Skaz

Skaz (Russian: сказ, IPA: [ˈskas]) is a Russian oral form of narrative. The word comes from skazátʹ, "to tell", and is also related to such words as rasskaz, "short story" and skazka, "fairy tale".[1] The speech makes use of dialect and slang in order to take on the persona of a particular character.[2] The peculiar speech, however, is integrated into the surrounding narrative, and not presented in quotation marks.[3] This is not only a literary device, but is also used as an element in Russian monologue comedy.[4]

Skaz was first described by the Russian formalist Boris Eikhenbaum in the late 1910s. In a couple of articles published at this time, the literary scholar described the phenomenon as a form of unmediated or improvisational speech.[5] He applied it specifically to Nikolai Gogol's short story The Overcoat, in a 1919 essay titled How Gogol's "Overcoat" Is Made.[1] Eikhenbaum saw skaz as central to Russian culture, and believed that a national literature could not develop without a strong attachment to oral traditions.[4] Among the literary critics who elaborated on this theory in the 1920s were Yury Tynyanov, Viktor Vinogradov, and Mikhail Bakhtin.[5] The latter insists on the importance of skaz in stylization,[6] and distinguishes between skaz as a simple form of objectified discourse (as found in Turgenev or Leskov), and double-voiced skaz, where an author's parodistic intention is evident (as found in Gogol or Dostoevsky).[7]

In the nineteenth century, the style was most prominently used by Nikolai Leskov, in addition to Gogol. Twentieth-century proponents include Aleksey Remizov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Andrei Platonov, and Isaac Babel.[1] The term is also used to describe elements in the literature of other countries; in recent times it has been popularised by the British author and literary critic David Lodge.[8] John Mullan, a professor of English at University College London, finds examples of skaz in J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little.[9]