Description
Book SynopsisThe Hamburg Score (Gamburgsky schyot) is “a very important concept,” wrote Viktor Shklovsky, the famous Russian literary critic and founder of Russian formalism, in 1928. All wrestlers cheat in performance and allow themselves to lose a fight at the behest of the organizers. But once a year wrestlers gather in Hamburg and fight in private among themselves. It is a long, hard, ugly competition. But this is the only way that they can reveal their real class. It is in this way that Shklovsky has the leading literary come to a reckoning of their real worth. This collection of essays and memoirs published in 1928 represents one of the last of the great critic’s works to be translated into English and will be a treasure for both Shklovsky scholars and lovers of literature alike.
Trade Review"A rambling, digressive stylist, Shklovsky throws off brilliant aperçus on every page . . . Like an architect's blueprint, it lays bare the joists and studs that hold up the house of fiction." -Washington Post
"In their heterogeneity, their subversive undercurrents, their way of achieving inclusion through use of digression while simultaneously using digressions as means of being pointed, the works of Viktor Shklovsky are so appropriate to our contemporary situation as to seem to have been written for us. His writings do precisely what he has said it is art's goal to do: they 'restore . . . sensation of the world,' they 'resurrect things and kill pessimism.'" -Lyn Hejinian
"Shklovsky is a disciple worthy of Sterne. He has appropriated the device of of infinitely delayed events, of the digression helplessly promising to return to the point, and of disguising his superbly controlled art with a breezy nonchalance. But it is not really Sterne that Shklovsky sounds like: it is an intellectual and witty Hemingway." -National Review
