During the Russian famine of 1921–1922 Lyubov Balandina slipped out of her Petrograd apartment at night, armed with a knife. For the Siberian heiress, who had until recently lived in a grand house staffed by servants, this was not a matter of self-defense: she planned to cut meat from the corpse of a horse that had collapsed from hunger in the street. During this famine and those that followed, residents of the unfortunate city ate whatever was available, whether horseflesh or boiled boot leather.
Balandina’s husband had been called Konstantin Wagenheim when she married him, but like St. Petersburg he had changed his name to avoid any association with Germany at the beginning of World War I. He rechristened the family “Vaginov,” a Russianized version of “Wagenheim.” (The name does not, to the Russian ear, carry the gynecological connotations that it does for English speakers.) The couple’s son Konstantin, born in 1899, spent his teenage years of world war and revolution snorting cocaine, falling in love with a homeless prostitute, and writing poetry. In this, as in many other respects, he resembles “the unknown poet” of his 1928 novel Goat Song, recently translated by Ainsley Morse and Geoff Cebula and published in a new edition with his 1929 novel The Works and Days of Whistlin.
The last years of the Russian Empire were a time of dizzying instability—fertile ground for literary experiments with language and form. As the tsarist secret police hunted revolutionaries, double and even triple agents proliferated. Appearances could not be trusted, and the familiar trappings of everyday life were liable to vanish at any moment. From 1905 until the beginning of World War I, the poet Vladislav Khodasevich wrote,
everything appeared ambiguous and equivocal; the outlines of objects seemed unsteady…. In addition to its obvious, primary meaning, each event took on a secondary meaning that had to be deciphered…. And so we lived in two worlds at once.1
Vaginov’s fiction is characterized, above all, by a sense of doubleness, ambiguity, and perverse humor. This approach marks a fundamental difference from the nostalgia of an émigré writer like Ivan Bunin, who went on hymning the beauties of prerevolutionary Russia for decades from his new home in the South of France. (Bunin, with his ravishingly beautiful realist style, was the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1933.) For Vaginov, the essential duality of language negates the imposition of singular meaning, a central aim of Soviet censorship. His doubling of characters, meanwhile, shows us the two sides of every dilemma, every death, every loss of inspiration. It is not surprising that Vaginov has remained obscure for so long, given his surreal, enigmatic style (one contemporary called his novels “cryptograms”), his eccentric approach to politics, and his comical surname, but his entrance into the English-speaking world is cause for celebration. His work adds an intriguing, poignant new dimension to our understanding of the early years of the Soviet Union.
The title Goat Song, like so much of Vaginov’s work, is a joke about tragedy: the phrase is a literal translation of the Greek tragoidia. (At a 1928 reading, Vaginov announced, “I am a poet of tragic amusement.”) Goat Song is a Petersburg tale that summons the spirit of Gogol, another writer who excelled at funny fiction about horrifying events. It invites comparisons to the poet Andrei Bely’s absurdist novel Petersburg (1913–1914), which anticipated Ulysses in its treatment of a troubled filial relationship, its setting in a city that becomes a principal character in the story, and its highly concentrated, playful, rhythmic prose. Vaginov’s novel is about the death of the old world and the death of poetry—for individuals, for a generation, and for a society. In this sense, it fits with the work of more familiar artists of Russia’s so-called Silver Age: Anna Akhmatova, Bely, Alexander Blok, and on through the alphabet. After the revolution and subsequent civil war and famine, many of these luminaries left the country, were shot, or died prematurely of disease, of malnutrition, or by suicide. Those who remained and survived felt that their days were numbered. The émigré Khodasevich titled his 1939 memoir of his fellow Silver Age writers Necropolis. It was published in 2019 in an outstanding new translation by Sarah Vitali, and makes an excellent companion to Goat Song. Today the American literary scene brims with “debut novelists”; Russian literature of the 1920s teemed with lyric poets who were about to expire. Told by a friend that “the last lyric poet” has shot himself, a minor character in Goat Song bursts into tears and declares, “We will all meet the same fate. I’m the last lyric poet too, after all.”
Goat Song has two main characters, both writers: “the unknown poet,” later identified as Agathonov, and Balmcalfkin, an impotent but charming scholar. The novel also has two forewords from two ostensible authors, one “who appears periodically at the book’s threshold” and the other “who made an appearance in the middle of the book.” This second writer calls himself “a coffin-maker by trade, not a cradle expert.” “And right now,” he adds, speaking of himself in the third person, “the author is preparing a coffin for the twenty-seven years of his life.” Vaginov was about that age when he wrote Goat Song and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Yet the literary coffin-maker is a merry one:
He loves his stiffs, and follows them around while they’re still alive, and shakes their hands warmly, and starts conversations with them, and all the while he’s sanding down the boards, stocking up on nails, buying some lace when he can find it.
Dying poets can be lots of fun.
Vaginov’s Leningrad is more than a necropolis; after all, decay nourishes new life. Though he mocks “official” Soviet literature, Vaginov is aware of the energy that the Soviets offer, with their cult of rude health and their vision of a new world, however brutal its enactment. Balmcalfkin lives “with the constant sensation of a decomposing husk, rotting seeds amid new shoots already rising.” When he sees tanned young Pioneers—the Soviet government’s answer to Boy and Girl Scouts—he feels “a jolt of joy and freshness.” Throughout Goat Song, Vaginov compares the aesthete-intellectuals who thrived during the prerevolutionary period—people like himself and his friends—to Roman writers of the second century, capable of great feats of art and intellect but doomed to fall to the emerging faith of Christianity. Having read Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a child, Vaginov saw the Bolsheviks as the Russian Empire’s Christians, destroying Rome’s magnificent civilization. Like much in Vaginov’s fiction, the comparison is counterintuitive and surprising, a game of paradoxical identities. Though Vaginov hardly means it as a compliment, the parallel undermines long-standing clichés of the Bolsheviks as godless beasts.
His depiction of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia, meanwhile, is rife with ambivalence and irony. He does not glorify this last generation. A descendant of the “superfluous man” of Turgenev’s day, Balmcalfkin is virginal, out of date, the antithesis of a socialist realist he-man. His earnest study of poetry is “astoundingly senseless and unnecessary.” His consciousness is split between Russia and the ancient world; given the choice, he’d dwell among the ancients full-time. He daydreams that the object of his affections, Maria Dalmatova, is reading the ancient Greek poet Callimachus (who cataloged the holdings of the Library of Alexandria) and looks up to say, “We are living among dread and desolation.” This longing for the ancient world is common to many of the novel’s characters, as it was common to members of Vaginov’s circle. In one scene the unknown poet imagines Leningrad’s Neva River becoming Rome’s Tiber. For a moment, rather than walking through a “terrifying, boarded-up, empty city, overgrown with grass,” he finds himself on a “well-lit, buzzing, chattering, singing, shouting, jingling, gleaming, frolicking street, among the utterly unsuspecting crowds.”
Like many literary works of this period, Goat Song is preoccupied with consumer goods, which assume an anthropomorphic liveliness. This is not surprising at a historical moment when so many possessions had been confiscated almost overnight, the wealthier classes driven from their luxurious homes and forcibly separated from their silver tea services, suede boots, Bukhara dressing gowns, and oak cabinets with velvet-lined shelves. For the unknown poet, the study of ancient coins—Vaginov’s own childhood hobby—is a way of growing “accustomed to the inconstancy of all that exists, to the idea of death.” It prepares him for the revolution, the eradication of the old world, and his own transformation into a kind of walking corpse, someone who keeps living after the conditions for his existence have vanished.
After the revolution, though so poor he could hardly afford food, Vaginov collected antiquarian books sold for almost nothing by their owners, “former people.” The flea market is a recurrent motif in Goat Song, signifying the afterlife of possessions that were once expensive and alluring but have now been reduced to bric-a-brac, rather like their former owners. A character named Misha Kittenkin, meanwhile, studies the everyday possessions of a dead writer he adores, Euphratesky, who is modeled on Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova’s ex-husband and the leader of a poets’ circle called the Sounding Shell, which Vaginov attended as a young man. Kittenkin ingratiates himself with Euphratesky’s widow, pumping her for information about the shape of the great writer’s nose, whether he wore starched collars, how many moles were on his body, what he liked to eat. This is a satire of the era’s obsession with every detail of a writer’s material existence, the idea that a poet’s handkerchief or pillow was imbued with his aura, becoming a sacred vessel of his genius. When I visited Pushkin’s apartment in St. Petersburg some years ago, a guide told me proudly that DNA tests had confirmed that the couch contained droplets of the great poet’s blood. This is the ultimate literary experience: proximity to a genius’s bodily fluids.
One of Vaginov’s contemporaries described him as a poet of disjunction. In his poems, “each word pushes away from its neighbor.” Take, for instance, the 1922 lines “I ran out into the streets and the eyelashes of the bronze sun/Toppled with a double sound into my wound-up shoulders,” or a 1933 poem that includes the line “An orchestra played love under a hail of acorns.”2 The Soviet 1920s were an ideal setting for such poem-making. The old order, old meanings, and old language were being shattered and reconfigured, with results that were both brutal and absurd.
