One of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century, Viktor
Shklovsky writes the critical equivalent of what Ross Chambers calls
"loiterature"--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's life and novels, applying the
famous "formalist method" he invented in the 1920s to Tolstoy'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--how novels work and what they do. Available
in English for the first time, 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.