The term Verfremdungseffekt is rooted in the Russian Formalist notion of the device of making strange (приём остранения priyom ostraneniya), which literary critic Viktor Shklovsky claims is the essence of all art."Art as Device", translated by Benjamin Sher in Shklovsky, The Theory of Prose (Bloomington, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1991). Lemon and Reis's 1965 English translationLee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, eds. and trans., Russian Formalist Criticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). of Shklovsky's 1917 coinage as "defamiliarization", combined with John Willett's 1964 translation of Brecht's 1935 coinage as "alienation effect"—and the canonization of both translations in Anglophone literary theory in the decades since—has served to obscure the close connections between the two terms. Not only is the root of both terms "strange" (stran- in Russian, fremd in German), but both terms are unusual in their respective languages: ostranenie is a neologism in Russian, while Verfremdung is a resuscitation of a long-obsolete term in German. In addition, according to some accounts, Shklovsky's Russian friend playwright Sergei Tretyakov taught Shklovsky's term to Brecht during Brecht's visit to Moscow in the spring of 1935.For discussion, see Douglas Robinson, Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). For this reason, many scholars have recently taken to using estrangement to translate both terms: "the estrangement device" in Shklovsky, "the estrangement effect" in Brecht.