In Goat Song, the unknown poet dreams of forming “the world anew through language,” “descending into the hell of meaninglessness, the hell of wild sounds and shrieks, in order to find a new melody of the world.” Throughout the book, he is seeking “holy madness,” the visionary state that makes poetry possible. It often arrives for him, as for many writers throughout history, with the aid of alcohol, drugs, or love. (Of Vaginov’s youthful cocaine addiction, his contemporary Nikolai Chukovsky said, “He justified his downfall with the theory that intoxication is not pleasure, but a method of perception.”) For the unknown poet, the trick is to tame the madness when it arrives, to compel it “to serve humanity” by delivering meaning and wisdom. Here there is a flavor of the zaum, or “beyonsense,” favored by OBERIU, the avant-garde group to which Vaginov briefly belonged. But OBERIU’s most radical members embraced the meaningless juxtaposition of words, and Vaginov soon quit. For him, the “juxtaposition of words”—a phrase that appears often in Goat Song—was above all a way of producing new meanings. And every word was a world. He wrote in a poem:
All of a sudden like the nightingale
A word breaks into song. I run toward the stair.
The word is there, before me like a hallway,
A journey underneath the agitated
Moon: from dark to light, from littoral bluffs
To the indefinite shifting of the sea.
Vaginov’s Russian text often has a lilting, almost hypnotic cadence, and many paragraphs sound like prose poems. In Morse and Cebula’s inspired translation, Vaginov’s poetic voice comes through not only in the snippets of lyrics included throughout the novel, but also in his prose:
The heavy sand lifts and spirals up into the unbearable sky, petrifying into columns; waves of sand sweep up and solidify into walls; a pillar of dust picks itself up, the wind gives it a smack—and there’s a person for you; grains of sand come together and grow into trees, and strange fruits glimmer.
The sonic aspect of words and punning evocations are essential to Vaginov’s style. Morse and Cebula make the daring decision to translate the “speaking names” of the original—Balmcalfkin, Troubadorov. It is a wise choice, underscoring the Gogolian quality of the novel.
Morse and Cebula’s translation also succeeds in matching the strange humor of Vaginov’s poeticism. Despite its exceedingly dark subject matter and intentional modernist difficulty, Goat Song is hilarious. Vaginov juxtaposes ethereal poetry and murder ballads, the Internationale and drinking songs. One writer-character goes out into the white night and meets a woman on the street in a nurse’s uniform. He channels nineteenth-century Orientalism: “Where is your white satin coverlet? Your coverlet of precious stobi fabric, of Indian corduroy, of Gilan silk, your violet-colored silk cushion, your tasseled golden veil?” She tells him that he reeks of beer and asks if he’d like to come over to her place. In another scene, Maria Dalmatova rhapsodizes about Egyptian lapis lazuli while she and Balmcalfkin walk past an open trash pit.
As Khodasevich points out in Necropolis, which gathers his essays on Bely, Gumilev, Blok, Sergei Esenin, Maxim Gorky, and others, Russian writers of the first decades of the twentieth century blurred every boundary between life and art. Many died in their attempts to become great literary characters, and their deaths were transfigured as literary events. According to émigré legend, as Bely was dying of sunstroke, he asked to hear a poem he had written years before: “He trusted in the golden brilliance,/But perished in sunlight’s rays.”
And many real people, of course, were turned into literature. The inspiration for Goat Song’s Maria Dalmatova was apparently Maria Yudina, a pianist and writer who refused to renounce her religious convictions and who, according to an apocryphal story that became the opening of the film The Death of Stalin, was summoned in the middle of the night to record a performance that Stalin had just heard on the radio. In the 1920s her apartment was a meeting place for a circle that included Vaginov and Mikhail Bakhtin, who bears similarities to a philosopher in Goat Song named Andrievsky. The critic Lev Pumpiansky, the prototype for Balmcalfkin, broke off relations with Vaginov after reading Goat Song.
The joys and perils of the conversion of life into fiction are at the center of The Works and Days of Whistlin, which follows Goat Song in the new translation. Vaginov’s metafictional games are heightened by the fact that the washed-up novelist Whistlin is modeled on his friend Andrei Egunov. (Morse translated Egunov’s novel Beyond Tula: A Soviet Pastoral in 2019.) No longer visited by inspiration, Whistlin is now a linguistic magpie, collecting newspaper clippings, the correspondence and diaries of unknowns, and other ephemera that he turns into fiction. This is a parody of the Soviet “literature of fact,” but it is also a gleeful celebration of everyday language and the quotidian absurd, which awaken Whistlin’s dormant imagination. Whistlin sounds a bit like the French anarchist art critic Félix Fénéon composing his Novels in Three Lines, but Whistlin also treats people he meets as material for his collages. He wanders Leningrad society in search of new characters.
