The defamiliarizing method in ELIF Batuman’s academic dilogy

Abstract

The paper discusses how Viktor Shklovsky’s defamiliarizing method found reception in the books of the famous American Slavist Elif Batuman. These books – a collection of literary essays The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010) and a novel The Idiot (2017) – can be discussed as an academic “dilogy”. In the first book, Batuman mentions Shklovsky several times, in particular, his collection of essays Knight’s Move, in which the scholar draws an analogy between the movement of the chess figure and the history of literature. The metaphor of the “knight’s move” serves as one of the expressions of his defamiliarization method. The American scholar, who does not need to avoid censorship, implements this method mainly in unexpected parallels, which allow her to deconstruct the common perception of the Russian classics. The book’s “adventurous” subtitle, its cover in a comic style, its humor – all these elements participate in the defamiliarization strategy and allow the author to interweave subtly her original remarks about literature. Like Shklovsky, Batuman also blends her life and fiction, so her book is a symbiosis of a reader’s autobiography, a philological research with elements of a travelogue and an ironic narrative about contemporary American universities. The book’s three main plots focus on Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. The main theme of the Pushkin plot is “Oriental” as Batuman finds numerous comic parallels between Pushkin’s “A Journey to Arzrum” and her own journey to Turkey and, following Daniil Kharms and Abram Terz, literalizes the metaphor of Pushkin’s omnipresence in an attempt to show his meaning in the Russian culture. In Tolstoy’s reception, the defamiliarizing method reveals itself in the comic absurd, so inconsistent with Tolstoy’ style and his status in world literature. Batuman replicates some Shklovsky’s defamiliarizing findings: for example, the materialization of Tolstoy’s greatness through a comparison of the weight of his writings with the weight of the whale. Dostoevsky’s plot unfolds in the final chapter called, like the book, “The Possessed”. Batuman uses the title of the first translation of Dostoevsky’s novel Besy into English to create an allusion to it without a “demonic” constituent (which later translations, Demons or The Devils, contained) and to emphasize her own possession with Russian literature. As for Shkolvsky, it is most important for Batuman to perceive fiction through the prism of her own life. Having learned from Dostoevsky’s archives that Stavrogin is Myshkin’s “diabolic double”, the author develops this idea in her autobiographical novel The Idiot, where she ironically interprets the image of the demon-saint. Besides this (self)-ironic attitude, Shklovsky’s method is once again present in this novel in existentializing the reader’s experience, in introducing information from different fields of knowledge and mainly in the overall metafictional approach that blends autobiography, philology and fiction.