It’s terribly distasteful and revolting. I am now going back to the boring and tasteless Anna Karenina, with the sole desire to finish and free up some time . . . I am fed up with my Anna; and am dealing with her as with a pupil who has turned out to be unmanageable. Everything is vile and all must be reworked and rewritten, everything that has been printed needs to be crossed out, dropped and disavowed.
Such were the agonies of Leo Tolstoy about one of his two great novels, with whose central character, writes Viktor Shklovsky, the great man fell in love — as have many readers. Later he said, ‘I am proud of its architecture; the structure is unified not through plot or the relations of the characters, but through an inner unity.’
Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky (1893-1984), himself one of Russia’s notable novelists, was a superior critic. He liked oblique. He says things like this: ‘I can put this sentence anywhere I like in my book; in fact, I’ll put it right here or anywhere — it’s like when a person is headed somewhere without having an address.’ As a reviewer, a kind of critic, who knows how often he fails, I was especially struck by this:
Most mistakes in literary criticism, I think, occur when people approach so close to the poetic horse — Pegasus — and mount it so swiftly that they miss the saddle and end up on the other side of the horse. Then they get up, look around, the horse is still standing there, but the person is not in the saddle.
Let’s approach this horse. Energy of Delusion is a book about many things and many writers, from Homer and Boccaccio, to Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Chekhov; but Shklovsky loves Tolstoy, and is also in love with Anna, so there is much to learn here.
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