REVIEWS OF VAGINOVEXCERPTS FROM THE EUROPEAN PRESSLeonardo PaleariFrom the Oberiu [the Leningrad avant-garde] — the last brilliant burst of the avant-garde of the 1920′s — Vaginov reaches out to the new literary avant-garde, founded on an “open” spontaneity.

. . . to penetrate into that logic that is hidden beneath an absurdist surface, to feel the whirlwind created by that two-way spiral in which life and literature mutually cancel and enrich each other.

Dmitri SegalIn The Goat-Song, where the figure of the author – periodically thrusting himself into the narrative – organizes the novel’s frame, the artificiality and conventionality of this construction is proclaimed. Vaginov’s author is completely. . . shut up within the fictive world. . . master of a kind of puppet show or a traditional director.

In contrast to Mandelshtam’s intensely personal [fictive] author. . . [in Vaginov] one feels the yearning to demonstrate the author’s creative omnipotence, his invulnerability.

Novyi ZhurnalPublishers today view Vaginov as a mediator between Soviet literature and Russian literature abroad.

V. KaverinPossessing originality, [Vaginov] passionately rejected the element of philistinism.

T. NikolskayaIn the twenties, the name of Konstatin Vaginov was well known in the literary circles of Leningrad. His subtle, delicate poetry was prized by N. Gumilyov, M. Kuzmin and O. Mandelshatam, while his caustic, grotesque prose aroused both the keen interest of readers and. . . the irritability of critics.

Russkaya Mysl. . . there emerges on the universal plane a confrontation between an authentic, unshakable spirituality and the intelligentsia’s superficial craze for culture that easily degenerates into philistinism.

Though the Western reader may at times find an analogue for certain individual facets of Vaginov’ prose in certain works of A. Gide, A. Huxley or V. Nabokov, their fusion nonetheless, produces something qualitatively new. It represents a unique phenomenon in European literature which shall inevitably be appreciated by the contemporary cultivated European reader.

AltschullerGradually, the protagonists lose their spirituality. The refined culture in which they had immersed themselves with such intoxication could not save them from vulgarity [poshlost'], from spiritual and physical ruin.

Literaturnyi KurierRiccio is prepared to consider Vaginov as the descendant of the Hoffmanesque branch of Idealism that extends from Gogol through Bely and Bulgakov to Okudzhava in our own time.

Journalistic topicality, a mingling of styles, the motif of the split personality, prophecies of all kinds, etc. what Bakhtin. . . called “menippea” – all of this is to be found in the novels of Vaginov.

. . . Vaginov’s very irony, often nothing more than self-irony, was brought into being by a searing phenomenon characteristic of Russian culture in general: the fate of an intelligentsia endlessly debating the causes of its won crisis.

– Excerpts translated by Benjamin Sher

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Note: My special thanks to Mr. Grigory Polansky, publisher of Silver Age, for kindly providing me with the
materials from which the excerpts below have been taken. Silver Age reprinted Vaginov’s original edition of Kozlinaia Pesn’ in the United States in 1978.