ABSTRACT
Richard Sheldon, Viktor Shklovskii's most prolific English translator and critic, summed up his subject's different lives as follows: 'after showing members of Opoiaz how novels are assembled, Shklovskii would return to his unit and show his students there how to assemble armoured cars'. Neubauer and Stewart find 'Tristram Shendi Sterna i teoriia romana' to be Shklovskii's most convincing interpretation of a single text; they also point to Shklovskii's creative responses to Sterne and to the former's critical essays and autobiographical novels. One way to negotiate Shklovskii's complex relationship with literary history, in which he experimented with the roles of theoretician and practitioner, is to establish some of the facts of his reading practice and institutional affiliations. However, Shklovskii's interest in conveying his practical involvement in the formation of a Soviet canon is intermittent. An English language literary-theoretical canon has Shklovskii representing Russian Formalism, a term rejected by Opoiaz members.
