Goat Song – Konstantin Vaginov

[NYRB; 2025]

Tr. from the Russian by Ainsley Morse and Geoff Cebula

Literature cannot help but exploit life, or at least Konstantin Vaginov (1899–1934) seems to believe so. His 1928 novel Goat Song tells the story of a motley crew of Leningrad intellectuals and the unnamed author who follows their every step. Based on Vaginov’s actual friends and acquaintances, the novel provoked controversies and encouraged generations of literary scholars to debate the possible prototypes of its characters. In Vaginov’s subsequent novel Days and Works of Whistlin (1929), a writer named Whistlin turns the people around him into characters in his would-be novel, only to realize that his own life has become indistinguishable from his fiction. Some critics see Days and Works as Vaginov’s attempt at self-criticism and meta-literary reflection on his previous novel. And these books do have much in common, dealing with the complex relationship between life and literature, a theme that was central for Vaginov throughout his career. 

Celebrated by specialists as one of the most prominent modernist writers of his generation, Vaginov is almost unknown to the general public both in Russia and beyond. This is partly due to the experimental and idiosyncratic nature of his literary output, which combines hidden quotations from classic texts with ironic descriptions of post-revolutionary Soviet realities. Yet there are also historical reasons for Vaginov’s disappearance from the canon. He died in 1934, the year of the First Congress of the Soviet Writers, which codified a new socialist realist aesthetic and banned independent artistic experimentation. After that, Vaginov’s works were erased from the history of Soviet literature because they didn’t meet the standards of socialist realism: narrative coherence, simplistic plot, and historical optimism. Vaginov’s books were not reprinted in the USSR until the late 1980s. The first English translation of Vaginov appeared in 1983. However, it took forty more years for all four of his novels to be translated into English. 

This spring, NYRB is publishing Vaginov’s Goat Song and Days and Works of Whistlin, translated by Ainsley Morse. A literary scholar and experienced translator of Russian literature, Morse has found the perfect English idiom for idiosyncratic Vaginov’s prose. She was assisted by Geoff Cebula, who has also translated the writer’s final novels, Bambocciata (1931) and Harpagoniana (1933), set to appear with NYRB later this year. Morse and Cebula did an excellent job translating the character’s last names, which, as is often the case in Russian literature, reveal their defining features. Instead of reproducing the last names as they are, translators came up with English equivalents. For instance, Teptyolkin from Goat Song, whose last name in Russian evokes associations with something “feminine and doltish,” became Balmcalfkin. The pair Kostya Rotikov (from Russian rot, mouth) and Misha Kotikov (from Russian kot, cat) transformed into Kissenkin and Kittenkin. Goat Song also includes several poems by an unknown poet, which were translated by poet and translator Eugene Ostashevsky, a specialist in modernist and contemporary Russophone poetry. The introduction of old texts into a new cultural and linguistic context requires tremendous work from translators, especially if the texts originated in a period as complicated and diverse as the Soviet 1920s. 

In the post-revolutionary decade, Vaginov was a prominent figure on the Leningrad literary scene. A member of several diverse artistic groups and communities, he was a close acquaintance of the poet and novelist Mikhail Kuzmin (1872–1936), avant-garde poets Daniil Kharms (1904-1942) and Alexander Vvedensy (1904–1941), and the philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). As Russian literary critic Anna Nuzhdina notes, Vaginov lived at the intersection of the competing factions. In an obituary for Vaginov, Russian emigre critic Georgy Adamovich called him a person “everybody loved.” 

However, Vaginov was involved in at least one literary scandal. After the publication of Goat Song in 1928, Vaginov’s friend, the literary scholar and critic Lev Pumpianski (1891–1940), broke with him. Pumpianski recognized himself in one of the novel’s characters, Balmcalfkin: a refined intellectual and a scholar of humanist literature who gradually gives up on his high inspirations and becomes a disillusioned Soviet bureaucrat. A real-life Pumpianski arguably underwent a similar transformation in the mid-1920s when he gave up on idealistic philosophy and embraced an increasingly dominant Marxist ideology. 

Balmcalfkin’s defeat and accommodation is emblematic of all the main characters of Goat Song. These bohemian intellectuals, who belong to the modernist culture of the pre-revolutionary period, think of themselves as the last representatives of a great humanitarian tradition threatened by the Soviet state and its cultural politics. After taking power in October 1917, Bolsheviks started to slowly but steadily push the members of the intelligentsia to support their cause. By the mid-1920s, even the most apolitical artists and scholars started realizing that in order to work and live in the USSR, they would need to comply with the regime’s demands. While not a traditional realist novel, Goat Song depicts a particular historical situation of the post-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia and its troubled relationships with the new authorities. 

