Viktor Shklovsky

ELKOST Intl. Literary Agency handles world rights in Viktor Shklovsky estate

 

Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) was one of the leading literary scholars of the 20th century whose work is made particularly fascinating by the fact that he wrote for over 70 years, both as a very young man at the wake of the Russian revolution and as a ninety year old never tiring of analyzing the workings of literature. Thinly veiled, he appears as a protagonist in at least five Russian novels, e.g. as Shpolyansky in Bulgakov's The White Guard. His best-known essay, "Isskustvo kak priem" (Art as a Device/Technique/Method) was first published in 1917.

Shklovsky's work is aphoristic, essayistic, thought-provoking, and thus potentially interesting not only for literary scholars but for every intelligent reader.

Today's literary, film and cultural studies demonstrate an increasing interest in Viktor Shklovsky's work, as witnessed, for instance, by a 2005 special issue of Poetics Today and the 2012 English translation of the 1979 Italian biography Shklovsky: Witness to an Era. The new Russian biography by Berezin (published in 2014) features a rich array of primary material which has been inaccessible before. Several of his key texts have been translated recently into the English for the first time, such as Knight's Move (2005), Literature and Cinematography (2008), Energy of Delusion (2007), Bowstring (2011) and A Hunt for Optimism (2012).

His writings are fresh and exciting to contemporary readers.