Viktor Shklovsky - (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature 2016

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.

Review Quotes

"An extraordinary revelation of the unbelievable life and work of the man who invented formalism. Alexandra Berlina has done a great service to literature by rescuing these fragments of one of the most lively and irreverent minds of the last century. A book to return to, again and again. " --David Bellos, Meredith Howland Pyne Professor of French Literature, Princeton University, USA, and author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

"This collection allows all readers to approach the life and opinions of Viktor Shklovsky, one of the most fascinating figures of Russian cultural life in the twentieth century." --Tzvetan Todorov, historian, essayist, and author of The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre

"Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader, thoughtfully translated and edited by Alexandra Berlina, is a valiant reminder of the extraordinary versatility, humor, brilliance, and sensitivity the Formalist label has come to conceal. ... With this exemplary new anthology, Alexandra Berlina has helped free Shklovsky from the clanging of -isms, allowing new readers to appreciate his thought in the fullness of its diversity and beauty." --The Los Angeles Review of Books

"The reviewed omnibus, it must be added, challenges yet another well entrenched doxa concerning Shklovsky's work. Traditionally, it was regarded as consisting of two unequal parts: the impishly appealing pre-1929 formalist output followed by the appalling potboilers written after the author reluctantly renounced his formalist stance ... Berlina, though, managed to erase the perceived caesura between the early and late Shklovsky's writings not just by telling but by showing. Her Reader, assembling texts from all periods of his long writerly career, clearly highlighted the motivic iterations binding them together as well as their overall thematic unity." --The Russian Review

About the Author

Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) was one of the foremost literary critics and theorists of the 20th century. One of the founders of the Formalist movement in literary criticism, his seminal works include "Art as Method" (1917), Theory of Prose (1925), Third Factory (1926), classic studies of Tolstoy and Mayakovsky, and a memoir of the Russian civil-war era, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922 (1923).

Alexandra Berlina is Postdoctoral Researcher in Literary Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. Her translations of Brodsky's poems "Dido and Aeneas" and "You can't tell a gnat..." have won awards from the 'Willis Barnstone Translation Prize' and the 'The Joseph Brodsky/Stephen Spender Prize'. She is the author of Brodsky Translating Brodsky (Bloomsbury, 2014).