A HUNT FOR OPTIMISM
by Viktor Shklovsky
Translated by Shushan Avagyan
CONTENTS
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
ON ARCHITECTURE
PART ONE
Titled “Everything as it Should Be,” with an Epigraph
PART TWO
Which Is of No Particular Importance
PART THREE
The Middle of the Book or Thereabouts
PART FOUR
Titled “The Trumpet of the Martians”
PART FIVE
The End of A Hunt for Optimism
JUST A FEW LAST WORDS — FROM MYSELF
Copyright
About the Author
The dawn is breaking in all the stories of this book.
- Viktor Shklovsky
The book after Gamburgsky Schyot (Hamburg Account, 1928), provisionally titled “New Prose,” was begun in the fall of 1929, and it was supposed to be turned in no later than December 15, 1929, according to the contract with the Leningrad Writers’ Publishing House. But Viktor Shklovsky didn’t meet the deadline and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s sudden death caught him in the midst of his work. He would recall later in 1931: “My writer’s work and life have cost me a lot. And this book in particular has been exceptionally costly.”1 Mayakovsky’s death did in fact change the direction and style of the new book, which he retitled A Hunt for Optimism. Not only did Shklovsky add a section on Futurism and Mayakovsky, but the overall structure and tone of the book also changed — it became more somber. “Every writer is asked to repent after several days or several years,” he wrote in the part on Mayakovsky. Using various narrators and scenarios, Hunt repeats and alludes to the same scene of interrogation in which a writer is being put on trial for his unorthodoxy. His own public recantation of Formalism in the article “Monument to a Scientific Error” (1930) was perhaps to him a metaphorical suicide, and in that he felt strongly aligned with Mayakovsky. Hunt in that sense is very much an autobiographical book, which is undoubtedly characteristic of his other works. And despite the assertion of literary critic Aleksandr Chudakov that it lacks unity and is too “variegated” to be called a pure “Shklovskian book” (such as Third Factory or Hamburg Account), Hunt is nonetheless stylistically unpredictable, experimentally bold, and unapologetically ironic — making it one of the finest books written by Shklovsky.2 “As for the unity of the book,” Shklovsky warns the reader, “it is often an illusion, just like the unity of a landscape. Browse through our works, look for a point of view, and if you can find it, then there is your unity. I was unable to find it.”
Shklovsky and Mayakovsky had been drifting apart during the last years of the poet’s life. Their relationship had become tense when Mayakovsky controversially adapted LEF (Left Front of the Arts) into REF (Revolutionary Front of the Arts) in May 1929, which Shklovsky refused to join. Mayakovsky had abandoned LEF in submission to rigorous political control in September 1928, forswearing his Futurist views and allowing the infiltration of the secret police into their literary group. REF pursued only journalistic goals; Mayakovsky himself contributed nothing but sloganized writings for the press, and REF went out of existence before ever conducting any meaningful activity. Convinced that closed groups hinder normal creative communication among Soviet writers, Mayakovsky joined RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) in February 1930, which he viewed as a mass literary organization. “LEF is dissolving,” Shklovsky wrote to Yuri Tynjanov in September 1928, “Mayakovsky has announced himself a school directly associated with the Komsomol and the savings and loan funds.”3 Shklovsky perceived Mayakovsky’s criticism of LEF as a “replacement of an artistic alignment with an appeal to political leadership.” The relationship was further damaged when Shklovsky had an argument with Lili Brik in November 1928, and the efforts to fix the relationship between Shklovsky and Mayakovsky in December 1929 were futile.
Still, Shklovsky reacted strongly to Mayakovsky’s suicide. He wrote to Tynjanov in April 1930: “His dedication to the Revolution was sincere. He carried his heart in his hands as a live bird. He defended it with his elbows. They were pushing him . . . He was terribly exhausted when he died. All that was left was a bundle of notebooks with unpublished poems. They were written in the last period. Vladimir Vladimirovich lies in the Writers’ Club. Hordes of people are congregating, they are coming in ten thousands. We don’t even know if they have read him.”4 Some of these sentences reappear in Hunt’s epilogue. Around the same time, Shklovsky wrote to Boris Eichenbaum: “Vladimir Vladimirovich died as a poet who repented and accepted again the burden of his sole and unfortunate love. He needed love for his poetry, he needed poetry in order to live, and he needed the Revolution for his odic line . . . And we are guilty in front of him, guilty for not writing about his verses, guilty for not creating a poetic wind for him.”5
Hunt belongs to the earlier period of Shklovsky’s oeuvre and incorporates sketch stories, feuilletons, journalistic observations, and memoirs, ranging from the Russian Civil War to Mayakovsky’s death on April 14, 1930. The book is divided into five parts with a short preamble and an epilogue. The first part, “Titled ‘Everything as it Should Be,’ with an Epigraph,” includes stories about love affairs and betrayals narrated by male and female protagonists. Many of the stories incorporate autobiographical material like, for instance, the story about an eccentric sculptor who lives in Berlin and returns to Moscow during the first years of Sovietization, or “The General’s Son,” which laconically recounts the trial of a former anti-Bolshevik officer. The second part, “Which Is of No Particular Importance,” can be summarized as the ramblings of a lost man or the typical “person out of place” — an exile in the Caucasus awaiting his return to his native city. All the stories echo the same mood of dejection and ennui. The third part of Hunt, entitled “The Middle of the Book or Thereabouts,” echoes the exilic mood from the previous section:
[I]magine that you have moved from Moscow to the moon and that it’s stifling there. And then you find out suddenly there, on the moon, that you have been forbidden forever to return to Moscow and that they have rented your apartment to someone else. Since nobody has had the chance to read the Bible or the history of Russia cut up into narrow strips and mixed with the morning paper, I can’t convey the impression of reading the October telegrams in the East. (“Captions”)
In another piece in this section, Marco Polo, Shklovsky’s part-fictional, part-historical stand-in, allegorically narrates his return to a city that puts him through a series of public humiliations and criticisms: “Repent for the sake of your conscience that you slandered the stars. And we won’t burn your books, for which you are still guilty in front of Venice, because it’s not good to tell everyone about other countries and the roads that lead to them. No, we won’t burn your books, we will only write on them: ‘The Happy Tales of Signor Marko Polo.’” The trial scene in this trenchant satire is turned into a circus show ruled by the stupidity and ignorance of the public, while the scene with the priest draws attention to the absurdity of the