Masturbation as Device: Fantasy and Transgression in Viktor Shklovsky’s Subversive Editing

Higher seminar in Literature and English

This talk offers a new reading of Shklovsky’s perhaps best known 1923 work, Zoo, or Letters Not about Love, a modernist take on the epistolary novel. Written and first published during his exile in Berlin, Shklovsky subsequently published four thoroughly revised editions.
While the Berlin edition of the book introduces the early-Soviet ideal of sexuality as comradeship, it also engages with modernist tropes that link sexual desire and sexual frustration to creativity. On the other hand, the 1924 Leningrad edition of the book paints an overtly transgressive image, presenting the New Soviet Men, born from the revolution, as creatures devoid of control over their own bodies and sexuality.
The paper examines the textual variants of Zoo, alongside Shklovsky’s cameo in Andrei Platonov’s 1926 pamphlet “The Anti-Sexus” as a proponent of a fictional electromagnetic masturbation device that promises to relieve compulsive sexual urges that prevent people from serving their social and economic functions.