Viktor Shklovsky: Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar (1970/2011) [RU, EN]

“Myths do not flow through the pipes of history,” writes Viktor Shklovsky, “they change and splinter, they contrast and refute one another. The similar turns out to be dissimilar.” Published in Moscow in 1970 and appearing in English translation for the first time, Bowstring is a seminal work, in which Shklovsky redefines estrangement (ostranenie) as a device of the literary comparatist—the “person out of place,” who has turned up in a period where he does not belong and who must search for meaning with a strained sensibility. As Shklovsky experiments with different genres, employing a technique of textual montage, he mixes autobiography, biography, memoir, history, and literary criticism in a book that boldly refutes mechanical repetition, mediocrity, and cultural parochialism in the name of art that dares to be different and innovative. Bowstring is a brilliant and provocative book that spares no one in its unapologetic project to free art from conventionality.

Тетива. О несходстве сходного
Publisher Sovetskii pisatel’, Moscow, 1970

English edition
Translated by Shushan Avagyan
Publisher Dalkey Archive Press, 2011
John F. Byrne Literature series
ISBN 1564784258, 9781564784254
456 pages

Review (Jonathan Foltz, Los Angeles Review of Books)
Review (Bruce Stone, Cinq Magazine)

Publisher (EN)
Google books (EN)

Tetiva: o neskhodstve skhodnogo (Russian, 1970, HTML), Alt link.
Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar (English, 2011, EPUB), Alt link.