The Superfluous Man Redux

Josh Billings reviews Russian author Konstantin Vaginov’s newly translated novel “Goat Song.”

By Josh BillingsJune 20, 2025

• Fiction

SOMETIMES, WHEN LIFE gets me down, I like to imagine that I’m a minor character in a 19th-century Russian novel. Here is my average day: at three p.m., I wake up, order my beloved manservant to bring me a plate of pickles, and then spend two hours lamenting the peasantry. At seven p.m., I put on something called a pince-nez and begin leafing through the latest tract of German philosophy. Finally, when I have had enough of my own cosmic irrelevance, I set out for a ball, and then another ball, and another. I dance mazurkas and take part in a duel (as a minor character, I am typically a second, rather than the actual duelist). At one point, I propose to the adorable but cross-eyed niece of a neighboring landowner: she is interested and unavailable. A few minutes before dawn, I compose an impromptu ode to loneliness, collapsing after the last line into a sleep that is profound and completely dreamless. When I wake up, it is 1939 and I am in prison making bricks while my cellmate picks fleas out of his ears.

The trick to having a good time in Russian literature is, as with all parties, not to stay too long. Stay too long, and the vibe curdles: the cute Kitties become merciless Margaritas; the whiplike officers thicken, grow moustaches like antennae, begin following orders. And then, inevitably, like burps emitted in the middle of a confession, here come the clowns:

In the city lived a mysterious creature—Balmcalfkin. He could often be seen walking with a teapot to the public cafeteria for hot water, surrounded by nymphs and satyrs. 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.

Behold Balmcalfkin, the hero of Konstantin Vaginov’s Goat Song, published in 1927 but translated into English for the first time by Ainsley Morse and Geoff Cebula. As a fellow hanger-on of the Russian novel, I recognize him immediately. He is a “superfluous man,” great-grandson of Oblomov and Onegin and benevolent uncle to the epic losers of more recent Russian fiction, from Venedikt Erofeev’s Vanya to Sergei Dovlatov’s Boris Alikhanov. Armored in bathrobe and slippers, he tiptoes around postrevolutionary Saint Petersburg like some sort of post-Soviet Dude, turning prostitutes into nymphs as he searches for a source of tea water that won’t give him cholera.

Unfortunately for Balmcalfkin, the Russia that he lives in is no longer the forgiving 19th-century playground; on the contrary, it’s a country gripped by a delusion at least as blinkered as his own. This is a story of the Soviet Revolution, a fairy tale of labor and communal sacrifice that found itself by condemning the entire 19th century as superfluous—or, worse, as a collar weighing it down. It does not have time for Pentelic marble, let alone for someone refined enough to know what that means. So, instead of embracing Balmcalfkin as the genius he believes himself to be, it shuns him, turning a cold shoulder that not even his self-absorption can ignore completely.

As cultural situations go, this is not exactly Renaissance Italy, or even prerevolutionary Russia—but it was the backdrop and chosen subject of Balmcalfkin’s creator, Vaginov, who rose to prominence in the 1920s and ’30s (Osip Mandelstam put him on the same level as Anna Akhmatova as a poet, and even the unforgiving Nabokov admired him). At the height of his powers, he frequented some of the more sparkling intellectual orbits of postrevolutionary Saint Petersburg, associating with both the OBERIU group and the circle of writers and scholars surrounding Mikhail Bakhtin. But his rise also coincided with Stalin’s, and he died young, like so many of his peers, succumbing to tuberculosis at 34.

Perhaps because of his staggered generational positioning (he was born a decade after Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva, and 20 years before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), Vaginov did not win the voice-of-a-generation fame that many of his peers did. But the miscellaneous aura that made his writing so difficult to categorize when it first appeared gives it a fresh feeling when we read him now. His satire damns with the insight of a true outsider, presenting Soviet society as a kind of slow-motion car wreck in which the verve of the Russian “Silver Age” hurls itself against the closing walls of decadence, opening only occasionally into what feel like moments of real despair:

It’s a dark night. Right now it’s three a.m. My heroes’ favorite hour. The hour of the unknown poet’s zenith, and that of his faculties and visions. Once again I see: through bitter frosts, across the snowy bumps and hollows of the streets, against the horrifying wind that deadens the face, he is seeking intoxication—not for pleasure, but as a means of cognition, a way to cast himself into that holy madness (amabilis insania) which reveals a world accessible only to visionaries (vates).

It is part of Vaginov’s comic genius that even the most visionary moments don’t seem to be taking themselves completely seriously; so the Latin labels stuck beneath this dark night of the soul add a whiff of stuffy scholarship, as if we could smell Vaginov’s stale pipe smoke and hear the coals popping around his ankles. Even the Masterpiece Theatre appearance of the narrative “I” feels a little ridiculous, as if we were watching the author himself trying, and failing, to assert some distance from the depressing world of his characters. But the frustrated self-awareness of this gesture only thickens its emotion, reminding us that, no matter what he wants to believe, author and character are in this nightmare together.

This mixture of sympathy and self-critique is a weird flavor in Vaginov, one that sets his metafictional mechanisms apart from the unsubtle prankishness of his great predecessor Andrei Bely, not to mention the more arch gamesmanship of his most famous (at least outside of Russia) peer, Nabokov. The second comparison is maybe the more interesting one. Born in the same city and year as Vaginov (Saint Petersburg, 1899), Nabokov spent the 1930s creating intricately designed mousetraps that, for all their spirit of lament, draw a clear moral distinction between artists (who are good) and pretenders (who are bad). Reading these books now, it is very difficult not to fall into their trap, unable to feel anything but disdain for their villains and awe for their heroes (which is, of course, exactly what Nabokov wanted us to feel). But it is also hard to drag our imagination out of the ruts they create and feel something other than amazement at the inarguable moral universe they present as the real one.

Reading Vaginov, on the other hand, is a much less certain story. Reading Vaginov, we are constantly encouraged to peek behind the myth of Art into the vast archipelago of artisanal loserdom that persists in the shadow of any successful myth, and particularly beneath the looming shadow of communism. This is particularly true in The Works and Days of Whistlin, the second novel translated in this NYRB volume. You can see what Vaginov’s peers were so excited about here: not the arch, modernist self-consciousness, but the inventiveness when it comes to twisting the forms of fiction into shapes that will better fit the dilapidated lives of his characters. There’s a syncopation to his structures, a jazzy, offbeat rhythm that either cuts scenes off a fraction earlier than we expect or draws them out way past the point when we feel like they should have ended, leaving a space for ambient emotional gurgles that are way more interesting than the usual epiphanies:

Sitting in the bedroom beneath the old-fashioned portraits, the host and his guest smoked, drank some vodka, and washed it down with tomatoes.

Psychofsky talked about his noble order. Whistlin, dragging on his cigarette with pleasure, smoked and let the smoke out of his nostrils. Whistlin saw the night of Psychofsky, because in the life of every man there is a great night of doubt, which is followed by victory or defeat. A night that can last months or years.

“A night that can last months or years”—and its opposite, the year that passes in a single night—might be a good shorthand for Vaginov’s technique, which accordions so unexpectedly that reading him can feel as if we’re Alice eating cookies and drinking potions in a vain attempt to get back to “normal size.” But the longer we read Whistlin, the more we get the sense that the whole point of its self-awareness is to knock us off whatever regularly scheduled story we’ve been traveling, leaving us dazed but also wide-eyed to the weirdos foraging around us. Russian literature again, with its love of the downtrodden and dispossessed! And then, sure enough, by the time we are only a few sentences into the above interview, we have mostly lost interest in the plot that brought us there, preferring to listen to Psychofsky babble on about swords and mystic energies or whatever esoteric blather his intellect has encased itself in.

Still, it is not exactly fair to say that there is no larger momentum behind Whistlin; on the contrary, it’s in this novel, even more than in Goat Song, that we begin to see a larger and even more ambitious target of Vaginov’s critique taking shape. This target is not decadence, or even the Soviet society looming behind it, but the writer himself. The urge to aestheticize, in other words—which Vaginov implies is at least partially an urge to escape, or at least to separate oneself from the disaster of the world in a way that feels final but is really just one last turn of the screw. For at the end of the day, what’s the difference between Whistlin, the note-taking observer, and Psychofsky, his unaware subject? For that matter, what’s the difference between either of them and Balmcalfkin? No one escapes; everyone falls into the same trap, aestheticizing themselves so totally that the very idea of there being a border between “life” and “art” begins to feel naive, and reality itself like a place that only an idiot would waste his time searching for.

Such unsparing fiddling may feel uncomfortably close to home for contemporary readers, but it is (also) a realization that Vaginov derived directly from his time and place. It’s the hereditary understanding of the Russian tradition, which has, after all, lived and worked under (and against, and for) despotism since at least the 17th century. At different points over that time, the most natural, or maybe only, way for people to survive this has been to try and separate themselves, elevating whatever they’re doing into a rarefied fable of us and them. But as Vaginov shows us, this dream is only that: a dream. No matter how superfluous we make ourselves, there will still be a reckoning, because underneath all the clowning, we ultimately want to wake up (although, at the same time, I don’t want to wake up). At least, if we’re lucky, there will be a record.