Goat Song

Two beautiful and biting classics of Russian modernism come to life in this collection of two novels from Vaginov (1899–1934), sharply translated by Morse and Cebula. The eponymous entry, set mostly in and around 1920s Leningrad (“Now there is no Petersburg,” Vaginov writes woefully) features a cast of idealists who imagine themselves as “the representatives of high culture” but are growing increasingly adrift under communism. After settling into a marriage and leaving his life of letters, critic Baumcalfkin realizes that “all of them spoke in a general way about a culture to which they did not belong.” The Works and Days of Whistlin focuses on a writer, Whistlin, who befriends local characters, including Cuckoo, an important-looking man with no opinions of his own (“Whatever everyone approved of, he approved of as well”) and the esoterically minded quack Psychofsky. Whistlin is a keen observer and manipulator of his acquaintances, and he stifles any guilt he feels about absorbing details of their lives into his work. Like Whistlin, Vaginov wrote lovingly and mercifully about his friends in his race to document a vanishing world. Readers will be rewarded. (June)