A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY.

By ViktorShklovsky. Translated by Prof. Richard R.Sheldon (Russian). Ithaca and London:Cornell University Press, 1970. 304 pp.$10.

Somehow, in time of war, cold, famine, revolution, and civil war, between stints as a front-line soldier, instructor of armoredcar personnel, peripatetic revolutionary, fugitive counter-revolutionary, and professor at the Institute of Art History in Petrograd, Viktor Shklovsky managed to lead Russian Futurism, found Russian Formalism, father the movement called The Serapion Brothers, serve as godfather to Russian modernism, revolutionize Russian poetics, and write this extraordinary and beautifully translated memoir of those furious days.

Shklovsky does not attempt to define the great issues of his time, but instead casts his own brilliant, peculiar, personally slanted light on the names, place names, and dates that many others have more objectively defined. He makes frequent use in this memoir of two devices that are fundamental to his poetics: ostranenie (making the familiar strange), and zatrudnennaia forma (roughened, retarded, impeded narration, or made difficult). One of Shklovsky's basic ideas is that the mind tends to glide too smoothly over ordinary verbal surfaces: the work of the poet is to arrest the glide of the mind by using devices and linguistic combinations that draw attention to themselves, by making the ail-too familiar, suddenly strange and the ever-present, ever-unnoticed, suddenly fresh and noticed.

In this book, Shklovsky is telling the million and twice-told tale of Soviet literature (how I spent the Revolution), but he tells it as it had never been told before and as it will probably not be told soon again: in an un-Tolstoyan, unsocialistic, unrealistic manner, reflecting Shklovsky's enthusiasm for the English writer Sterne.

Shklovsky has long been out of favor in his own country and unavailable in translation in ours. Professor Sheldon's translation of the uncensored version of A SentimentalJourney will be welcomed by all students of Russian literature and history and will hopefully serve to introduce this very important and neglected writer to a wider reading public.

Mr. Young is Assistant Professor of RussianLanguage and Literature at Dartmouth.