As we exited the bell-tower where the bell-ringing school was located, I took a deep breath and it all in, the cool autumn air, the golden leaves, and the patient pines which ringed the park where the church was located. Simple scenes of life greeted me, people strolling through the park, others sitting on benches, an autumn wedding party walking with bottles of champagne to the next photo location.
In a foreign country, or perhaps it is something unique to Russia, simple events, phrases, scenes seem to take on a deeper poignancy. Perhaps because the routine and familiarity of life at home is replaced by a newness of sound and smell, you are “de-familiarized” from even the most simple aspects of daily life, allowing you to approach everything from cell-phones to bathrooms anew, as if you had been born the day before.
Of course, “defamiliarization” is not an idea foreign to the Russians…because it was invented by them. In a 1917 essay entitled “Art as Device,” the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky coined the word “ostranenie” to describe how poetic language differs from prose, both in form and in purpose. He wrote that prose language is simple, direct, and is for the purpose of conveying knowledge quickly, whereas poetic language intentionally is not simple, is not direct, and purposely hopes to cause the audience a delayed perception and understanding of its words.
“The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.”
The idea of defamiliarization explains the logic of 6th graders reading Shakespeare, of ee cummings’ unique phrasing, and even illogical contemporary art. Each of these things, whether it be a random assortment of words, or archaic phrasing, or a black square on a wall, make us stop, reconsider our surroundings, see simple things anew, as if for the first time.
Sometimes even words themselves, upon closer inspection, seem “enstranged” or foreign. Perhaps amidst the pages of an older book, or in a font that slightly changes the proportions of its printed letters, words can amaze with their sudden strangeness.
Soil. S oi l
Feat. Fea t
Heighten. H e i g hten
And then one thinks, how did these words become so common-place, so natural, when if one examines them closely, they seem so strange, so random an assortment of letters.
For me, Russia is a defamiliarization of life. When you arrive at the airport, and even already at the layover, the language begins to shift, not simply in form, but also in intonation, sound, intensity, emotion. The faces, the public culture of silence and introspection on public transportation, the arrangement and architecture of the buildings, the smell of the cars, the sounds of the street, the sharp divergence in dress, the unique and open conception of time, the different rituals of tea, chocolate and never-ending evenings and conversations. All of these things are not fundamentally new, the faces are human, the cars are cars, the buildings stand in similar proportion and structure, the tea is tea. But the sum of all the slight differences and novelties surrounding things that seem to be familiar, defamiliarize us from the world, and redirect our eye in a new light.
Perhaps Russia only has that effect on me, because of my personal connection to Russia, and its language and culture. Perhaps some French-American Jacques Smith might have an analogous experience if he returned to his ancestral Paris for the first time.
But perhaps Russia is unique in this respect. Externally, Russia seems familiar to the visiting European or American, it is not some sort of exotic Oriental India or China. But this external familiarity is fleeting, for beneath, Russia is a land of contradictions, beautifully irrational and unpredictable. As Winston Churchill said in the oft-quoted phrase, “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The final part of that quotation, which is often left out, remarks, “but perhaps there is a key.” That final phrase perfectly captures our false sense of comfort, our apparent familiarity with European Russia, our optimism that “perhaps there is a key,” that perhaps Russia is not so different after all. But thankfully for us, it is.
And so, as I stood at the doors of the church, and looked out upon the common scene of a day in the park, it seemed completely new to me, unfamiliar, and strikingly alive. My eyes immediately leapt to the young woman leaning over her stroller, tending to her baby; to the teenage couple glumly sitting next to each other on the public bench, the girl reaching over to play with her boyfriend’s hair, perhaps trying to smooth over or ignore the cause for their adolescent dis-connect; to the newly-wed couple and their wedding party gleefully breaking the silence of the garden, and the indulgent groom waiting for new wife to exhaust her desire to pose for the cameras on her big day. How quickly we outgrow strollers and run to our adolescent calling to be a rebel without a cause. And how quickly we are brought back to the stroller, without even realizing that he have returned to where we had begun.
I guess we do not recognize it because it is no longer familiar to our eyes.
