Goat Song

Synopsis

As the old imperial capital of St. Petersburg gives way to Soviet Leningrad, a circle of poets, collectors, dreamers, and intellectuals struggles to preserve a disappearing world. Their lives are filled with forgotten songs, obscure books, scraps of history, and fading memories, even as the revolutionary future presses relentlessly forward. Rather than adapting to the new order, they cling to the remnants of a culture already slipping into myth.

This volume brings together two of Konstantin Vaginov's greatest novels: Goat Song, a brilliantly satirical portrait of Russia's shattered artistic intelligentsia, and The Works and Days of Whistlin, an equally inventive meditation on literature, exploitation, and the uneasy relationship between art and power. Rich with irony, philosophical wit, and dazzling modernist experimentation, these novels stand alongside the works of Gogol, Bely, and Bulgakov as essential achievements of twentieth-century Russian literature. Their English publication restores one of Soviet modernism's most original and unjustly overlooked voices to contemporary readers.

About the Author

Konstantin Vaginov (1899–1934) was a Russian poet and novelist associated with the avant-garde literary circles of Petrograd and Leningrad. Born in St. Petersburg, he lived through the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, experiences that shaped his deeply ironic and elegiac fiction. Although he published only four novels before dying of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four, his work is now recognized as a major contribution to Russian modernism. This edition is translated by Ainsley Morse and Geoff Cebula, with an introduction by poet and translator Eugene Ostashevsky.

Publisher

NYRB Classics

Publication Date

June 17, 2025

Format

Paperback

Pages

376

Subjects

Literary Fiction · Fiction in Translation · Russian Literature · Modernism · Soviet Literature · Classics

ISBN

9781681378886