ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Viktor Shklovskii's models for literary history, asking how reading Sterne and other eighteenth-century English novelists could have affected Shklovskii's discourse on influence and reception. Shklovskii's ability to experiment and to take a playful approach to literary history did not mean the issue was not a serious one. Shklovskii is certainly aware that his resurrection of Sterne — and the eighteenth-century novel from England — is a khod konia in a narrative of Russian literary history. Literary history becomes a set of parallel lines, each linking an older author to a younger. Shklovskii's lines of literary history may be tangled, but they still demonstrate broadly linear connections between writers, genres or devices; as such, his linear representations of history in terms of threads or chains, for example, are not particularly innovative. One final concept which works against literary history is that of the zapas or sklad.
