ABSTRACT
There are some terms which have gained such a wide currency among the historians of Russian literature and literary critics that a modern scholar seldom stops to ask what the content of the notion presumably signified by the term is or whether the term actually suits the concept. The application of the term becomes quite mechanical, with all the consequences outlined by Viktor Shklovskii in his analysis of the automatism of perception, “habitualization” and “defamiliarization” (Lemon and Reis 1965:11-13). In due course, as it sometimes happens with other objects of unquestioned veneration, both the term and the concept it supposedly implies go stale, and an adverse reaction to it begins to take shape.
