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Third Factory
Like many of Shklovsky's works, Third Factory cannot be neatly classified. In part it is a memoir of the three "Factories" that influenced his development as a human being and as a writer, yet the events depicted within the book are fictionalized and conveyed with the poetic verve and playfulness of form that have made Shklovsky a major figure in twentieth-century world literature. In addition to its fictional and biographical elements, Third Factory includes anecdotes, rants, social satire, literary theory, and anything else that Shklovsky, with an artist's unerring confidence, chooses to include.
106 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1926
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About the author
Victor Shklovsky
151 books116 followersViktor Borisovich Shklovsky (Russian: Виктор Борисович Шкловский) was a Soviet literary theorist, critic, writer, and pamphleteer.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
April 18, 2020
(Stoj ovde rečenico i pričuvaj stvari
dok ja dovedem ovamo
ostale reči.) (125)
Prvo je bilo crveno slonče. A onda fabrike. Njih tri. Ovo je (ne samo) o trećoj.
Da li je i književnost izbor nesloboda? Ili – koliko slobode je (u) književnosti dozvoljeno? Stvaralaštvo je konstrukcija nesloboda.
Gde nas vodi ljubav prema brzini? (A prema blizini?)
Ko lepi kolaže kolaža? Ko laže kolaže?
Gde se završavam ja a počinje tekst? Gde počinjem ja a završava se tekst? Kako (se) otpočinjemo?
Zašto pisati? Da – zašto? (I savršeni odgovor Tolstoja u pismu Leonidu Andrejevu.)
A Šklovski je poentirao – „Ja sa naukom plešem.”
Potpuno svestan rizika da zvučim krajnje patetično – tvrdim – da književnost ima srce, ovde bi kucalo.
dok ja dovedem ovamo
ostale reči.) (125)
Prvo je bilo crveno slonče. A onda fabrike. Njih tri. Ovo je (ne samo) o trećoj.
Da li je i književnost izbor nesloboda? Ili – koliko slobode je (u) književnosti dozvoljeno? Stvaralaštvo je konstrukcija nesloboda.
Gde nas vodi ljubav prema brzini? (A prema blizini?)
Ko lepi kolaže kolaža? Ko laže kolaže?
Gde se završavam ja a počinje tekst? Gde počinjem ja a završava se tekst? Kako (se) otpočinjemo?
Zašto pisati? Da – zašto? (I savršeni odgovor Tolstoja u pismu Leonidu Andrejevu.)
A Šklovski je poentirao – „Ja sa naukom plešem.”
Potpuno svestan rizika da zvučim krajnje patetično – tvrdim – da književnost ima srce, ovde bi kucalo.
December 2, 2010
Shklovsky was a major literary and social critic whose ideas about literary form (Formalism) aligned him with the Futurists of the Russian avant-garde in the teens and twenties (Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov etc.) This book of essays deals with the various 'factories' which processed himself as a human being. The first factory was his family and education. The second, the avant garde circles of writers and poets in the exciting Revolutionary period, who made fascinating inroads into the possibilities of language and form. The Third Factory was ostensibly the job he held at the Gosfilm after his literary school became officially 'politically retrograde', and publication became difficult. But in fact, it's the factory of the phase of life in which thought continues even after social usefulness (so deemed) is over. How we are processed by our times, and how it feels to be thus processed, this is the subject of Third Factory--how it is to be the vegetables from which the soup is extracted.
As always, Shklovsky's writing style is epigrammatic and pointed, funny and full of exceptional metaphor (like being the vegetables thrown away after the Soviet soup is made). This is the kind of book that I'll pick up and just read a page to be reinspired... Can you ever say a book like that is "read"? But I don't want to keep it on "currently reading" forever...
.
As always, Shklovsky's writing style is epigrammatic and pointed, funny and full of exceptional metaphor (like being the vegetables thrown away after the Soviet soup is made). This is the kind of book that I'll pick up and just read a page to be reinspired... Can you ever say a book like that is "read"? But I don't want to keep it on "currently reading" forever...
.
June 5, 2012
I remain deeply affected by Shklovsky. I have not been able to say precisely why. I had my hunches.
This particular edition of THIRD FACTORY concludes with a brief statement by Lyn Hejinian, the "Language" writer. She excavates the tremendous impact Shklovsky had on the early "Language" writers of the 1970s whose own experiments with sentences and paragraphs coincided with Richard Sheldon's translation of Shklovsky.
