Publishers Weekly
496444.html?nid=3336
Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot
Viktor Shklovsky, trans. from the Russian by Shushan
Avagyan. Dalkey Archive, $14.95 paper (440p) ISBN
9781564784261
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. (Oct.)