Zoo / Třetí fabrika – Šklovskij Viktor (2019)

A love story in letters and the third factory of the soul, two prose works by the master of Russian literature that loosely connect and thus form a trilogy with the famous novel A Sentimental Journey. A Sentimental Journey ends with a description of how the author ran "like a mottled rat" across the frozen Lake Ladoga, thus escaping Bolshevik persecution. The Zoo immediately follows this in A Sentimental Journey. Shklovsky made it to Berlin, where he stayed in a large group of Russian emigrants, mostly artists, intellectuals, and the social elite of Tsarist Russia. The Russian emigration lived in the area of the Berlin zoo. Just like their animal neighbors, they lived strangely, bored, clustered into groups, and reminisced about their homeland. Therefore, the author places a bizarrely long motto at the forefront of his Zoo, composed of Khlebnikov's depiction of the human menagerie. In The Third Factory, the author tells about three factories of his own soul – youth, OPOJAZ, and the unnamed today. He does not judge but names and analyzes. He cannot rely on feelings and beautiful words, so he pays attention to how they are constructed. Former beautiful words have lost their meaning, all wit and eloquence have become tiresome. The contradiction between the old humanistic culture and the new world is unsustainable. Magnificently vaulted theories about...