{{Short description|Russian oral form of narrative}} '''Skaz''' ({{lang-rus|сказ|p=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".<ref name="LE">{{cite encyclopedia|last=Cornwell|first=Neil|authorlink=|title=Skaz Narrative|encyclopedia=The Literary Encyclopedia|publisher=|location=|year=2005|url=https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1561|accessdate=2009-09-06}}</ref> The speech makes use of dialect and slang in order to take on the persona of a particular character.<ref name="EB">{{cite encyclopedia|last=|first=|authorlink=|title=skaz|encyclopedia=Britannica Online Encyclopedia|publisher=Britannica|location=|year=|url=http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/547338/skaz|accessdate=2009-09-06}}</ref> The peculiar speech, however, is integrated into the surrounding narrative, and not presented in quotation marks.<ref name="Potichnyj">{{cite book|title=The Soviet Union: Party and Society|editor=Peter J. Potichnyj|publisher=Cambridge University Press|location=Cambridge|year=1988|pages=108&ndash;9|isbn=0-521-34460-3|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=HOl-SqBouGIC&pg=PA107}}</ref> Skaz is not only a literary device, but is also used as an element in Russian monologue comedy.<ref name="CSP">{{cite journal|last=Mesropova|first=Olga|year=2004|title=Between Literary and Subliterary Paradigms: Skaz and Contemporary Russian Estrada Comedy|journal=Canadian Slavonic Papers|volume=46|issue=3–4|pages=417–434|doi=10.1080/00085006.2004.11092367|s2cid=194082040|url=https://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2F00085006.2004.11092367|accessdate=2009-09-06|url-access=subscription}}</ref>

Skaz was first described by the Russian formalist Boris Eikhenbaum in the late 1910s. In a couple of articles published at the time, Eikhenbaum described the phenomenon as a form of unmediated or improvisational speech.<ref name="RHE">{{cite encyclopedia|last=Hemenway|first=Elizabeth Jones|authorlink=|title=Skaz|encyclopedia=Russian History Encyclopedia|publisher=|location=|year=|url=http://www.answers.com/topic/skaz|accessdate=2009-09-06}}</ref> He applied it specifically to Nikolai Gogol's short story ''The Overcoat'', in a 1919 essay titled ''How Gogol's "Overcoat" Is Made''.<ref name="LE"/> Eikhenbaum saw skaz as central to Russian culture, and believed that a national literature could not develop without a strong attachment to oral traditions.<ref name="CSP"/> Among the literary critics who elaborated on this theory in the 1920s were Yury Tynyanov, Viktor Vinogradov, and Mikhail Bakhtin.<ref name="RHE"/> The latter insists on the importance of skaz in stylization,<ref>Bakhtin, M., "Discourse Typology in Prose" (1929), in ''Readings in Russian Poetics'', ed. L. Matejka and K. Pomorska (Ann Arbor, 1978), pp. 180-182.</ref> 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).<ref>{{cite book |last1=Bakhtin |first1=Mikhail |title=Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics|date=1984 |publisher=University of Minnesota Press |page=194}}</ref>

In the nineteenth century, the style was most prominently used by Nikolai Leskov and Pavel Melnikov, in addition to Gogol. Twentieth-century practitioners include Mikhail Bulgakov, Aleksey Remizov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Andrei Platonov, and Isaac Babel.<ref name="LE"/> 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.<ref name="Lodge">{{cite book|last=Lodge|first=David|author-link=David Lodge (author)|title=The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts|url=https://archive.org/details/artfictionillust00lodg|url-access=limited|publisher=Penguin|location=London|year=1992|pages=[https://archive.org/details/artfictionillust00lodg/page/n32 17]&ndash;20|chapter=Teenage Skaz|isbn=0-14-017492-3}}</ref> 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''.<ref name="Mullan">{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/nov/18/featuresreviews.guardianreview17|title=Talk this way|last=Mullan|first=John|author-link=John Mullan (academic)|date=2006-11-18|work=The Guardian|accessdate=2009-09-06}}</ref>

==See also== * ''The Malachite Box'' compiled by Pavel Bazhov, is a collection of stories with the titular genre of "''Skaz''" * Gawęda, Polish oral tradition * Saga

==References== {{reflist}}

==Further reading== *{{cite book|last=Hicks|first=Jeremy Guy|title=Mikhail Zoshchenko and the Poetics of Skaz|publisher=Astra|location=Nottingham|year=2000|isbn=0-946134-61-8|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=n3OAAAAAIAAJ}} *{{cite book|title=Handbook of Russian Literature|editor=Victor Terras|publisher=Yale University Press|location=New Haven, London|year=1985|isbn=0-300-03155-6|url=https://archive.org/details/handbookofrussia00terr}} *{{cite book|title=Skaz: Masters of Russian Storytelling|editor=Danielle Jones|publisher=Translit Publishing|location=Canada|year=2015|isbn=978-0-9812695-42|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=gAj1BgAAQBAJ}}

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Category:Literary terminology Category:Russian literature Category:Oral literature