The Hamburg Score

by Viktor Shklovsky, Shushan Avagyan (Translator)

Overview

The 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628971675
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	02/24/2017
Series:	Russian Literature Series
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

Editorial Reviews

12/19/2016
Russian author (Theory of Prose) and formalist critic Shklovsky (1893–1984) digs deep in this newly translated collection, originally published in 1928. He prefaces the work by calling for a “Hamburg score” for literature—a wrestling term for a special match where no one takes a dive and participants are all judged by their “true worth.” Only the savviest readers of Russian literature, however, will be able to authoritatively judge his sophisticated literary criticism. Thankfully, Shklovsky is an eclectic writer and some pieces are more broadly accessible, including some general criticism and well-observed memoir. His extended treatise on the feuilleton, a short piece published in a periodical, is enlightening, and his explorations of the form thereafter, especially a series of five feuilletons considering Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, are delightfully composed and rigorously argued. Indeed, the book’s most accessible section for nonspecialists is likely to be his writings on film. Shklovsky wrote several scripts in the 1920s, but he writes about the form and industry from enough of an outsider’s perspective to be appreciated by any lover of the arts. This book will be a treat for serious lovers of Russian literature and will further reward those who stick around for the more essayistic short pieces of essay and memoir. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

"The recollections of almost anyone who lived through the Russian Revolution have historical interest, and the memoirs of a major literary figure like Viktor Shklovsky are a priceless document." -Virginia Quarterly Review

"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

"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

From the Publisher