Context N°23
Viktor Shklovsky
The following essay was written for an anthology entitled Kak my pishem (How We Write), originally published in 1930, which consisted of responses to a questionnaire (see below) on working methods
solicited from Russian writers such as Andrei Bely, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Evgeny Zamiatin, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Yuri Olesha, Boris Pilnyak, Veniamin Kaverin, etc. Shklovsky’s essay was reprinted in the 1990 anthology of his work, Gamburgskii shchet (The Hamburg Account, forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press).
I’ve been writing for fifteen years and over time I’ve obviously changed my manner and style of working.
Fifteen years ago it was much harder, because I didn’t know how to get started. Everything I wrote seemed like it had all been said before. Individual pieces didn’t coalesce. Examples were all self-referential. For the most part this is all still the case. I still find writing difficult, except now in a different way. A piece of mine might be spun off into an independent work, but the main thing, as in film, is what goes between pieces.
Creation in general and the creation of a new literary style in particular often arise when a chance mutation takes hold. More or less like what happens with the development of a new breed of cattle.
There is a universal literary style, one founded upon the individual style. No one actually writes in this style—it makes nothing move, it is intangible, it is imperceptible.
There is the emphasis on the flouting of syllabic-tonic prosody in Mayakovsky.
There is the emphasis on dialect, on idiolect in Gogol. Gogol most likely did not write in the language in which he actually thought, and his Ukrainian prosody affected his style. As distant stars affect the orbits of planets.
I write beginning with facts. I try not to modify facts. I try to link disparate facts. I may have gotten this from Lomonosov—the juxtaposition of disparate ideas—or it may come from Anatole France, banging the heads of epithets together.
So maybe rather than epithets, I’m trying to bang things—facts—together.
Currently I’m starting to write differently, particularly if I’m working on a scientific study. Here I proceed from the subject matter. The “why” doesn’t interest me until the “what” and “how” have been resolved. I do not go in search of explanations to the unknown.
I begin a work by reading. I read without trying to strain myself. Rather, I try not to commit things to memory. The strain, the attentiveness—they simply get in the way. One should read serenely, just looking at the book.
I read a lot. As you can see, you’re getting an essay on how I work rather than one on how I write.
Let’s continue.
I read without straining myself. I make colored bookmarks or bookmarks of various widths [for citations]. While I don’t write the page number on my bookmarks, it would be good to do so, in case they fall out. Then I look over my bookmarks. I make notes. The typist, the same one typing up this essay, retypes my pieces with the page numbers. I line up my pieces—and there are many of them—in columns along the wall of my room. Unfortunately my room is small, and I feel hemmed in.
Getting the sense of a citation is very important: I turn it around, and join it to other citations.
Pieces tend to stay up on my wall for a long time. I sort them and pin them up in columns again, and brief transitions occur to me. I write a sufficiently detailed chapter outline on some sheets of paper, and sort the now integrated fragments into stacks.
Then I start dictating the work, marking insertions with numbers.
All these techniques immeasurably speed up the pace of the work. And they make it easier. It’s like working directly onto a typesetting machine.
During this process the outline and often even the subject are almost always modified. The work’s meaning turns out to be different than intended, and it’s in the wreckage of the work’s potential that one can agonize over the unity of subject matter, the possibility for a new arrangement, the algebraic compression the subconscious performs on the subject matter that we call inspiration.
The work grows and it evolves. I don’t think I so much complete my books as stop writing them, and that if I were to rewrite them two or three more times they would be better, clearer, and my audience would understand me, not just my friends, but that I would be divested of my wit.
This wit, for which some reproach me—it is a consequence of my method, a certain lack of refinement.
I cannot edit myself, just as I cannot read myself. Other thoughts occur to me, and I depart from the text.
Listening to myself reading aloud would be torture.
This manner of working and this lack of refinement are not flaws. Just as a glassblower can’t make a mistake, if I master a technique completely then I can’t make a mistake even when I work quickly. In the end, however, it must be said that I produce no more than many who work at a slower pace.
And it’s time for a break.
I am forever talking to people, and I don’t believe that people should write everything on their own. I am convinced we ought to write in groups. I am convinced that friends should live in the same city, and meet frequently, and that the work gets done only if done collectively.
The best year of my life was when I would talk to Lev Yakubinsky1 on the telephone, every day, day after day, for an hour or two. We put up the scaffolding over the phone.
I am convinced, Lev Petrovich, that it was pointless for you to get off the phone to get back to your real work.
I am convinced that it would be pointless for me not to live in Leningrad.
I am convinced that when Roman Jakobson moved to Prague it was a tremendous blow both to my work and his.
