Goat Song

”[Goat Song and The Works and Days of Whistlin] are formally inventive, mordant works, cleverly constructed so as to nourish the author’s faint hope that his rendering of intelligentsia decadence might find acceptance with the arbiters of Soviet literature…. Appearing at a time when that ultimate collagist, artificial intelligence, is taking over the campus, The Works and Days of Whistlin adds to this gloomy impression. One hundred years later, Konstantin Vaginov’s depiction of the fate of humanism under incipient communism seems an increasingly likely terminus for humanism under capitalism, too.” —Eric Naiman, The TLS “Two beautiful and biting classics of Russian modernism come to life in this collection of two novels from Vaginov…Readers will be rewarded.” —Publishers Weekly“Konstantin Vaginov—brilliant sly elf of Russian modernism—observes his city’s and culture’s end times with the utmost irony and courage. The originality of his style and sense of history makes him one of the most distinctive thinkers of his time—in poignant harmony with ours.“—Polina Barskova“Vaginov was one of the most interesting and outstanding representatives of the Leningrad circle of poets.“—Mikhail Bakhtin

Konstantin Vaginov (1899-1934), born in St. Petersburg, served in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. He was active in Nikolai Gumilev’s Acmeist movement and the Guild of Poets, and was a core member of the avant-garde group OBERIU. Inspired in part by his interactions with Mikhail Bakhtin and his intellectual circle, Vaginov wrote four satirical novels before his death in 1934.

Ainsley Morse is a translator and scholar of Russian and former-Yugoslav literature. She has translated books by Andrei Egunov-Nikolev and Vsevolod Nekrasov, and her translations have appeared in The Paris Review, World Literature Today, and Modern Poetry in Translation. She teaches at Dartmouth.

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.

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