Goat Song

Description

Two novels by one of the Soviet Union’s most inventive writers, written in the tradition of Gogol and Dostoyevsky but with a 20th-century, modernist edge.

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 at the turn of the century, Vaginov came of age with the Bolshevik revolution. His novels of the late 1920s-early 1930s are daringly experimental and tragically nostalgic, mourning the irrevocable loss of pre-revolutionary intellectual culture with mercilessly ironic prose. Hopelessly 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.

The first novel’s title, Goat Song (1928), is an ironically literal translation of the Greek word “tragedy” (tragodia—goat song). The novel features thinly veiled portraits of Vaginov’s contemporaries, the luminaries and leftovers of the once-flourishing Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad arts community, 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. There is Leningrad; but Leningrad has nothing to do with us—the author is a coffin-maker by trade, not a cradle expert.” 

Works and Days of Wistlin (1930) follows a nonchalant novelist as he unscrupulously mines the lives of his friends and fellow citizens for literary material. Like the flea-market trinkets hunted by Goat Song’s marginal figures, Wistlin’s eccentric and frivolous victims are yesterday’s relics and nobody’s concern. His exploitation of human material is a wry commentary on the concurrent efforts to industrialize and collectivize the Soviet economy, at horrific human cost.

This volume will be followed by Vaginov’s exquisitely bleak final two novels, Bambociatta(1932) and Harpagoniana (1934).Konstantin Vaginov (1899-1934) was a Russian poet and novelist. Born in St. Petersburg, his father was a high-ranking police official of German descent who Russified the family’s surname during the First World War. He followed his father’s wishes and studied law, before serving in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. After the war, he returned to Petrograd where he began his literary career. He was active in the Acmeist Nikolai Gumilev’s Poet’s Guild, the avant-garde group Obedinenie real’nogo iskussta (OBERIU), and kept company with Mikhail Bakhtin and his intellectual circle. Vaginov’s career was cut short when he died of tuberculosis in 1934.

Ainsley Morse is an Associate Professor at Dartmouth College who studies twentieth and twenty-first century literature from the former Soviet Union and its republics, specializing in twentieth century Russian poetry. She is also a literary translator who works from Russian, Serbian / Croatian / Bosnian, and Ukranian, with poetic translation as her forte.

Polina Barskova published her debut when she was only eight years old. She has lived in the United States since 1998. She studied classical philology in St. Petersburg and Slavic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she now teaches. Apart from her extensive poetic work—eight volumes of poetry published since 1991—she dedicates her work as a literary scholar and editor to the poets of the siege of Leningrad.US

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