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I wrote this book while on a Fulbright in Voronezh, Russia, where access to the hard-copy Russian originals of Tolstoy, Shklovsky, and their Russian critics and sources was easier than it might have been in the United States but every other aspect of the research was more difficult. My first thanks go, therefore, to Martha Swan, Lisa Harrison, and Anne Johnson in the Interlibrary Loan office at the University of Mississippi, who obtained for me well over a hundred chapters and articles. Kara Hobson in the Ole Miss English department and my daughters Laura, Sara, and Anna, especially Laura in Finland, helped me get the books I absolutely had to have. Thanks also to my colleagues at Voronezh State University, especially Vyacheslav Borisovich Kashkin and Irina Dobrynina, for helping me get into the university library there, to the consultants at the Russian State Library (the Leninka) in Moscow, and to the Fulbright Program in the Russian Federation (Ed Rosloff, Valentina Gruzintseva, and the others) for a productive year in the country of Tolstoy, Shklovsky, and Il’inskaya, who gave me invaluable help with the other two. Charles Rougle, my fellow Fulbrighter at Moscow State University that year, read the Russian chapters not just for argumentative coherence but for accuracy on Russian culture and language and Anna Karenina’s dreams; thanks also to Svetlana Boym and Caryl Emerson for e-mailing their essays in the then-forthcoming Poetics Today special issue on estrangement, guest edited by Professor Boym, and for discussing my project with me. Aleksandr Skidan, in the course of a long conversation in St. Petersburg on Brecht and Shklovsky, got me to write a five-page essay on both for the newspaper he and some friends were putting out, Chto delat’?/What is to be done? I ended up deciding not to publish the piece there, but writing it kicked off the writing of the book. Sasha also read some early drafts of chapter 3 and made helpful comments. Thanks to Artyom Magun and David Riff for their comments on the draft of the five-page essay. Michael Denner, editor of Tolstoy Studies Journal , in the course of accepting my article version of chapters 1 and 2 for pubAcknowledgments vii lication pointed me in some useful directions with Tolstoy and Shklovsky; the two external evaluators to whom he sent that manuscript also offered helpful suggestions. Timothy Sergay engaged me in a lively e-mail discussion of issues of translation, Russian literature, and transliteration. Acknowledgments viii ...

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