Goat Song
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Two novels by one of the Soviet Union's most inventive writers, written in the tradition of Gogol and Dostoyevsky but with a twentieth-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, 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two beautiful and biting classics of Russian modernism come to life in this collection of two novels from Vaginov (1899–1934), sharply translated by Morse and Cebula. The eponymous entry, set mostly in and around 1920s Leningrad ("Now there is no Petersburg," Vaginov writes woefully) features a cast of idealists who imagine themselves as "the representatives of high culture" but are growing increasingly adrift under communism. After settling into a marriage and leaving his life of letters, critic Baumcalfkin realizes that "all of them spoke in a general way about a culture to which they did not belong." The Works and Days of Whistlin focuses on a writer, Whistlin, who befriends local characters, including Cuckoo, an important-looking man with no opinions of his own ("Whatever everyone approved of, he approved of as well") and the esoterically minded quack Psychofsky. Whistlin is a keen observer and manipulator of his acquaintances, and he stifles any guilt he feels about absorbing details of their lives into his work. Like Whistlin, Vaginov wrote lovingly and mercifully about his friends in his race to document a vanishing world. Readers will be rewarded.
