Energy Of Delusion Pa

One of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century, Viktor Shklovsky writes the critical equivalent of what Ross Chambers calls "loiterature"#xE2;#xAC;#x1D;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#xE2;#xAC;"s life and novels, applying the famous "formalist method" he invented in the 1920s to Tolstoy#xE2;#xAC;"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#xE2;#xAC;#x1D;how novels work and what they do. 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.

A leading figure in the Russian Formalist movement of the 1910s and 1920s, Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) had a profound effect on twentieth-century Russian literature and on literary criticism throughout the world. Several of his books have been translated into English, including Third Factory, Theory of Prose, and Zoo, or Letters Not about Love, all available from the Dalkey Archive Press. Over the next few years, Dalkey Archive will also publish the first English language editions of Shklovsky's Hamburg Account, Bowstring, and Lite