Third Factory by Viktor Shklovsky

First published:Tretya fabrika, 1926 (English translation, 1977)

Type of work: Documentary novel

Time of work: The 1920’s

Locale: The Soviet Union

Principal Character:

• Viktor Shklovsky, the narrator, a Formalist literary critic and novelist

The Novel

Third Factory is a short, plotless novel made of autobiographical fragments representing discontinuous memories, unsent letters to friends, anecdotes, dreams, and theoretical discussions. These fragments create an artistic work with a contradictory but unified theme, like fiction. The narrator is the author himself; the memories and apostrophes and stories are composed around the theme of the life of a Formalist literary critic in the Soviet Union in the 1920’s. The result is a critique of the literary experience and responses of this unique individual. This critique is not the only point of the book; the implicit critique of former novels, in the form of innovations in this one, opens lines of development for new work. At a deeper level yet, the narrator’s interest is to understand the time in which he lives and to explore the correct role of the writer and the nature of verbal art. These latter issues have special significance for the Soviet state and Soviet writers, as the state begins to define the artist’s task.

The novel is arranged chronologically in three parts, one for each “factory.” A factory is the life experience that turns the narrator into the “product” that he has become. The first factory is his home and school life (this part takes place before the Revolution). The second is the intense experience of his professional life as a literary theorist in Petrograd in the early 1920’s, the period of the emergence of Formalism as a literary school and of the group of writers known as the Serapion Brothers as its innovative practitioners. This second factory includes apostrophes to Osip Brik, encouraging him to continue his theoretical work, and to Roman Jakobson, who Viktor Shklovsky believes has deserted his comrades and their work.

The third factory, and the longest section of the novel, is set in the Soviet film industry, where Shklovsky’s work is to revise films. He brings the values of the second factory to bear on this new work, while a variety of pressures on the film compete in its shaping. The focus, however, is on the defense and further definition of Formalism; literary theory is the hero of this section and of the novel. Shklovsky includes a story-within-a-story in the third factory, “Envy Bay”; the tale is full of implications for the time even as it practices a major Formalist device, the self-conscious baring of the technique, as well as shifts in point of view and special attention to the role of the narrator. Several of Shklovsky’s innovations have been adopted by later twentieth century writers in the U.S.S.R. and the West.

He also addresses letters to several of the early Formalists: to Boris Eikhenbaum about skaz, a specifically Russian narrative technique; to Lev Yakubinsky about Marxism and about puns and language. He tells Yury Tynyanov about the way literature changes by expanding into nonliterature: “Art converts the particularity of things into perceptible form.” A preoccupation in all these letters is Shklovsky’s effort to explore the connection between objective reality, the consciousness of the writer, and the artistic work. He is attempting to apply his Formalist principles in the new and unfriendly context of proletarian literature—and the coming Socialist Realism—as the Party begins to assert its control of literature.

The poignancy of the narrator’s experience is expressed in continuing metaphors. One of the most compelling and complex is the image of flax, which has been explained by Fyodor S. Grits, a Soviet critic. The narrator introduces the metaphor, with no primary explanation of its meaning, then plays with its range of meanings, developing the figure before making a clear explication. Shklovsky had a job treating flax at one time, and this firsthand knowledge moves into art, coming to mean the suffering and “unfreedom” of the artist necessary to the artist’s work: “Terror and oppression are necessary.” What the oppression is remains muted: Is it Party pressure on literature or is it the writer’s necessary submission to his material? Writers were being beaten, like flax, into conformity in the Soviet Union in the late 1920’s, but Shklovsky seems to suggest that the necessary suffering is the artist’s compulsion to respond to his material freely: as the material, not the government, demands. The difficulty of keeping alive the achievements of his own theoretical work, of staying in touch with his fellow theoreticians, and of letting the work go forward accounts for the deep sadness of the novel. Yet it ends in a reference from Vergil, about the call to Aeneas to leave Troy—to rebuild, to continue to hope.

The Characters

Only the character of the narrator receives sustained development. The images of those friends whom he addresses are suggested, but as characters they are all significantly absent. Nevertheless, each emerges as a unique individual, with moral views, style, and professional gifts.

Shklovsky emerges as an able, witty, melancholy man deeply devoted to his profession, his country, and his family. He is sensitive to his time, imaginative and fresh in his ability to express his experience, and full of integrity and honesty. He has a range of abilities and interests that make his sympathy wide. He thinks deeply, feels deeply, and does not say everything he thinks and feels. The reader cannot help but identify with him, although he is contradictory and elliptical. The intimate details of living through the period of the great shift from czarist Russia to Socialist U.S.S.R. make the reader see the complexity of making judgments in that ambiguous and painful context.

Critical Context

The year 1925 brought the first explicit Party resolution, “On Party Policy in the Field of Imaginative Literature”; it was the beginning of political control over writers. The comparative freedom of the early 1920’s began to die, and the Formalists, Futurists, and other experimental groups felt the shock. Shklovsky, as a member of LEF, an organization of Futurists and Formalists attempting to define in their own terms the way to respond to the new life after the Revolution, recognized the implications of the resolution. They saw that it paved the way for an essentially reactionary literary theory. (The policy would emerge as Socialist Realism in the early 1930’s.) LEF died out in 1925, and Shklovsky says that Third Factory began as an attempt to accommodate to his times. Having returned from exile in Germany only in 1923, certain that he had to share the life of his country whatever fate that might bring, he apparently meant to try to follow Party guidance. Nevertheless, the book wrote itself differently. The habit of his mind was contradiction, according to Richard Sheldon, who translated the book into English, and the Formalist views Shklovsky had had so large a part in developing could not so easily be deserted. As a result, his persisting (though developing) view of literature not as a mirror of reality but as a complex verbal construct kept undermining his attempts to conform to Party thinking. Instead, the most he could do was to begin to consider that the rationalist approach of Marxism might well have something to add to the Formalists’ rationalist approach to literature. He seemed prepared to learn about it; later twentieth century neo-Marxist criticism in the West would have been extremely interesting to Shklovsky.

At the same time, however, his literary foes rejected Third Factory for its tone of depression and its rejection of the emerging Party views on literature. Soviet critics recognized the persisting influence of Formalist ideas, and the book was not well received.

The book was unavailable to Western critics for half a century. As a result, Shklovsky’s techniques deserve exploration: the brilliant experimentation with point of view, estrangement, the elaborated metaphor instead of plot to establish unity, ironic devices such as illogical deduction, surprising semantic parallels, parody, oblique comparison, personification of contemporary abstractions, and anthropomorphism for common and unexpected objects. The book is brief but filled with surprise and innovation.

Third Factory, like much of the literature written in the Soviet Union in the second quarter of the twentieth century, has not had the wide and receptive world audience it would have had without the advent of Stalinism and Party control of literature. Shklovsky’s realization of the coming decline of all that he held important to the art accounts for the deep sadness of the book, but it does not prevent the delivery of a book of dazzling virtuosity and deep humanity.

Bibliography

Choice. Review. XIV (January, 1978), p. 1506.

Erlich, Victor. Twentieth Century Russian Literary Criticism, 1975.

Grits, Fyodor S. “The Work of Viktor Shklovsky: An Analysis of Third Factory,” in Third Factory, 1977.

Sheldon, Richard. “Viktor Shklovsky and the Device of Ostensible Surrender,” introduction to Third Factory, 1977.