Slavic Colloquium: Irina Sandomirskaya on Viktor Shklovsky's Critique of Memory

Speaker(s): Irina Sandomirskaya (Södertörn University)

Viktor Shklovsky always wished to belong to his current reality and denied the past any value as long as it was considered as heritage. Historical research, according to Shklovsky, was only useful for the understanding of the present, the past being merely the product of a "revolutionary choice" of today. With time, however, he found himself increasingly engrossed with history, apparently in parallel to, and at a relatively safe distance from, the evolution of Stalinist official historicism. As opposed to socialist realist positivism, Shklovsky was working towards critical reflection, a task that proved quite challenging not only under the rule of Stalin's censorship but also after Stalin's death when memory of the recent past was admitted in public discussions, albeit selectively and tendentiously. In this Slavic Colloquium event, Prof. Irina Sandomirskaya will attempt to trace Shklovsky’s views of time and history in their evolution, with special attention to his critique of memory, a project that even nowadays has not lost its relevance.
 
Irina Sandomirskaya is Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn University (Sweden). Her research focuses on 20th-century Russian literature, film, language, and literary theory. She is the winner of the 2013 Andrei Bely Prize in the humanities for her book Blokada v slove: ocherki kriticheskoi teorii I biopolitiki iazyka (Moscow: NLO).