Zoo, or Letters Not About Love

The program is conducted by PhD in Philology Alexander Galushkin and program author Ekaterina Kalinina.
The book text is read by Vladislav Vetrov and Irina Brazgovka.
Sound engineer — Marina Karpenko

In the foreword to his book, Viktor Shklovsky wrote:
“... At first I intended to give a series of essays about Russian Berlin, then it seemed interesting to connect these essays with some common theme. I took ‘The Menagerie’ (Zoo)—the title of the book had already been born, but it didn’t connect the pieces. Then I had the idea to make something like a novel in letters.
For a novel in letters, you need a motivation—why these people should be writing to each other. The usual motivation is love and parting. I took this motivation in its particular case: the letters are written by a loving person to a woman who has no time for him. Here I needed a new detail: since the main material of the book is not about love, I introduced a prohibition on writing about love. It turned out that what I expressed in the subtitle was ‘Letters not about love.’
Then the book began writing itself; it demanded connections of the material—that is, a love-lyrical line and a descriptive line. Obedient to the will of fate and to the material, I linked these things with comparison: all descriptions then became metaphors of love. ...”
In the five-part radio version of the famous book by Viktor Shklovsky, we will hear about the unusual fate of the writer himself, Viktor Shklovsky— whose work and life twists could have been the plot of a separate adventurous novel. “Russian Berlin” of the 1920s in the book “Zoo” is a gallery of portraits of famous Russian writers and artists—about whom Viktor Shklovsky tells as about fellow travelers by fate and calling.
The authors of the program Ekaterina Kalinina and literary scholar Alexander Galushkin attempt to restore the true real picture of the writer’s life in emigration and the details of his biography in the context of his literary work.