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Goat Song

Goat Song

by Konstantin Vaginov, translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse and Geoff Cebula, introduction by Eugene Ostashevsky

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Konstantin Vaginov was an early and exemplary figure of Soviet modernist writing in all its agonized and glorious contradictions. Born into an educated middle-class family, Vaginov came of age with the Revolution. His novels of the late 1920s and early '30s are daringly experimental and tragically nostalgic, using mercilessly ironic prose to mourn the loss of prerevolutionary intellectual culture. Adrift in the brave new Soviet world, Vaginov's protagonists attempt to conjure the recent and distant past by stockpiling old books and songs, vulgar baubles and bad jokes, newspaper clippings, coins, and graffiti.

This volume contains two novels: Goat Song features thinly veiled portraits of Vaginov's contemporaries as they flounder and self-destruct in their new bracingly materialist circumstances. Echoing Gogol, Dostoyevsky, and Bely, Goat Song is both a classic Petersburg city text and its swan song: "Now there is no Petersburg . . . the author is a coffin-maker by trade, not a cradle expert."

Works and Days of Whistlin follows the novelist Whistlin as he unscrupulously mines the lives of his friends and fellow citizens for literary material. His exploitation of human material is a wry commentary on the concurrent efforts to industrialize and collectivize the Soviet economy, at a horrific human cost.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681378886
Pages: 376
Publication Date:

Praise

[Goat Song and The Works and Days of Whistlin] are formally inventive, mordant works, cleverly constructed so as to nourish the author’s faint hope that his rendering of intelligentsia decadence might find acceptance with the arbiters of Soviet literature…. Appearing at a time when that ultimate collagist, artificial intelligence, is taking over the campus, The Works and Days of Whistlin adds to this gloomy impression. One hundred years later, Konstantin Vaginov’s depiction of the fate of humanism under incipient communism seems an increasingly likely terminus for humanism under capitalism, too.
—Eric Naiman, TLS

Vaginov’s fiction is characterized, above all, by a sense of doubleness, ambiguity, and perverse humor . . . His work adds an intriguing, poignant new dimension to our understanding of the early years of the Soviet Union . . . Goat Song, a novel about the death of poetry, translated and published nearly a century after its publication, convinces us, finally, that poetry will never die.
—Sophie Pinkham, New York Review of Books

Two beautiful and biting classics of Russian modernism come to life in this collection of two novels from Vaginov . . . Readers will be rewarded.
—Publishers Weekly

Konstantin Vaginov—brilliant sly elf of Russian modernism—observes his city's and culture's end times with the utmost irony and courage. The originality of his style and sense of history makes him one of the most distinctive thinkers of his time—in poignant harmony with ours.
—Polina Barskova

Vaginov was one of the most interesting and outstanding representatives of the Leningrad circle of poets.
—Mikhail Bakhtin

This volume is sure to delight readers interested in Russian literature and the various forms of European modernism, as well as anyone interested in experimental and avant-garde literature. Even at nearly a century old, even in translation, Vaginov can still take readers on a journey into 'the magical depth of words.'
—Eric Vanderwall, Harvard Review

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