For about a decade after the 1917 revolution, the Soviet Union enjoyed, if that is the word, a last gasp of free air. Newspapers were subject to rigid state control and censorship during this period, but literary publishing was left more or less in peace as long as the author did not overtly challenge the new order. A modernist literature emerged, and some of its oddness and linguistic vitality derived from the deliberate subversion of official, politicised speech. New ways had to be found to say what needed to be said, both because authors had to think of their personal safety and because a wholly new social order demanded new modes of expression.
Isaac Babel and Andrei Platonov are the names that spring most readily to mind as representative of these years of experimentation. In Babel’s Red Cavalry cycle of stories (1927), a band of Cossack soldiers ravage the countryside, spreading communism in a brutal fashion, accompanied by the rhetoric of Bolshevik salvation. In Platonov’s dystopic The Foundation Pit, Soviet workers devote their lives to excavating the foundation for a building that is so vast that it will never be built. The novel itself is an absurdist construction, down to its very grammar of collapsing, overladen sentences put together with bricks of newspeak, revolutionary exhortations, abbreviations, acronyms, and bureaucratic jargon. It is nonsense-hell made from language.
To these names we can now add that of Konstantin Vaginov. His novel Goat Song (1928), recently published in English for the first time by NYRB Classics, describes the moribund world of a circle of Leningrad intellectuals. They are losing their tongues, and they know it. In the late 1920s, Stalin tightened his grip, demanding that writers be active propagandists for the regime. Vaginov revised the novel substantially for a second edition, which was refused publication in 1929. Platonov’s The Foundation Pit was completed the following year and was also refused publication. Babel, too, fell out of favour and no longer attempted to publish. In 1932, the Union of Soviet Writers was established and the creed of Socialist Realism formally articulated. In literary terms, the regime demanded simple narratives involving noble proletarian characters striving to further the revolution. This form of ‘realism’ was anticipated with some prescience decades earlier by a character in one of Dostoevsky’s novels, when he described the world view of the ‘socialists’: ‘I can show you their books: they reduce everything to one common cause—environment. Environment is the root of all evil—and nothing else. A favourite phrase. And the direct consequence of it is that if society is organised on normal lines, all crimes will vanish at once, for there will be nothing to protest against, and all men will become righteous in the twinkling of an eye. Human nature isn’t taken account of at all. Human nature is banished. Human nature isn’t supposed to exist… They don’t want a living soul.’ In Stalin’s Russia, you didn’t have to burn the books. You just had to squeeze the writers until they lost their minds.
Born in 1899, Vaginov was one of the most talented poets in the ‘Bakhtin Circle’, a group of writers and intellectuals revolving around the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin.
Bakhtin believed the modern novel, starting with Dostoevsky, was the ideal vehicle for what he called polyphonic multiplicity, where conflicting voices and viewpoints and forms of language competed without a single, authorial resolution ever imposed on this chorus of disparate consciousnesses. As a poet, Vaginov took this a little further, describing his technique as ‘experiments with the juxtaposition of words’, a form of semantic fragmentation where the author allowed language to work in haphazard, illogical, and even contradictory ways. As a novelist, Vaginov seems to adapt this technique. Rather than fragmentation at the sentence level, the narrative is fragmented between a cast of disparate characters and the shifting perspectives provided by their utterances and thoughts. For the most part, we cannot speak of a central character or a primary narrative in Goat Song; we might in one moment be in a St Petersburg street, among beggars and prostitutes, then onto the philosophical musings of a poet who imagines himself in ancient Rome, and we are not sure if the author wishes us to believe he is mad. Goat Song is frequently disorienting, arguably more so than it needs to be. It is sometimes hard to keep track of what Vaginov’s cast of stream-of-consciousness characters are doing. But Vaginov is also endlessly playful, surprising and revealing. Lacking any kind of inner censor, his characters hash it up between the comic and tragic, the mundane and the profound, the sublime and the sordid.
The experimentalism of much modernist writing can come off as self-indulgent, but Vaginov’s historical moment seems to require a degree of disorder. He depicts the years after war and revolution, where the past civilisational order has been obliterated. Those in power no longer permit language to be used as it previously was. And even were it freely allowed, language has lost the power to indicate what it once did, since nothing exists in its previous, more stable form. The chaos of Goat Song reflects a societal breakdown. If Platonov buries his characters beneath the weight of the language of the new regime, Vaginov works from the other direction. His characters are desperately clinging to scraps of the old tongue in the hope of digging themselves a tunnel out from under the collapsed edifice.
