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.

Zoo;: Or, Letters not about love

Shklovsky, Viktor

Literature & Fiction

Cornell University Press

Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) was both patriarch and enfant terrible of Formalism, a literary and film scholar, a fiction writer and the protagonist of other people's novels, instructor of an armored division and professor at the Art History Institute, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary. His work was deeply informed by his long and eventful life. He wrote for over seventy years, both as a very young man in the wake of the Russian revolution and as a ninety-year old, never tiring of analyzing the workings of literature.Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader is the first book that collects crucial writings from across Shklovsky's career, serving as an entry point for first-time readers. It presents new translations of key texts, interspersed with excerpts from memoirs and letters, as well as important work that has not appeared in English before.

Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader

History & Criticism

Bloomsbury Academic

Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) was both patriarch and enfant terrible of Formalism, a literary and film scholar, a fiction writer and the protagonist of other people's novels, instructor of an armored division and professor at the Art History Institute, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary. His work was deeply informed by his long and eventful life. He wrote for over seventy years, both as a very young man in the wake of the Russian revolution and as a ninety-year old, never tiring of analyzing the workings of literature.
Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader is the first book that collects crucial writings from across Shklovsky's career, serving as an entry point for first-time readers. It presents new translations of key texts, interspersed with excerpts from memoirs and letters, as well as important work that has not appeared in English before.

"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

Sentimental Journey: Memoirs 1917-1922 (Russian Literature)

Contemporary

Dalkey Archive Press

First published in 1923, Knight's Move is a collection of articles and short critical pieces that Viktor Shklovsky, no doubt the most original literary critic and theoretician of the twentieth century, wrote for the newspaper The Life of Art between 1919 and 1921. With his usual epigrammatic, acerbic wit and genius, Shklovsky pillories the bad writers, artists, and critics of his time, especially those who used art as a political or social tool. And at no time is Shklovsky better than when he insists with indignation and outrage that "Art has always been free of life. Its flag has never reflected the color of the flag that flies over the city fortress." As fresh and revolutionary today as they were when written nearly a century ago, these pieces promise to infuriate an English-speaking readership as much as the Russian one of the 1920s.

Knight's Move (Dalkey Archive Scholarly)

Essays & Correspondence

Dalkey Archive Press s favorite writer of them all.

Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar (Russian Literature)

As time has proven, Theory of Prose still remains one of the twentieth century’s most significant works of literary theory. It not only anticipates structuralism and poststructuralism, but poses questions about the nature of fiction that are as provocative today as they were in the 1920s. Founded on the concept of “making strange,” it lays bare the inner workings of fiction―especially the works of Cervantes, Tolstoy, Sterne, Dickens, Bely and Rozanov―and imparts a new way of seeing, of reading, and of interacting with the world.

On the Theory of Prose (Russian Literature)

Begun in 1929 under the title "New Prose," 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 "enemies of the people"--"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 "variegated" to be called a purely "Shklovskian book," "Hunt" is stylistically unpredictable, experimentally bold, and unapologetically ironic--making it one of the finest books in Shklovsky's body of work.

A Hunt for Optimism

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 at the behest of the organizers. But once a year wrestlers gather in Hamburg and fight in private among themselves. It is a long, hard, ugly competition. But this is the only way that they can reveal their real class. It is in this way that Shklovsky has the leading literary come to a reckoning of their real worth. This collection of essays and memoirs published in 1928 represents one of the last of the great critic's works to be translated into English and will be a treasure for both Shklovsky scholars and lovers of literature alike.

The Hamburg Score (Russian Literature)

Literary

Life of a Bishop's Assistant is a "rewritten" biography of the 18th century historical figure, Gavriil Dobrinin. The son of a priest, he became an assistant to a bishop before being fortunate to rise all the way to gubernia procurator. Despite the obscurity of Dobrinin, it is Shklovsky's narration of his story that takes center stage. Like Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, Life of a Bishop's Assistant is a notable example of experimentation with narrative form in the early twentieth century by one of its leading theorists.

Life of a Bishop's Assistant (Russian Literature)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shklovsky, Viktor. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Shklovsky, Viktor

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Shklovsky, Viktor. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Zoo;: Or, Letters not about love

Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader

Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader

Sentimental Journey: Memoirs 1917-1922 (Russian Literature)

Knight's Move (Dalkey Archive Scholarly)

Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar (Russian Literature)

On the Theory of Prose (Russian Literature)

A Hunt for Optimism

The Hamburg Score (Russian Literature)

Life of a Bishop's Assistant (Russian Literature)