While living in exile in Berlin, the formidable literary critic Viktor Shklovsky fell in love with Elsa Triolet. He fell into the habit of sending Elsa several letters a day, a situation she accepted under one condition: he was forbidden to write about love. Zoo, or Letters Not about Love is an epistolary novel born of this constraint, and although the brilliant and playful letters contained here cover everything from observations about contemporary German and Russian life to theories of art and literature, nonetheless every one of them is indirectly dedicated to the one topic they are all required to avoid: their author's own unrequited love.

Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) was both patriarch and enfant terrible of Formalism, a literary and film scholar, a fiction writer and the protagonist of other people's novels, instructor of an armored division and professor at the Art History Institute, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary. His work was deeply informed by his long and eventful life. He wrote for over seventy years, both as a very young man in the wake of the Russian revolution and as a ninety-year old, never tiring of analyzing the workings of literature. Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader is the first book that collects crucial writings from across Shklovsky's career, serving as an entry point for first-time readers. It presents new translations of key texts, interspersed with excerpts from memoirs and letters, as well as important work that has not appeared in English before.

This book examines the heritage of Victor Shklovsky in a variety of disciplines. To achieve this end, Slav N. Gratchev and Howard Mancing draw upon colleagues from eight different countries across the world—the United States, Canada, Russia, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Norway, and China—in order to bring the widest variety of points of view on the subject. Viktor Shklovsky’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy is more than just another collection of essays of literary criticism: the editors invited scholars from different disciplines—literature, cinematography, and philosophy—who have dealt with Shklovsky’s heritage and saw its practical application in their fields. Therefore, all of these essays are written in a variety of humanist academic and scholarly styles, all engaging and dynamic.

"Perhaps because he is such an unlikely Tolstoyan, Viktor Shklovsky's writing on Tolstoy is always absorbing and often brilliant." Russian Review

Like many of Shklovsky's works, Third Factory is not easily classified. In part it is a memoir of the three "Factories" that influenced his development as a human being and as a writer, yet the events depicted within the book are fictionalised and conveyed with the poetic verve and playfulness of form that have made Shklovsky a major figure in twentieth-century world literature. In addition to its fictional and biographical elements, Third Factory includes anecdotes, rants, social satire, literary theory, and anything else that Shklovsky, with an artist's unerring confidence, chooses to include.

In this essay, a leading figure of the Russian Formalist movement of the 1910s and 1920s enunciates the function of the arts: what they are and, more importantly, what they are not. His views of the other arts lead him into speculations about cinematography, which was just emerging at the time of writing, 1923.

First published in 1923, Knight's Move is a collection of articles and short critical pieces that Viktor Shklovsky, no doubt the most original literary critic and theoretician of the twentieth century, wrote for the newspaper The Life of Art between 1919 and 1921. With his usual epigrammatic, acerbic wit and genius, Shklovsky pillories the bad writers, artists, and critics of his time, especially those who used art as a political or social tool. And at no time is Shklovsky better than when he insists with indignation and outrage that "Art has always been free of life. Its flag has never reflected the color of the flag that flies over the city fortress." As fresh and revolutionary today as they were when written nearly a century ago, these pieces promise to infuriate an English-speaking readership as much as the Russian one of the 1920s.