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

Literature & Fiction

Viktor Shklovsky

Contemporary

Dalkey Archive Press

Like many of Shklovsky's works, Third Factory is not easily classified. In part it is a memoir of the three "Factories" that influenced his development as a human being and as a writer, yet the events depicted within the book are fictionalised and conveyed with the poetic verve and playfulness of form that have made Shklovsky a major figure in twentieth-century world literature. In addition to its fictional and biographical elements, Third Factory includes anecdotes, rants, social satire, literary theory, and anything else that Shklovsky, with an artist's unerring confidence, chooses to include.

Third Factory

Literary

One of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century, Viktor Shklovsky writes the critical equivalent of what Ross Chambers calls “loiterature”―writing that roams, playfully digresses, moving freely between the literary work and the world. In Energy of Delusion, a masterpiece that Shklovsky worked on over thirty years, he turns his unique critical sensibility to Tolstoy’s life and novels, applying the famous “formalist method” he invented in the 1920s to Tolstoy’s massive body of work, and at the same time taking Tolstoy (as well as Boccaccio, Pushkin, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev) as a springboard to consider the devices of literature―how novels work and what they do. Available in English for the first time, Energy of Delusion provides contemporary readers with a new way of thinking about how great literature is written (and how great criticism might be) that is as timely today as ever.

Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot

History & Criticism

Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin’s Language brings together the first English translation of the Russian Formalist and Futurist writings on Lenin’s revolutionary language. The book includes the Russian Formalists’ (Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, Yuri Tynyanov, Boris Tomashevsky, Lev Yakubinsky, and Boris Kazansky) most ‘political’ texts, first published in 1924 in the journal of the Left Front of the Arts (edited by Mayakovsky). Together with this collection, the publication also includes Futurist poet Alexei Kruchenykh’s Devices of Lenin’s Speech, from 1925. Indispensable for any serious research dealing with the relationship between revolutionary politics and artistic forms, these writings had remained a marginal note, both in studies on avant-garde art, and in much literature on Formalist theory.\nThe publication is edited by Sezgin Boynik, who wrote an extensive introduction to the translations by contextualising the experiments of the Russian avant-garde through theories of conjuncture, or more precisely, the theory of contemporaneity within the revolutionary moment. Darko Suvin in his afterword discusses the actuality (and limits) of Lenin and Formalists in the shadow of never-ending warfare.\nWith this book, Rab-Rab Press is proud to present the first English translation of the most interesting project of political Formalism and avant-garde theory in the twentieth century.\nTranslated by Thomas Campbell and Mikko Viljanen, the book is designed by Ott Kagovere.

Coiled Verbal Spring: Devices of Lenin's Language

Sezgin Boynik

Darko Suvin

Lev Yakubinsky

Aleksei Kruchenykh

Boris Eikhenbaum

Boris Kazansky

Boris Tomashevsky

Yuri Tynyanov

Rab-Rab Press

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Books by Viktor Shklovsky