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In the early 1920s, formalist literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky fled Russia, like many other writers whose work or political activities were discordant with the ideologies of the new regime. Shklovsky went to Berlin, where there was a community of Russian expatriates, all of whom had fled the new regime. While he was there, Shklovsky fell in love with a woman named Elsa Triolet, who he called by her diminutive, Alya. He began to write her letters. He began to write her multiple letters every day. Alya would put up with this deluge under one condition: he could write to her about anything except love. The letters between the two—most of them written by Shklovsky, with an occasional response from Alya—were collected and bound together as the book Zoo, or Letters Not about Love.
The title, Zoo, refers in part to the area of Berlin where many Russian émigrés lived and in part to a poem by Velimir Khlebnikov that serves as the epigraph to the book. In the poem, Khlebnikov lists various creatures trapped together behind the iron bars of their cages, different in all aspects except that they are confined in the same zoo. This is a metaphor perhaps too apt for both the émigrés and exiles who lived in Berlin, and for Zoo itself, a coterie of texts that discuss far-flung topics, connected only by the book that physically binds them together.
The letters between Shklovsky and Alya have no pattern. Across multiple letters, there is a recurring discussion of how pants should be creased and why (a theme Alya never responds to). One letter is a single sentence (“I lay at your feet like a rug, Alya!”); another details Shklovsky’s feelings toward a particular publisher; yet another concerns a conversation between floodwaters and a pair of Alya’s slippers; and the final letter is a plea, addressed to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, that Shklovsky may be allowed to move back home to Russia. In her sporadic responses, Alya doesn’t reference or reply to anything Shklovsky has mentioned.
Each letter in the book is prefaced by a short paragraph, sometimes a single sentence, that serves as a synopsis. Above the first letter of the book, in which Alya complains to her sister in Moscow of a man who is sending her multiple letters a day, Shklovsky writes: “Written by a woman in Berlin to her sister in Moscow. Her sister is very beautiful, with glistening eyes. The letter is offered as an introduction. Just listen to the calm voice!” The text is aware of itself as text, a letter not just passed between two people, but on display for other readers. Shklovsky explains the letter passed between the two sisters; the book opens with Alya’s words preempted by Shklovsky’s interpretation. In doing this, he adds a layer to the texture of the book, as the fragments in Zoo begin to speak back to one another, commenting on the content and being recursive in their self-referentiality.
Sometimes these prefaces are a few clipped sentences. At other times they are written as if explaining the contents of the letter to a student. Letter Ten, which concerns the imagined conversation between a flood and a pair of Alya’s slippers, opens with the explanation that this is “about a certain flood, in Berlin; in point of fact, the whole letter constitutes the realization of a metaphor; in this letter, the author attempts to be light-hearted and cheerful, but I know for sure that in the next letter he won’t be able to carry it off.” The author of the preface declares himself an authority over the author of the letters, positioning himself as an editor, a commenter outside of the text. The author of the prefaces occasionally criticizes both the letter writer and the editor who complied the book, as in the preface to Letter Twenty-Two, when he writes: “Unexpected and, in my opinion, utterly superfluous . . . perhaps the compiler of the book deemed the letter indispensable for reasons of variety.” There is a gesture to a compiler, a person stitching the book together out of fragments, someone taking real letters that were sent between two people and arranging them for an outside readership, another editor who seems to have greater authority over the book than Shklovsky himself, even if that editor is Shklovsky himself. In Letter Eighteen, Shklovsky admits, “I am completely bewildered, Alya! This is the problem: I’m writing letters to you and, at the same time, I’m writing a book. And what’s in the book and what’s in life have gotten hopelessly jumbled.” The lines between literature and life, if they ever existed at all, are beginning to blur.
Letter Nineteen erases this line altogether. Shklovsky writes in its preface that it is the best of the whole book. “But don’t read it now,” he writes. “Skip it and read it after you’ve finished the book.” As he continues this introduction, he changes his mind. It is not adequate to skip the letter and return to it later. “Thus, dear friends, don’t read this letter. To that end, I’m deliberately crossing it out with a red pencil. So that you don’t read it by mistake.”
What is the purpose of including a text that is not supposed to be read? Shklovsky himself answers the question: he is purposefully creating layers of irony. He warns us, however, to remember that the letter was written by Alya and that to think anything else is a mistake. “However,” he concludes, “you will make neither head nor tail of all this. You see, the crucial sections were pruned by the proofreader.” So many hands, he tells us, have touched this text before our own. This book, with its prefaces and editorial commentaries, was made to be read, even as the crucial sections are erased and altered, thereby confounding the reader.
