Series:

Russian Literature

4 total works

Cover of A Sentimental Journey
"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

Cover of Life of a Bishop's Assistant

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.

Cover of Bowstring

Bowstring

by Viktor Shklovsky

Published 7 July 2011
Dalkey Archive Press s favorite writer of them all.

Cover of Energy of Delusion

Energy of Delusion

by Viktor Shklovsky

Published 20 September 2007
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.