ABSTRACT
The figure of thought that dominated the theoretical work of the so-called Russian Formalists, exerting a centripetal force on often disparate positions, was paradox. Paradox is most commonly, and deservingly, associated in this context with Viktor Shklovsky, for whom it became a form of rhetorical signature and, perhaps even more than that, the dominant device that drove all his critical, theoretical and occasional writings. Shklovsky’s identification with the paradoxical, which programmes for itself a certain degree of intellectual – and pragmatic – room for manoeuvre, is confirmed in his conduct ‘in life’, where what others might have characterised as dangerously contradictory behaviour in fact allowed him scope to negotiate his way to a venerable dotage on the cusp of the demise of the Soviet project.
