Knight’s Move by Viktor Shklovsky
Eight moves a knight can make on suitable terrain. Quotations and off-the-cuff reactions to Viktor Shklovsky's collection of cultural journalism from the years 1919-1921.
8. "There are many reasons for the strangeness of the knight's move, the main one being the conventionality of art, about which I am writing." Signs suggest systems. The word 'stricture' doesn't deserve a negative connotation.
7. "At first people furtively cut chunks off the carcass. Then the joyful dogs bit into into the exposed meat. Sometimes you ran across a horse's tail or a piece of horse where you didn't remember seeing the corpse of a horse." The short piece on living in Petersburg during the blockade is comprised of vivid and gruesome facts.
6. "[...] I read in Pravda the program, or "project for a program," to organize an evening of music sponsored by the education department of the War Commissariat." Dead Soviet words.
5. There are too many names in this book that say absolutely nothing to me. I will not draft a list. (I want to maintain a false aura of expertise.)
4. Not one text stands out or packs a serious punch (except for "Petersburg During the Blockade"). A collection of weightless curios by an observant writer. And therein lies the rub: the reader quickly becomes irritated by Shklovsky's lax style. Some sentences are great, though.
3. "A witch doctor is not a man lacking in theory: the witchdoctor has an untrue, more often than not, outmoded, theory."
2. "Worrying about the creation of collective art is just as futile as worrying about the fact that the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea."
1. "The word in poetry is not just a word. It draws in its wake dozens and thousands of associations. It is permeated with them just as the Petersburg air during a blizzard is permeated with snow."
Knight's Move (2005, Dalkey) by Viktor Shklovsky.
The historical/generational analogies always struck me, wrt how literature is ‘handed down.’ Namely that he seemed to think it takes a period of time and requisite distance for literary concerns to resonate, such that everyone is really writing for their nephew, or vice versa, as opposed to being, you know, too close to the stars.
Above all the ‘knight’s move’ is political, no? Such was my impression anyway.