In just a few pages, Hejinian clarify the issue; a certain faith in sensibility that ties together words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs even under a highly strict reductionism. An eschewal of grandiloquence. An almost objectivist (to be anachronistic) commitment to the image as communicated in a condensed utterance.
These images remain with me. They form an object of small manufacture that lingers on and on.
It is also useful to note that "Language" writers, most of them anti-imperialist petite bourgeois white intellectuals (of American pedigree) would cleave to Shklovsky, the anti-Bolshevik anti-Tsarist. Restoring sensation of the world remains an urgent task whether that sensation has been deadened by dictatorships of capital or of bureaucrats.
Which is to say, Shklovsky has much to teach us about the devices of art in the mid-step of our own revolutionary moment.
This particular edition of THIRD FACTORY concludes with a brief statement by Lyn Hejinian, the "Language" writer. She excavates the tremendous impact Shklovsky had on the early "Language" writers of the 1970s whose own experiments with sentences and paragraphs coincided with Richard Sheldon's translation of Shklovsky.
In just a few pages, Hejinian clarify the issue; a certain faith in sensibility that ties together words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs even under a highly strict reductionism. An eschewal of grandiloquence. An almost objectivist (to be anachronistic) commitment to the image as communicated in a condensed utterance.
These images remain with me. They form an object of small manufacture that lingers on and on.
It is also useful to note that "Language" writers, most of them anti-imperialist petite bourgeois white intellectuals (of American pedigree) would cleave to Shklovsky, the anti-Bolshevik anti-Tsarist. Restoring sensation of the world remains an urgent task whether that sensation has been deadened by dictatorships of capital or of bureaucrats.
Which is to say, Shklovsky has much to teach us about the devices of art in the mid-step of our own revolutionary moment.
December 12, 2021
A kind of memoirish notebook, not particularly political, thank God, by a writer of revolutions whose penchant for self-flogging nears in its intensity those trembling heights of doom trod by Boswells everywhere. What can I say? I am drawn in by delusional, doubting, industrious folk.
At any rate, this really ought to be studied alongside Pound’s studies of Fenollosa and, later, Bucky Fuller’s work on synergy — that to pull together and construct something out of certain parts (sentences, say) is not only to produce something that is greater than its parts, but unpredicted by them, too. I enjoyed the experiment — like a journalistic shattered-mosaic Bildungsroman? — think it mostly successful, and look forward to more by this author.
At any rate, this really ought to be studied alongside Pound’s studies of Fenollosa and, later, Bucky Fuller’s work on synergy — that to pull together and construct something out of certain parts (sentences, say) is not only to produce something that is greater than its parts, but unpredicted by them, too. I enjoyed the experiment — like a journalistic shattered-mosaic Bildungsroman? — think it mostly successful, and look forward to more by this author.
April 28, 2022
3.5* rounded up
December 28, 2020
Brilliant but not all that captivating.
August 21, 2024
Gradually getting acclimated to Shklovsky’s idiosyncratic prose. What’s the value of a deep commitment to formalism in a period where art should be made in service / reflection of the class struggle? Perhaps a more relevant question today than you might at first think
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March 18, 2025este libro está lleno de triste insolencia
January 4, 2011
Viktor Shklovsky writes:
I speak in a voice grown horse from silence and feuilletons. I’ll begin with a piece that has been lying around for a long time.
The way you assemble a film by attaching to the beginning either a piece of exposed negative or a strip from another film.
I am attaching a piece of theoretical work. The way a soldier crossing a stream holds his rifle high.
It will be completely dry. Dry as a cough.
During the eighteenth century, and at the beginning of the nineteenth, to tell an anecdote meant to relate an interesting fact about something.
For instance, to relate that the Krupp factory is currently building a diesel engine with 2,000 horsepower in one cylinder would have been, from the viewpoint of that time, an anecdote. An anecdotal story, from the viewpoint of that time, was also a story consisting of separate facts tenuously connected. There were even such things as philosophical anecdotes.
Wit – the unexpected denouement, for instance – had no place in the anecdote of that time. Now we describe an anecdote as a short novella with a denouement. From our viewpoint, to ask after hearing an anecdote, “But what happened next?” is an absurdity, but then that is the viewpoint of our time.
