Goat Song (New York Review Books Classics)

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.