The art as a resurrection procedure of the word: Viktor Shklovsky and the philosophy of the common cause

Abstract

Having influenced many figures of the Russian avant-garde, including Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov, Pavel Filonov and Andrey Platonov, by the early 1930s the teachings of Fedorov were suppressed, along with the utopianism of early revolutionary culture. It is all the more interesting to encounter the open evocation of his name and ideas in the work of a completely officially recognized author such as Viktor Shklovsky, who had assumed this status from the 1930s and who had emerged most forcefully at the center of cultural life in the era of the Thaw, when his roots in the avant-garde origins of Soviet culture endowed him with additional symbolic weight. Even more striking, one must note that in Shklovsky’s early works, that was enrooted in the avant-guard art, the name of Fedorov was completely absent. However, in perspective of already revealed Fedorovian stratum one may find the echo of Russian cosmism even in these early works.