The novel’s characters, each eccentric in their own way, represent various responses to this historical challenge. Balmcalfkin’s friend, an unknown poet (who shares some traits with Vaginov), strives to find inspiration in intoxication and transgressive practices. Their mutual friend, Kostya Kissenkin, collects kitschy and pornographic pictures, dreaming of establishing a new branch of art history that studies bad taste. He also shares some traits with Vaginov, including his name (Kostya is a diminutive of Konstantin) and his passion for collecting. There is also Misha Kittenkin, who works on the biography of a recently deceased poet, Alexandr Euphratsky (based on Russian Silver Age poet Nikolai Gumilyov, shot by Bolsheviks in 1921); his research involves collecting objects somehow related to the late poet and romantic relationships with Euphratsky’s widow. 

Finally, someone called the author occasionally appears in the narrative and comments on other characters’ actions. In the novel, primarily narrated in the third person, his appearances are the only instance when the first-person is used. It is difficult to say whether the author belongs to the depicted world or stands outside it. The characters of Goat Song seem to be aware that someone is constantly watching them and turning their lives into a novel. At some point, the author even gathers them together for a party, where Kostya Kissenkin suggests starting work on a collective novella. Yet, the end of this scene leaves readers in doubt whether it was a “real” meeting, dream, or extended metaphor for the creative process: 

I went over to the mirror. The candles were burning low. In the mirror I could see my heroes, sitting in a semicircle, and into the next room, where Balmcalfkin was standing by the window, sniffling and looking at us.

I lifted the blinds. 

A dark morning was already dawning. The factory whistles could already be heard. And I see my heroes pale and disappearing one after another. 

It is tempting to interpret the unnamed author as Vaginov’s self-portrait. After all, Vaginov also used his friends’ stories as raw material for his novel. But there is another way of reading the author’s appearances in Goat Song: as a device aiming to lay bare and deconstruct the idea of an omnipresent narrator who somehow knows everything about their characters, including their hidden motifs and desires. Vaginov mocks this convention, characteristic of a nineteenth-century realist novel, by making the author confess: 

“You know,” I turned to the unknown poet, “I followed you and Balmcalfkin one night.”

“You are always following us spiritually,” he broke in and looked at me. 

The realist novel, which in the Russian tradition is associated with Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, was often described as the most important artistic form of nineteenth-century Russian culture. By deconstructing it, Vaginov emphasizes the cultural break that occurred after the October Revolution, when the previous cultural forms suddenly became outdated. Both on the level of material and literary techniques, Vaginov’s novel turns out to be a reflection on the precarious situation of the intelligentsia and its modes of self-representation in the post-revolutionary context. 

Thus the significance of the novel’s title. As Morse and Cebula write in the introductory note, “Goat song” (Russian: kozlinaia pesn’) is a “literal translation of the ancient Greek tragoidia (tragos, goat + oide, song), the source of the English word ‘tragedy.’” The novel’s characters repeatedly express the hope that some talented writer would immortalize their desperate battle with the modern age, creating a tragedy of a Greek type. However, what seems more suitable to their fate and historical situation is some distorted form that oscillates between tragedy and grotesque comedy, a form for which a somewhat vulgar “goat song” appears to be a more appropriate name. 

The second Vaginov novel, Days and Works of Whistlin, further explores the consequences of transforming life into fiction. Not unlike the biographical Vaginov, its protagonist, a writer named Whistlin (Svistonov in the original, from Russian svist, whistle), treats the people around him as potential material for his novel. Like a hunter, he follows his targets all over Leningrad, makes their acquaintance, and even directly intervenes in their lives. 

Whistlin’s first target is a failed writer, Ivan Ivanovich Cuckoo, who follows all the newest intellectual trends, “always thinks about something lofty and sublime,” and compares himself to the great men of the past. Whistlin quickly becomes Cuckoo’s friend and starts experimenting with his “test subject.” He arranges Cuckoo’s affair with a young girl named Nadia, thinking their affair would perfectly fit his novel. Interestingly enough, Whistlin does not make a secret of his intentions to transform Cockoo into a literary character. What is even more striking is that Cuckoo initially meets this idea with enthusiasm, believing that Whistlin’s prose would celebrate the greatness of his persona. However, after hearing the novel’s first draft, Cuckoo is shocked. He realizes that by turning his experience into a literary text, Whistlin effectively stole his life, making another man (i.e., a literary character) live it for him. Frustrated and broken, he moves away from Leningrad. 

