Summary (Masterplots II: World Fiction Series)
A Sentimental Journey is a novel difficult to describe or categorize. Its narrative line emerges only in discontinuous episodes, memories, character studies, and literary discussions. Yet the cumulative effect of these separate pieces communicates in very personal terms the sweep of events in the revolutions and civil war bringing the Soviet Union into being. The novel is a literary experiment growing out of the commitment of Viktor Shklovsky and other Russian Formalist literary critics to the renewal of Russian prose in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Shklovsky calls the work “memoirs,” but he shapes these memories of World War I, the February and October Revolutions, and civil war as he would a novel, though no conventional novel. The title is an ironic reference to Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth century English novel, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768); previously, Shklovsky had published a celebrated analysis of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767). The episodic structure and self-conscious narrative devices of Sterne’s works had excited Shklovsky in his search for ways to make a fresh start in the Russian novel. Sterne’s eccentric and leisurely commentary on his casual travels in Europe is a far cry, however, from the hair-raising history which Shklovsky offers with acute objectivity and tragic irony.
New times bring the need for new forms: Shklovsky’s memoirs make of his...
(The entire section is 1151 words.)
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