Shklovsky vs. Jakobson: A War of Languages

Abstract

The longstanding friendship between Viktor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson, which gave way to a gradual cooling of relations and finally arrived at a complete rupture, has for almost a century been the subject of numeral scholarly researches. The reality of personal conflict and the obviousness of the multiple psychological, biographical and historical causes that made this conflict inevitable have nearly completely obscured the persistent theoretical dimension of the evolving relationship between the two men. The story of their relationship may be interpreted as a history of the clash of two perspectives on the development of the humanities, as a history of clash of two metalanguages or of two ways to see the relationships between poetic language and language, between the subject and language, and between language and reality. Refs 22.