Vaginov might be describing his own literary process when he writes that Whistlin “transposed living people and, pitying them slightly, strove to intoxicate his readers with rhythms, the music of vowels, and intonation.” This is a larger-scale version of Vaginov’s “juxtaposition of words.” By taking the people in his life and putting them into new arrangements, he can discover new meanings. We sense the autobiographical when Vaginov writes:
Since he had talent, and since he saw no fundamental difference between the living and the dead, and since he had his own world of ideas, everything came out in a strange and original light. Music in art, courtesy in life—these were Whistlin’s shields.
As Eugene Ostashevsky notes in his excellent introduction to the new translation, it is a mystery why Vaginov was able to keep publishing into the 1930s, while his peers were silenced. Perhaps it was because of his own personal charm, his courtesy.
But writing from life is risky. Relationships can be spoiled, identities compromised. The dilemmas faced by the author trying to repurpose life into fiction will be comically familiar to anyone who has attempted or witnessed this task. For Whistlin, “people were not divided into good and evil, pleasant or unpleasant. They were divided into those who were necessary for his novel and those who weren’t.” He struggles to think of one identifying detail of a new character that he could change to grant himself plausible deniability, when all of the person’s attributes seem so essential. After all, he thinks, “One cannot invent anything better than what exists in real life.”
Whistlin treats his writing process as a kind of parlor game, but it has grave consequences. After hearing an early version of the novel, a man named Cuckoo, who has been cast in the role of protagonist, feels that Whistlin has “taken away his life.” Estranged from himself by the experience of becoming a literary character, Cuckoo abandons everything he loved and loses all the qualities that made him so enchanting. The story of Cuckoo is classic Vaginov, ridiculous yet moving, and it will resonate with anyone who has been deeply hurt by their own too-perceptive portrait in a friend’s novel. Vaginov suggests that this heedless conversion of life into letters can destroy even the writer; after the publication of his book, Whistlin feels that the real world is drained of interest, that he is “completely locked inside his novel.” Everything around him has already been made into fiction, and now he is engulfed by emptiness.
“In my youth, by putting words together,” the author of Goat Song writes, “I came to know the universe, and a whole world emerged for me in language and rose up from language. And it turned out that this world risen from language coincided astonishingly with actuality.” The author invites his heroes to drink wine with him. The unknown poet begins the round of toasts: “We are in Rome…undoubtedly in Rome and in intoxication; I felt this, and words tell me this at night.”
But as time goes on, the unknown poet finds that he can no longer gain access to the holy madness, the intoxication, that once produced his words. An austere new dogma has taken hold of the world, and there is no more room for poetry—though the loss of inspiration is an affliction common to aging artists across many political circumstances.
Balmcalfkin rents a tower in Peterhof, outside Leningrad, and invites his friends there, imagining they’ll stroll through the garden “like ancient philosophers.” “We are the last island of the Renaissance,” he tells his friends,
in the dogmatic sea that surrounds us on all sides; we, and we alone, are preserving the sparks of critical thought, respect for the sciences, respect for man; neither master nor slave exists for us. We are all within a tall tower, we can hear the raging waves beating against its granite sides.
The scene is at once risible and touching. The “pacified Soviet bureaucrats” in the nearby dachas laugh at Balmcalfkin; he is a comical relic of the dreamy old artistic class. But audiences are captivated by his lectures. Certain younger listeners even fall in love with him, if only from afar. Balmcalfkin’s speech reminded me of the “In this house, we believe…” lawn signs that speckle my devoutly liberal neighborhood, as the authoritarian waves beat ever harder across our own country.
Other characters adapt better to the new world. By 1927, the ten-year anniversary of the revolution, Kostya Kissenkin is cataloging the graffiti in public bathrooms. He dreams of becoming a pioneer in the field of “vulgar kitsch studies,” another eerie echo of our own time, when all forms of popular culture have taken up residence in the ivory tower. (I too have dipped my toes into “vulgar kitsch studies,” and I confess that I enjoyed it.) Kostya has
already experienced greater aesthetic stirrings from depictions of Carmen on candy wrappers or boxes than from paintings of the Venetian school; more from little dogs on clocks that periodically stuck out their tongues than from Fausts in literature.
The search for kitsch makes him happy because kitsch is everywhere. He’s caught in a dopamine loop.
The dwellers of the “tall tower of humanism,” meanwhile, slowly lose their will to continue. The middle-aged virgin Balmcalfkin eventually marries Maria Dalmatova, settling into a life of complacency. His heart no longer beats “with quiet music.” The philosopher Andrievsky feels that his work has lost its audience. The journals are closing, and his work is no longer famous. But the pursuit of art is worthwhile in itself: “Art is enraptured existence.” As the poet puts it, “If you think that we’ve perished, you are sorely mistaken…. We are an exceptional, periodically recurring state of being and we cannot perish. We are inevitable.” This is the final paradox of Vaginov’s 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.
English (US) · 