The city in Goat Song is Leningrad, previously St Petersburg. This had been Russified to Petrograd in the First World War, and the author’s father, in the same spirit, changed the family name of Wagenheim to Vaginov. (Today’s reader, asked whatcha-readin’, might wish he hadn’t). A glance at some of the secondary characters, early in the novel, reveals a world where nothing signifies what it did before. Natasha Ivanovna Holubets, the daughter of an ex-General in the old regime, attends a party where a poet tells her that valuing virginity is falling for petit-bourgeois morality. Natasha passes out, drunk, and is raped. ‘I love popping a girl’s cork’, the violator later remarks, to the horror of his confidant, who remembers Natasha as ‘a little girl with pigtails, in a white dress, dancing at the children’s balls in Pavlovsk’. Natasha has a suitor called Kovalyev. When Natasha saw him off to war as an officer with the Petrograd Hussars, she thought him a dashing hero and he dreamed of being awarded the George’s Cross. The revolution came and his regiment demoted him to peeling potatoes. He hid in the woods for a year, then was press-ganged to fight for the Reds. Now he’s a day labourer and Natasha has lost interest in him. ‘The years of hunger had transformed her; she had become a high-strung creature. One day she’d be studying in some theatre studio, where she’d get groped all over, the next she’d be at the university, striding down the ‘Bois de Boulogne’ (main hallway) and smoking a cigarette.’ Kovalyov dreams of getting steady work and winning Natasha back, but that depends on getting into the union. ‘And he started thinking of the union the way he had once thought about the George’s Cross’.
Natasha’s new suitor is the ‘technician’ Shacklekin. ‘“I’ve got real muscles,”’ says Shacklekin. “I’m a real man, not like the feeble intelligentsia. My father was a doorman, but I’ve come up in the world.”’ Natasha confesses to him that she is not a virgin. ‘“Now there’s a shocker,” answered Shacklekin. “Virgins have become obsolete these past few years. There’s not a virgin in our whole city”’. Shacklekin wants an educated wife as a trophy he can display before his comrades, as a mark of his new status. After a year of labour, Kovalyov gets into the union, becomes a foreman, and saves a little money. On the first day of Easter he drags his old uniform and epaulets from their hiding place and dresses up to go ask General Holubets for his daughter’s hand. The ex-general is unimpressed. ‘“What lunacy,” yells General Holubets and, instead of greeting Kovalyov, leaps from his seat: “to be waltzing around in uniform seven years after the revolution. You’ll be the ruin of us. How dare you appear in my presence in uniform!”’ The ex-general now earns a crust playing the piano in a cinema. His wife works as a seamstress, peddling her work at the market. Natasha has already married Shacklekin.
This summation of Natasha and Kovalyov’s story is altogether more narratively conventional than Goat Song as a whole, but it serves to indicate the problem Vaginov is dealing with in depicting a world where nothing means what it used to; not virginity, not Easter, not uniforms, not fathers, not marriage proposals nor playing the piano. Anybody who hasn’t realised this must be a bit mad.
Which brings us to the main characters, misplaced in their era, all a little demented in their inability to let go of the past, a cast of Quixotes entranced by the beauty of their delusions. They are thinkers, artists, dreamers—heirs to a humanistic civilisation they struggle to keep alive within themselves. There is much comedy in this, but it is the bitter kind. Their commitment to the mental life resembles Kovalyov’s outmoded devotion to Natasha.
They wander the neo-classical ruins of the former St Petersburg, a city that came into being when the Russian Empire secured its first foothold on the Baltic and opened an avenue for commerce in the goods and ideas of western Europe. We meet the poet Balmcalfkin: ‘Exquisite groves bloomed fragrantly for him in the foulest-smelling places, and prim-and-proper statues, the legacy of the eighteenth century, seemed to him like gleaming suns of Pentelic marble. Balmcalfkin only occasionally raised his enormous clear eyes—and then he saw himself in a desert.’ The poet’s notion is that the collapse around him resembles the end of Rome’s imperial glory, when the intellectually vibrant and heterogeneous culture of the classical world was laid waste by Christian zealots and barbarian invaders. While we might today take a retrospective view of Soviet communism as a temporary aberration, some of those who lived through those cataclysmic times experienced them as a final and irredeemable collapse of a civilisation, and the total victory of a model of modernity that swept away all before it. In his pre-Revolution youth, Vaginov had read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Against the eschatology of the Bolsheviks, which proclaimed that history was moving inevitably towards a proletarian utopia in which all social conflicts and injustice would vanish, Vaginov had in his mind the old example of a great civilisation turned to ashes, its accumulated arts and learning forgotten through a long Dark Age of centuries.