The next pages, the entirety of Alya’s letter, are crossed out with large Xs, though the content of the letter is still legible behind them. In some English editions, the Xs are red, just as Shklovsky said they would be. In this new edition, the Xs that slash the pages are black. This change, however slight, is another contradiction within the text, another reminder that what we hold in our hands both is and is not real correspondence between real people. In the preamble, Shklovsky declares he will cross out the letter with a red pencil. In the editions with red ink, the editors and publishers honor Shklovsky’s declaration. In this version, the black ink reminds us that even the previous versions were lies. There was no red pencil held in Shklovsky’s hand, just the red ink printed on the page by a publishing house. That earlier editions used red ink makes the use of black ink all the more striking, as the new editorial decision distances the text from itself. The black ink contradicts Shklovsky; Shklovsky claims these letters are authentic, even as we see them marked by editors, proofreaders, and publishers.
In some letters—in some prefaces and introductions—we are told that these are the actual letters exchanged between Shklovsky and Alya. In the notes, we are told that in different editions, letters have been edited, their order rearranged, some of them left out of the book completely. In the preface to Letter Nineteen, Shklovsky scolds us that it would be foolish to think anyone but Alya wrote the letter. In another letter, Shklovsky writes that he invented this woman, this Alya, out of whole cloth. She never existed, he writes. The woman is the realization of a metaphor. Elsewhere, he writes that this woman, the real, living Elsa Triolet, has been made famous by the letters she wrote to him. The publication of the book marked the beginning of her literary career.
Zoo is a collection of letters that were exchanged between two real, breathing, existing people. It is also a book that has been edited and pruned, until all claims to authenticity ought to raise the suspicion that we might not know what authenticity means anymore. Zoo is a book that takes the idea of what a book is and muddies the waters. This book is not a novel. This book is not nonfiction. The book both is and is not a collection of letters exchanged between two people who were not in love. This book is an artifact of defamiliarization, disturbing the boundaries between what is in a text and all the world that we imagine exists outside of it.
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As a literary theorist, Shklovsky is perhaps best known for his essay, “Art as Device,” first published in 1917. In the essay, Shklovsky outlines his theory of prose, explaining what exactly poetic and prose language do. He writes against an idea that poetic language is “thinking in images.” That is, he writes against an idea that art and literature are simply invoking and reconstructing preexisting imagery, as if alluding to Platonic forms. Instead, he argues, the purpose of art is to take the things we have grown used to, the things all around us that we have become habituated to, and to make those things strange again, to make things felt. Art is a means of slowing perception: “ . . . art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stoney.” Through language, through the upending of literary forms, this defamiliarization can jolt us out of our stupor and make us experience the world, and life, anew. For Shklovsky, the power of art and literature lies in the ability to estrange us from what has become so normalized that we barely notice it.
Zoo is, in many ways, an enactment of this estrangement. The book estranges us from genre, from the form of an epistolary novel, questioning the relationship between what is on the page and what happens off of it. These letters, these works of art, affected the relationship of Shklovsky and Triolet, which then altered the letters, which were altered again when made into a book. It is not that literature is depicting life. Life and literature have been hopelessly jumbled, to the point of bafflement.
Zoo is about the alienation, the experience of defamiliarization, of exile. Zoo is about being estranged from a beloved who does not love you back, staring at a phone that does not ring, writing letters that are not answered. Zoo is at once a deconstruction of the novel as such, and a treatise on the pain of estrangement.
“I was bound to be broken abroad and I found myself a love that would do the job.”
Though Shklovsky broke his heart over Alya, within every letter, buried in the tangents and digressions, is the longing to return to a place of familiarity. Alya becomes the figure to whom Shklovsky attaches all of his ache to return home. These letters, in which he does not write of love, express a yearning to return to a place where the world is not so strange, where one doesn’t feel like a creature trapped in a strange land. When Shklovsky writes of Berlin, he repeats descriptions of the twelve iron bridges that he passes beneath. These bridges, their iron, tower over him like bars of a cage.
In another letter, Shklovsky declares that if he were allowed to go home, he would leave without a backward glance, without even packing his manuscripts. He would leave Alya, would abandon all of these letters. In the final letter of the first edition, addressed to the Russian government, Shklovsky writes: “The woman I was writing never existed . . . I invented a woman and love in order to make a book about misunderstanding, about alien people, about alien land. I want to go back to Russia . . . my youth and self-assurance have been taken from me by twelve iron bridges.” Here, the closing of the narrative frame, a plea for the cage that is Berlin to be opened, for that same narrative frame that defines the book to be broken, for literature and life to collide so that the letters may be free from the confines of the book itself, so that Shklovsky can simply go home.
