Böcker av Viktor Shklovsky

While living in exile in Berlin, the formidable literary critic Viktor Shklovsky fell in love with Elsa Triolet. He fell into the habit of sending Elsa several letters a day, a situation she accepted under one condition: he was forbidden to write about love. Zoo, or Letters Not about Love is an epistolary novel born of this constraint, and although the brilliant and playful letters contained here cover everything from observations about contemporary German and Russian life to theories of art and literature, nonetheless every one of them is indirectly dedicated to the one topic they are all required to avoid: their author's own unrequited love.

"Shklovsky's audacity gave him the freedom to take apart Cervantes and Sterne, Gogol and Tolstoy, with a brilliance that still dazzles ninety years later."-The Nation

The Hamburg Score (Gamburgsky schyot) is "a very important concept," wrote Viktor Shklovsky, the famous Russian literary critic and founder of Russian formalism, in 1928. All wrestlers cheat in performance and allow themselves to lose a fight for the organizers. But once a year wrestlers gather in Hamburg and fight in private among themselves.

A collection of Shklovsky's key criticism, taken from the major theoretical writings as well as from letters and memoirs, and presented in new translations with introductory material and commentary.

Begun in 1929 under the title "e;New Prose"e; and drastically revised after Vladimir Mayakovsky's sudden death, A Hunt for Optimism (1931) circles obsessively around a single scene of interrogation in which a writer is subjected to a show trial for his unorthodoxy. Using multiple perspectives, fragments, and aphorisms, and bearing the vulnerability of both the Russian Jewry and the anti-Bolshevik intelligentsia-who had unwittingly become the "e;enemies of the people"e;Hunt satirizes Soviet censorship and the ineptitude of Soviet leaders with acerbic panache. Despite criticism at the time that it lacked unity and was too "e;variegated"e; to be called a purely "e;Shklovskian book,"e; Hunt is stylistically unpredictable, experimentally bold, and unapologetically ironic-making it one of the finest books in Shklovsky's body of work.

"e;Myths do not flow through the pipes of history,"e; writes Viktor Shklovsky, "e;they change and splinter, they contrast and refute one another. The similar turns out to be dissimilar."e; Published in Moscow in 1970 and appearing in English translation for the first time, Bowstring is a seminal work, in which Shklovsky redefines estrangement (ostranenie) as a device of the literary comparatist-the "e;person out of place,"e; who has turned up in a period where he does not belong and who must search for meaning with a strained sensibility. As Shklovsky experiments with different genres, employing a technique of textual montage, he mixes autobiography, biography, memoir, history, and literary criticism in a book that boldly refutes mechanical repetition, mediocrity, and cultural parochialism in the name of art that dares to be different and innovative. Bowstring is a brilliant and provocative book that spares no one in its unapologetic project to free art from conventionality.

"One would be hard pressed to decide whether the book is more notable for what it says or for how it says it . . . Viktor Shklovsky's A Sentimental Journey is highly recommended." Library Journal