I am convinced that people in a given literary community should consider one another in their work, and that they should change their lives for one another.
For me it is somewhat complicated because I am a scholar, a journalist, and an author. There are other facts, other relationships to subject matter, other arrangements of the device. It is a burden
to efface the evidence of my method in my scholarly writing so that I might write books to be understood by foreign scholars, to be accessible, to not demand mental realignment.
But I want to demand it.
In his work the journalist needs integrity, and courage.
I was riding on the Turksib. Everything dusty and hot, lizards peeping. Tall grass: here wormwood, there feather grass, and stiff prickly desert grass, tamarisk, lilacs not yet in bloom.
Out there, in the fall, salty rivers flow into the freshwater Balkhash, the freshwater lake with the salty inlets. Out there people ride cattle and horses just like we ride streetcars. Out there the Kirghiz borzois leap through the wormwood on unseen legs, resembling nothing so much as slender undulating cardboard cutout spines.
Goats wandering across the sands. Automobiles stuck in the salt flats for weeks on end. Camels pulling carts. Eagles soaring hundreds of feet overhead, ready to light on the telegraph poles, the only place to land in the desert.
Out there they’re building the Turksib railroad. Hard work, necessary work.
Out there it’s so hot the Kirghiz go dressed in felt boots, felt trousers, and felt caps. Where they’re not called Kirghiz, they’re called Kazakhs.
Building a railroad is hard work. There isn’t much water. Bread has to be brought in. There has to be bread. Bread has to be stored somewhere. So many workers, all of them needing a roof over their heads.
But they built it anyway.
Good books come when we are forced to overcome our subject matter, when we are stalwart.
This is also known as inspiration.
This is how I wrote A Sentimental Journey.
Zoo, Or Letters Not About Love I wrote somewhat differently.
We had an anthem in OPOAYAZ.2 A very long anthem, as we were rather prolix and no longer young.
One couplet went:
From a formalist point of view even enthusiasm
Is a convergence of devices
This is entirely possible.
Enthusiasm is dulled by the inertia of expertise, and in particular the literary inertia of enthusiasm.
So it is with books.
I had to write a book, a biography, something along the lines of “One Hundred Portraits of Russian Literary Figures.” Would that I might have been infatuated with it, that I might have found some sort of convergence, that I might have contracted a love for it, the way a weakened organism contracts a disease.
The result was a badly written book.
I very much want to write prose now. I am waiting for convergences. I am waiting for invention. I am waiting for subject matter and inspiration.
There are, of course, other inert books for which I have contempt, ones made out of expertise and filler.
Such filler can deface even the best subject matter.
Individual instances grapple with the larger subject matter in Eisenstein’s all-too-significantly titled film, The Old and the New.3
To the dilettante who mutters that the film is flawed—“why don’t they show the cooperative?”—we note that the film is not a correlate, that it advances a theme, and that it is organized through the consciously selected and aestheticized
material of the syuzhet art. Syuzhet devices are like a set of French curves never meant to be used for tracing a given curvature.
One must learn.
Comrades, I cannot recall the lengthy and insightful list of questions you asked me. You can find a bibliography of my work somewhere, but I have no idea what my future holds.
Translated by Adam Siegel
The Kak my pishem questionnaire:
1. Preparatory period. Duration.
2. What kind of subject matter do you use
most (autobiographical, literary, obser-
vations and notes)?
3. Do you generally use living persons as
models for your characters?
4. What provides you with the initial
impulse for a work (anecdotes, com-
mission, images, etc.)?
5. When during the day do you work—in
the morning, afternoon, or evening?
How many hours a day at most?
6. Average productivity—pages per
month.
7. What sorts of stimulants (narkotiki) do
you use, and in what amounts?
8. Do you write with a pencil, pen, or
typewriter? Do you sketch when you’re
working? How heavily is your work
revised by editors?
9. Do you work from an outline and does
it change?
10. What do you find most difficult? Begin-
nings, middles, or endings?
11. Which senses most often generate
images? (visual, aural, tactile?)
12. Do you insist on some sort of rhythm
to your prose?
13. Do you proof your work by reading it
aloud (either to yourself or to oth-
ers)?
14. How do you feel when you have com-
pleted a work?
15. Do you revise your work for new
editions?
16. Are you affected by reviews?
Endnotes:
1 Lev Yakubinsky (1892–1945): Russian linguist and formalist.
2 Obshchestvo izucheniya POeticheskogo YAZyka: Society for the Study of Poetic Language.
3 Eisenstein’s 1929 film, also known as General’naia liniia (The General Line), focused on a single female farm-worker to extol Soviet collectivization of agriculture.
