Bøger af 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.

Like many of Shklovsky's works, Third Factory cannot be neatly 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 fictionalized 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.

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

"Perhaps because he is such an unlikely Tolstoyan, Viktor Shklovsky's writing on Tolstoy is always absorbing and often brilliant." Russian Review

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.