Shklovskii, Viktor Borisovich (1893 - 1984) Lantsetti, V., artist Seregin, M.S., artist.	Turksib. Izdanie vtoroe. M.-L., Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel´stvo, 1930. 32 p., [64 b/w photographs]	€250,00

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8 vo, attractive publisher´s multi-color covers designed by Lantsetti and V.M.Seregin. Ca 1 sq.sm of paper at lower part of front cover, title page and throuh to p.6 is missing, in all probability cut with scissors by a child. Very small part of the text, a numeral '30' of title page is missing.Attractive back cover with map and text preserved intact. VERY RARE. The book is written for juvenile readers the very same year, when on January 27, 1930 Shklovskii published his famous article 'Pamiatnik nauchnoi oshibki' in 'Literaturnaia gazeta'. In this article Shklovskii admited all his 'mistakes' promoting Formalist school in literature and condemned Russian Formalism. By 1930 Shklovsky became 'wise'. In his 'Turksib', not even on one page,he was able to escape naming a single family name of 'heroes of socialist labor', a single name of party apparatchik or Soviet official from Central Asia and Siberia. Just few years later many officials at Turksib construction works were arrested, and shot or sent to Soviet concentration camps. Two years later Viktor Shklovskii took part in a collective liteary work 'Belomorkanal'.The book which gloryfied Soviet slave labor. Shklovsky was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. His father was Jewish and his mother was of German/Russian origin. He attended St. Petersburg University.Shklovsky was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. His father was Jewish and his mother was of German/Russian origin. He attended St. Petersburg University. During the First World War, he volunteered for the Russian Army and eventually became a driving trainer in an armoured car unit in St. Petersburg. There in 1916 he founded the OPOYAZ (Obshchestvo izucheniya POeticheskogo YAZyka—Society for the Study of Poetic Language), one of the two groups, with the Moscow Linguistic Circle, which developed the critical theories and techniques of Russian Formalism. Shklovsky participated in the February Revolution of 1917. Then he was sent by the Russian Provisional Government as an assistant Commissar to Southwestern Front where he was wounded and then got an award for bravery. After that he was an assistant Commissar of the Russian Expeditionary Corps in Persia. Shklovsky returned to St. Petersburg in early 1918, after the October Revolution. He opposed bolshevism and took part in an anti-bolshevik plot of Socialist-Revolutionary Party members. After the conspiracy was revealed by the Cheka, Shklovsky went into hiding traveling over Russia and the Ukraine but was eventually pardoned in 1919 due to his connections with Maxim Gorky, and decided to abstain from political activity. His two brothers were executed by the Soviet regime (one in 1918, the other in 1937). Shklovsky integrated into the Soviet society and even took part in the Russian Civil War serving in the Red Army; but in 1922 he had to go into hiding again and to flee from Russia escaping arrest for his previous activities. In Berlin in 1923 he published his memoirs about 1917-22 called 'Sentimental'noe puteshestvie. (A Sentimental Journey) after A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne. In the same year he was allowed to return to the USSR. Shklovsky is perhaps best known for developing the concept of ostranenie or defamiliarization (also translated as 'estrangement') in literature.[3] He explained the concept in the important essay 'Art as Technique' (also translated as 'Art as Device') which comprised the first chapter of his seminal Theory of Prose, first published in 1925. He argued for the need to turn something that has become over-familiar, like a cliché in the literary canon, into something revitalized. Shklovsky's work pushes Russian Formalism towards understanding literary activity as integral parts of social practice, an idea that becomes important in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and Russian and Prague School scholars of semiotics.