Vaginov was conscripted into the Red Army in the civil war. The Petrograd he returned to in 1921 was a ravaged and violent urban wasteland, its population halved by a famine, aggravated by the Bolshevik policy of shooting ‘speculators’ (anybody who tried to bring in food). His family had been evicted from the building they once owned, and he had to do his best to conceal his social origins. With the pauperisation of the elite, entire personal libraries were tossed into the street or sold for a pittance, and Vaginov was able to accumulate a scavenged collection of books in the small room he now inhabited, with no electric light. He studied Romance languages while queuing for food. Yet his novel depicts how the seething, desperate underclass had been given an ideology of resentment and a target on whom to vent their fury. ‘I saw the new Christians… I saw indistinct crowds demolishing idols’, exclaims one character. The city’s neoclassical architecture provides the right backdrop for a world ‘running ever deeper and deeper into the old two-thousand-year circle’. The poet Balmcalfkin leans against a column with a broken capitol. ‘No porticos, no waterworks. The great freedom of the spirit is no more. No more conversations beneath the open black or golden-coloured sky.’ The city is a dead shell, and in his foreword to Goat Song, the author declares ‘Now there is no Petersburg’ and compares his craft to that of the coffin-maker. ‘He takes a sniff—smells like corpses; so we’ll need a coffin. And he loves his stiffs, and follows them around while they’re still alive, and shakes their hands warmly, and starts conversations with them, and all the time he’s sanding down the boards, stocking up on nails’.
In a fanatical, barbarian time, Vaginov’s heroes try to sustain their inner lives by transforming themselves into enlightened islands of Renaissance humanism ‘in the dogmatic sea that surrounds us on all sides; we, and we alone, are preserving the sparks of critical thought, respect for the sciences, respect for man’. As the seasons come and go, the illusion that they will be tolerated becomes harder to maintain, and the dream of a Renaissance ever more strained and artificial. They know that the new victors are writing a history of the time in which the humanists will be depicted as devils, ‘condemned’ by a ‘metaphysical plague’ that is ‘ravaging the city’.
However, they are even denied the satisfaction of their dramatic rhetoric—being condemned, being declared devils—when in this new world a demeaning personal situation might be sorted out with a few practical compromises. Several characters put aside their old bourgeois approach to poetry and now have secure jobs with official publishing houses, writing ‘edifying fairy tales for kids’ and praising ‘prole-lit’. With the passing years, those who stay true to their vision no longer feel so heroic: ‘Balmcalfkin now spoke about supporting culture ever more rarely and ineffectually… He didn’t write books anymore; after all, they were not fated for publication.’ In the end, even he makes a kind of peace. ‘His heart became clear and light. He was no longer horrified that office-clerks shared his sense of the world, that there was no abyss separating him from an accountant.’
As with Babel’s Red Cavalry and Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, the stylistic challenges the reader encounters in Goat Song are a response to the unstable world its author was forced to navigate. Vaginov’s criticisms and satirisations of the Marxist-Leninist worldview are deliberately indirect: they are articulated by the losers, the quixotic, and the mad. We see the end of the world through their eyes, but the author can counter, with some honesty, that he is mocking them for their failure to adapt to the new world. The anticlimactic ending of the novel, which sees the demented poet embrace the prosaic, must be seen in the context of the dangers serious writers exposed themselves to. We know that Vaginov was pushing the limits of the acceptable with Goat Song; after all, the revised edition was refused publication within a year of the book first appearing. Even those who became official writers and espoused Socialist Realism could fall from favour; some 1,500 Soviet writers died in Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. Writers who failed to write were executed too, including Isaac Babel, who was shot in 1940. It is not hard to imagine Vaginov sharing that fate had tuberculosis not taken him first, less than a decade after writing Goat Song.
(Note: The NYRB edition of Goat Song also contains another experimental short novel by Vaginov, The Works and Days of Whistlin).