Hunt for Optimism

Begun in 1929 under the title "e;New Prose"e; and drastically revised after Vladimir Mayakovsky's sudden death, A Hunt for Optimism (1931) circles obsessively around a single scene of interrogation in which a writer is subjected to a show trial for his unorthodoxy. Using multiple perspectives, fragments, and aphorisms, and bearing the vulnerability of both the Russian Jewry and the anti-Bolshevik intelligentsia-who had unwittingly become the "e;enemies of the people"e;Hunt satirizes Soviet censorship and the ineptitude of Soviet leaders with acerbic panache. Despite criticism at the time that it lacked unity and was too "e;variegated"e; to be called a purely "e;Shklovskian book,"e; Hunt is stylistically unpredictable, experimentally bold, and unapologetically ironic-making it one of the finest books in Shklovsky's body of work.