In the old days, one anecdotal fact was normally followed by another. In the old anecdote, one responded above all to the attractiveness of the fact, to the material, whereas in the modern anecdote we respond mainly to the structure.
This conflict – or, rather, the alternation – of perception from one aspect of a work to another – can be traced easily.
I have no desire to be witty.
I have no desire to construct a plot.
I am going to write about things and thought.
To compile quotations.
The time has changed course once again and the word “anecdote,” once applied to a witty story, will soon be defined in terms of the various facts being printed in the this-and-that columns of the newspapers. Each separate moment of a play is becoming a separate, self-contained entity. Structure is usually missing. When it does creep into a piece of work, it is promptly killed; moreover the crime goes unnoticed by the public. And the crime is pointless: the victim is already dead. The interest in the adventure novel which we are now witnessing does not contradict the thought just expressed. What we have in the adventure novel is a type of “stringing” in which there is no orientation toward the connecting thread.
At the present time, we perceive memoirs as literature; we respond to them as something esthetic.
This is clearly not due to interest in the revolution, because people are avid to read even memoirs having nothing to do with the revolutionary epoch.
It goes without saying that plot-oriented prose still exists and will continue to exist, but it has been consigned to the attic.
I speak in a voice grown horse from silence and feuilletons. I’ll begin with a piece that has been lying around for a long time.
The way you assemble a film by attaching to the beginning either a piece of exposed negative or a strip from another film.
I am attaching a piece of theoretical work. The way a soldier crossing a stream holds his rifle high.
It will be completely dry. Dry as a cough.
During the eighteenth century, and at the beginning of the nineteenth, to tell an anecdote meant to relate an interesting fact about something.
For instance, to relate that the Krupp factory is currently building a diesel engine with 2,000 horsepower in one cylinder would have been, from the viewpoint of that time, an anecdote. An anecdotal story, from the viewpoint of that time, was also a story consisting of separate facts tenuously connected. There were even such things as philosophical anecdotes.
Wit – the unexpected denouement, for instance – had no place in the anecdote of that time. Now we describe an anecdote as a short novella with a denouement. From our viewpoint, to ask after hearing an anecdote, “But what happened next?” is an absurdity, but then that is the viewpoint of our time.
In the old days, one anecdotal fact was normally followed by another. In the old anecdote, one responded above all to the attractiveness of the fact, to the material, whereas in the modern anecdote we respond mainly to the structure.
This conflict – or, rather, the alternation – of perception from one aspect of a work to another – can be traced easily.
I have no desire to be witty.
I have no desire to construct a plot.
I am going to write about things and thought.
To compile quotations.
The time has changed course once again and the word “anecdote,” once applied to a witty story, will soon be defined in terms of the various facts being printed in the this-and-that columns of the newspapers. Each separate moment of a play is becoming a separate, self-contained entity. Structure is usually missing. When it does creep into a piece of work, it is promptly killed; moreover the crime goes unnoticed by the public. And the crime is pointless: the victim is already dead. The interest in the adventure novel which we are now witnessing does not contradict the thought just expressed. What we have in the adventure novel is a type of “stringing” in which there is no orientation toward the connecting thread.
At the present time, we perceive memoirs as literature; we respond to them as something esthetic.
This is clearly not due to interest in the revolution, because people are avid to read even memoirs having nothing to do with the revolutionary epoch.
It goes without saying that plot-oriented prose still exists and will continue to exist, but it has been consigned to the attic.
September 13, 2021
I wasn’t particularly impressed with this work. However, I am particularly impressed with Shklovsky and have read and cherished almost everything someone has been kind enough to translate. I wish more more authors blended creative and critical genres the way Shklovsky did.
March 6, 2007
Self-indulgent and tedious, this part biography, part fiction, part poetry, part literary criticism collection isn't worth anyone's time.
January 13, 2008
Stark, formalist & advocate of Soviet Futurism. Mediations on the Factory as a metaphor for aesthetics.
March 22, 2008
A great Russian Formalist genre busting read: "Take me, third factory of life!"
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September 11, 2015"My brain is busy with the daily grind. The high point of the day is morning tea. And that is too bad: some artists shed blood and sperm. Others urinate. Net weight is all that matters to the buyer."
February 1, 2012
Not the factories you might think, but three stages of life. I'm fine with the abandonment of plot when the results are as interesting as this combination of memoir, novel, and literary theory.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews