Goat Song

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.

Author: Konstantin Vaginov
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 06/17/2025
Pages: 376
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 7.90h x 4.90w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781681378886


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 03/31/2025

About the Author
Konstantin Vaginov (1899-1934) was born in St. Petersburg. His mother came from a wealthy family and his father was a high-ranking official, descended from German immigrants whose name had been Russified from Wagenheim. During the Civil War, he served in the Red Army. Active in Nikolai Gumilev's Acmeist movement and the Guild of Poets, he was a core member of the avant-garde group OBERIU and well acquainted with Mikhail Bakhtin and his intellectual circle, who partly inspired his fiction. Vaginov wrote four novels before his death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four.

Ainsley Morse teaches literature and translation at the University of California, San Diego, and translates from Russian, Ukrainian, and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian.

Geoff Cebula is a translator from Russian to English. He is the author of the novel Adjunct, and has published several articles on the avant-garde collective OBERIU. He lives in Indiana.

Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet and translator. He was born in Leningrad, grew up in New York, and currently lives in New York and Berlin. His poetry collections, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi and Feeling Sonnets, are published in the NYRB Poets series. He selected and translated the poems in Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think, also in the NYRB Poets series, and translated The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Kharms, published in the NYRB Kids series.