Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot [Paperback]

Viktor Shklovsky (Author), Shushan Avagyan (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 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 (andhow great criticism might be) that is as timely today as ever.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Just in time for the publication of two new translations of War and Peace comes the first publication in English of what is arguably the greatest critical work on Tostoy's masterpiece. Soviet critic Shklovsky (1893-1984) is the author of Third Factory and many other critical books. (They are slowly being translated into English and released by Dalkey Archive.) All are written in Shklovsky's inimitable, signature digressive style, but none perhaps has as grand a concentric development as this book, which radiates out from War and Peace and into Pushkin, Turgenev, the Opayaz period, Anna Karenina, the Neva, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, the Bible, Chekhov, Picasso, and many, many more figures, books, rivers, places, things. The result is a deep, and deeply satisfying, meditation on the form of the novel, and on what reading novels "now" (Shklovsky finished the book at the end of his life) is like. Shklovsky takes his title from a letter of Tolstoy's regarding "an earthly, spontaneous energy that's impossible to invent"; he has that energy in spades here, delightful even if one has been unable to finish Tolstoy's novel.
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Review

"A rambling, digressive stylist, Shklovsky throws off brilliant apercus on every page . . . Like an architect's blueprint, [he] lays bare the joists and studs that hold up the house of fiction." --Michael Dirda, Washington Post

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

"Shklovsky is a disciple worthy of Sterne. He has appropriated the device of infinitely delayed event, of the digression helplessly promising to return to the point, and of disguising his superbly controlled art with a breezy nonchalance. But it is not really Sterne that Shklovsky sounds like: it is an intellectual and witty Hemingway." --Guy Davenport, National Review

"A rambling, digressive stylist, Shklovsky throws off brilliant aperçus on every page . . . Like an architect's blueprint, [he] lays bare the joists and studs that hold up the house of fiction." --Michael Dirda, Washington Post

"Shklovsky is a disciple worthy of Sterne. He has appropriated the device of infinitely delayed event, of the digression helplessly promising to return to the point, and of disguising his superbly controlled art with a breezy nonchalance. But it is not really Sterne that Shklovsky sounds like: it is an intellectual and witty Hemingway." --Guy Davenport, National Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 428 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press (July 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564784266
• ISBN-13: 978-1564784261
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #699,462 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)