The Hamburg Score (Gamburgsky schyot) is "a very important concept," wrote Viktor Shklovsky, the famous Russian literary critic and founder of Russian formalism, in 1928. All wrestlers cheat in performance and allow themselves to lose a fight at the behest of the organizers. But once a year wrestlers gather in Hamburg and fight in private among themselves. It is a long, hard, ugly competition. But this is the only way that they can reveal their real class. It is in this way that Shklovsky has the leading literary come to a reckoning of their real worth. This collection of essays and...