-35;
it is only because his contribution remained unpublished that this fact
has been obscured to this day.
In due course, Shklovskii was invited to return for publication a
corrected copy of the stenographic record of his statement, which he
apparently did.66 We have to attempt an explanation, however
incomplete, of the fact that despite this his contribution did not appear
in the two issues of Literaturnyi kritikcontaining the materials of the
discussion.
The main reason is to be sought in the fact that the discussion was
entirely dominated by Luk'acsand his ideologically orthodox support-
ers, on the one hand, and Pereverzev, on the other. Pereverzev was
accused of the mortal sin of ideological treason and almost everyone
speaking after him felt obliged to contribute to these accusations. But it
is precisely this castigation that rendered him, contraryto all intentions,
a martyr and a hero. Those few who, like Shklovskii, attempted to
follow a line of compromise, by criticizing both Luk'acsand Pereverzev
and by suggesting a theory of their own, were doomed to go largely
unnoticed. Characteristically,it was not Shklovskii'scriticismof Lukacs
that drew attention to him, but rather his fleeting remark that Gor'kii,
in what Shklovskiiconsidered a 'quite muddled paper' (S, p. 65),67did
not pose correctly the problem of the novel. This imprudent objection
against Gor'kii's speech at the First Congress of the Soviet Writers68
met with Aristova's resolute rebuff, which made Shklovskiiwithdraw
his criticism and replace it in the corrected version of his contribution
with a statement that brought to the fore the fortes of Gor'kii'spaper
and only very cautiously hinted at its shortcomings:'In his unclear but
interesting speech Gor'kii pointed to this tendency of the late novel to
take man not as a social but as a universal phenomenon'.69 Thus it
would be reasonable to assume, in no uncertain terms, that Shklovskii
feared lest his substantial criticism of Lukacs became diluted in what
was a largely unsophisticated and partisan discussion; therefore he
might have decided to withdraw his statement from publication.
66 Evidence of this is contained in another set of the stenographic records preserved in
RGALI (fond 562, opis' i, ed. khr. 207, 1. 23); the relevant remark says that on 9 January
1935 Shklovskii was asked to return a corrected version of the record no later than I I
January 1935. On the whole, though, the set in RGALI is less useful that the one in RAN's
archive because two pages of Shklovskii's contribution are missing in the former.
67 '[ .. .] dovol'no s moei tochki zreniia putanom doklade'.
68 On the history of Shklovskii's contacts
with Gor'kii, see A. Galushkin, 'V. B. Shklovskii.
Pis'ma M. Gor'komu (I 9 I 7-I 923)', De visu, 1993, I, pp. 28-46.
69 'V svoei neiasnoi, no
interesnoi rechi Gor'kii ukazyval na etu tendentsiiu pozdnego
romana brat' cheloveka ne kak iavlenie sotsial'noe, a kak iavlenie planetnoe': RAN, fond
355, opis'5, ed. khr. 32,1. 66v.

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64 GALIN TIHANOV

Consequently, Aristova's contribution, too, had to be shortened, for it

had hardly any substance of its own beyond the (by then already
familiar)critique of Pereverzevand the attack against Shklovskii,which
would not have made sense without Shklovskii'sstatement. Why the
contribution of Igor Satz, one of Luk'acs'smost loyal allies, was not
published, remains unclear.
That Shklovskiihimself withdrew his statement from publication is
further suggested by the fact that his contribution appeared in an
extended article version later in the same year precisely in Literaturnyi
kritik.i0In this text, Shklovskiivigorously reinstated the main points of
his speech at the discussion; not surprisinglyfor a publication run by
Literaturnyi kritik,he never mentioned Lukacs's name in his criticism.
What is more, Shklovskii called his own article 'a portion of a large
book [otiyvokiz bol'shoiknigi]'(OR, p. i67),71 thus seeking to obliterate
all traces of the article being a summation and continuation of the
discussion paper. He started by questioning the value of Hegel's
understanding of the novel, on which Lukacs's account was built.
Hegel's definitions, Shklovskii charged, cover only the 'beginnings of
the classical novel, more particularly Fielding's novels' (OR, p. I67),
but they are far from useful in characterizing the new stage in the
evolution of the genre initiated by Balzac's rupture with the tradition
set by Fielding (OR, p. i 68). The genesis of Balzac's novel, then, is seen
not so much in the preceding novelistic tradition but, as in Shklovskii's
contribution to the discussion, in the sketch (OR, pp. I68-75).
Shklovskii's article, then, supplies one more confirmation of the fact
that throughout the latter half of the 1930S he remained loyal to his
Formalistidea of the interface between small (non-canonical) and great
(canonical) genres: both the sketch and the ballad, at different times,
flowed organically into the genre of the novel, thus altering its nature
and course of evolution.
In conclusion, let us recapitulate the main argument of this paper. We
have managed to establish that the continuous debate between
Shklovskii and Lukacs was a significant episode in Soviet literary and
ideological life in the middle and the latter half of the 1930s. Part of this
polemic proceeded on the surface and in public, another part was
concealed in the background, but it never failed to reflect the wider
controversiesof the Soviet literaryscene at a time when its Stalinization
was already well under way. Suffice it to point to the subterranean
struggle within Literaturnyikritik,resulting in the publication of articles
both promoting and condemning, implicitly but clearly enough,

70 V. Shklovskii, 'Ob ocherke i romane', Literaturnyikritik, 1935, 8, pp. I67-76, hereafter

abbreviated as 'OR', with page numbers in brackets in the main text.
71 There is no confirmation that Shklovskii ever wrote such a book.

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 SHKLOVSKII AND LUKACS 65
Lukacs's views. The polemics between Shklovskii and Lukacs, as well
as their behaviour, were indelibly marked by and expressive of this
spirit of uncertainty and precariousnes.Lukacs'sauthority as one of the
canon-makersin the recently institutionalizedfield of Marxist aesthetics
was constantlyjeopardized and held in check by his dubious status as a
foreign intellectual with unmistakeable roots in the classical German
bourgeois culture; in Shklovskii'scase, the suspiciously zealous efforts
of the neophyte and the pressing desire for survival and wider
recognition were both nourished and hindered by the complicated
history of his intellectual and family affiliations;he often had to do as
he was told and he did his best to conform and to camouflage this in
acts of biting wittiness and moderate rebellion. But, more importantly,
the picture of the contacts between the two men reveals Shklovskii's
tortuous evolution as a literarytheorist, for whom declarative approval
of the Party line never seems to have amounted to genuine attachment
and loyalty. In Shklovskii'swork of the 1930s, it was hard for Formalism
to die and to transformitself into true-bred Marxism.

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