Serious Russian chemistry flares this Fall (which seems to have already arrived in New York).

A new translation of War and Peace is due then from the elegant, righteously bawdy, deepest-delving master and mistress of Russian literature, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who have already de-Garnettized Anna Karenina, most of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and the fictional Chekhov. The Master and Margarita, too.

I have never read War and Peace. The novel haunts me the same way it does the characters, during a certain period where it must've been on Schulz's mind, of the still unforgiveably-named Peanuts. (They also haven't read it--except maybe Linus.)

The blue paper galley containing the sly, magnificent Pevear-Volokhonsky translation sits on my desk, where it has been for about a month. I pick it up and put it down, and read a scene here, a scene there. I am enchanted and smitten, and frightened and daunted.

But a couple of days after Count Tolstoy's masterpiece came to stay, the arrival another October galley settled the matter for me: I have to do it. The galley is Viktor Shklovsky's Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot. It's a masterpiece that fugues around a masterpiece.

Dalkey Archive has been quietly releasing the books of Shklovsky, a 20th C. Russian critic whose temperament is very different from that of Bakhtin, but whose writing is, I think, more beautiful and poetic in and of itself.

(Dalkey's edition of Shklovsky's Third Factory, about, among other things, the outcome of poetry and revolution, is one of my if-one-box-only books. I kept the galley. It's battered. I think the book itself is blue, like the War and Peace galley.)

The Energy of Delusion is more or less a book about reading War and Peace, about thinking about its structure and what formed it and what that form looks like 'now' (the book was in the 1970s, when Shklovsky was in his 80s). And so it takes in a great deal of what came before and after and during it: Pushkin, Turgenev, the Opayaz period, Anna Karenina, the Neva, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, the Bible, Chekhov, Picasso, and many, many more figures, books, rivers, places, things.

He does this in such an organic, graceful, determinate way that it's breathtaking. The Energy of Delusion unfolds like an oragami city.

And just so you don't think I'm trying to tease you, I will tell you what Shklovsky says the Delusion is.

The title phrase comes, Shklovsky says, in a letter written by Tolstoy in 1878, almost ten years after the publication of War and Peace, to the writer Strakhov, who is finding it difficult to work. (The punctuation is all as it is in the translation. I've checked it.)

"I know this feeling very well--even now, I have been experiencing it lately: everything seems to be ready for writing--for fulfilling my earthly duty, what's missing is the urge to believe in myself, the belief in the importance of my task, I'm lacking the energy of delusion; an earthly, spontaneous energy that's impossible to invent. And it's impossible to begin without it."

Shklovsky catalyzes Tolstoy. He makes it possible to begin.