Having effectively destroyed Cuckoo’s life, Whistlin goes on the hunt for another target: Psychofsky, a self-proclaimed occultist and a founder of a “mighty order.” This time, the would-be character asks Whistlin to depict him in the novel. After initial doubts, Whistlin agrees and starts attending the meetings of Psychofsky’s circle, consisting of middle-aged women and former aristocrats who seek to escape the unpleasant realities of Soviet modernity. After doing some preliminary research, Whistlin leaves Psychofsky “to rise for a while, like bread dough.”

Cuckoo and Psychofsky are victims of Whistlin, for whom real people are no more than raw material for artistic creation. However, both characters engage in what is called “life-creation” in Russian literary tradition: acting is as if their life is a work of art. While Cuckoo imagines his beloved Nadia to be Natasha from Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Psychofsky turns his whole life and the lives of his acquaintances into an endless mystic performance. As Whistlin notes of the latter’s followers, “Yes, they genuinely believe Psychofsky, they assume that the mighty order really does exist. And for all I know, Psychofsky will send a note to the pope and, you never know, he’ll receive money from America after all. And the order will blossom, and everyone will believe that it really did always exist.” Fiction may rip off life but, for better or worse, it also has the potential to transform it. 

However, Whistlin borrows not only from life but also from the textual sources. In the opening chapter, we see him rewriting passages for his novel from a random book on the bookshelf. He is not so much stealing from it as using someone else’s text as a starting point for his own prose. Whistlin, we are told, “did not write in a systematic manner… all of his works emerged from messy scribblings in the margins of the book, stolen metaphors, skillfully rewritten pages, overheard conversations, inverted rumors.” In the same chapter, Whislin asks his wife to read to him carefully collected and curated newspaper articles in which he looks for potential plots. In some way, Days and Works of Whistlin argues against the romantic notion of a fully self-sufficient and independent author. It shows that invention is often impossible without appropriation. 

Equating a novel’s protagonist with the author is usually a sign of bad criticism, but in this case, it is safe to say that Whistlin’s approach resembles how Vaginov wrote his novels. A recently published writer’s notebook titled Seeds (Semechki) consists precisely of the things listed above: rewritten pages, overheard conversations, inverted rumors, but also notes on criminal jargon, obscene songs, and folk sayings. As literary historian Dmitry Bresler notes, Vaginov used some of these materials when working on the second edition of his last novel, Harpagoniana. Thus, the character Whistlin from Days and Works of Whistlin can be read as the author’s grotesque self-portrait and a representation of his artistic method. At the same time, the novel exposes the dubious ethics of such a method. Exploiting the experience of others, Whistlin turns living people into hollow characters, artificial objects in both senses of the word. It is no coincidence that Whistlin goes to the cemetery searching for his characters’ names. Whistlin’s prose, as Bresler puts it, has a mortifying effect. 

In the end, it all backfires at Whistlin. After finishing his novel, he starts noticing that the world around him no longer feels real. People and places look like he has already described them and transferred them to his novel: hollowed out and deprived of meaning. Whistlin sees nothing new and noteworthy around himself, only wastelands and people he has no interest in. Whistlin’s fictionalization of others turned his one life into a boring novel from which there is no way out. 

Goat Song and Days and Works of Whistlin may seem to be mere relics of a modernist moment, but at least in one important sense, they speak to the current cultural situation. The persisting popularity of autofiction—a genre or a mode of writing based on combining a writer’s own biography with fictional elements—raises a whole set of questions concerning writing ethics: Is it appropriate to write about people you know? Does fictionalization require consent from the person being fictionalized? At what point does using the stories of others in your writing turn into a violent act? Is ethical fictionalization possible in the first place, or does any attempt of this kind necessarily lead to a violation of other’s experience? Though Vaginov did not write autofiction, his novels, balancing between fact and fiction, invention and appropriation, problematize the life/literature relationship and show the dark side of fiction. 

Konstantin Mitroshenkov is a historian, literary scholar, and translator. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Slavic Languages at Columbia University.