Under Review

Reviews by Robert Blaisdell

This volume contains the poet Konstantin Vaginov’s dizzy comic novel Goat Song (Козлиная песнь) and the less disorienting, equally comic novella The Works and Days of Whistlin (Труды и дни Свистонова). It’s not surprising that in the late 1920s Vaginov (1899-1934) was associated with the absurdist Daniel Kharms. One of Vaginov’s narrators says of the author-like character Whistlin that “all of his works emerged from messy scribblings in the margins of books, stolen metaphors, skillfully rewritten pages, overheard conversations, inverted rumors.” Vaginov was highly regarded by, among others, his friend Mikhail Bakhtin, who apparently guest-stars as “the philosopher” in Goat Song, which in this revised version was not published because of Soviet censorship in Vaginov’s lifetime. By the way, according to the translator, the author’s parents (longtime citizens of the Russian Empire) changed their name from Wagenheim to Vaginov in the early days of World War I and pronounced it “VAH-ghee-noff.”

On account of the St. Petersburg/Leningrad setting, the book blurb mentions Vaginov “echoing” Nikolai Gogol, and I was skeptical until Vaginov’s deadpan scenarios and attention to noses asserted themselves: “It was spring again. … The plumped-up trees of the Summer Garden, the young saplings on Victims of the Revolution Square, the bushes in the little Catherine Square, all served as a reminder of the season for those distracted by the hubbub of life. … some amputee, a former lieutenant, recipient of a state pension, might sit a while on a bench and recall: ‘I used to play here in the sand’ … And sigh and, lost in thought, pull out a dusty handkerchief redolent of a whole series of odors – black bread, breaded cutlet, tobacco, soup – and blow his nose in desperation. When the handkerchief is put away – all the odors disappear from the air.”