Zoo, or Letters Not About Love. A Sentimental Journey. Once Upon a Time. Letters to a Grandson

Viktor Shklovsky’s life could have served as the plot for an exciting novel. The texts included in this collection paint a fascinating portrait of the founder of the formal school in art, a master of intellectual provocation, who for nearly a hundred years remained at the center of the country’s cultural life.

Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (1893–1984) is a well-known writer, literary scholar, critic, and screenwriter, considered a leader of the formalists and the main organizer of OPoyAZ.

The collection includes three works by Viktor Shklovsky and a unique personal document, “Letters to a Grandson.” The book begins with a memoir novel created in the 1920s and devoted to Elsa Triolet (“Zoo, or Letters Not of Love”). “Sentimental Journey” is an autobiographical work written in exile and published in 1923 in Berlin. The difference between the hero and the author is several years: the first is still a young and somewhat naive person, ready to make sacrifices for his homeland and the revolution; the second, however, has already become disillusioned with his former ideals. “There Once Were” is a book that Shklovsky worked on throughout his long career. In it, he shares stories about Maxim Gorky, Vsevolod Ivanov, Sergei Eisenstein, and other contemporaries.

The book opens with a conversation between Viktor Borisovich and the writer-literary scholar Alexander Chudakov.

In Alexander Chudakov’s view, Shklovsky’s ideas about people, things, and events will continue to be studied, because a new vision is encountered rarely. The structure of Shklovsky’s prose will be examined just as carefully as the works of Rozanov and Andrei Bely.