Description: Kostantin Vaginov is one of Russian modernist literature's best kept secrets. He wrote in the wake of the Bolsheviks' emergence after the Revolution. Vaginov, from a privileged family and highly educated, skillfully concealed his contempt for the new order in his prose and poetry through references to antiquity, obscure metaphor, multiple layers of meaning, overlayed sarcasm, myriad subtexts, and a carnival atmosphere in many of his passages. This is Vaginov's second of four novels and perhaps the most accessible in theme and subject matter to an American audience unfamiliar with this author of stellar brilliance. The "works and days" of the main character, Svistonov, are filled with his tasks in assembling a work of literature. His primary chore is "collecting" characters, and there is no shortage of Leningrad philistines, decadents, and eccentrics to serve Svistonov's (and Vaginov's) purpose of skewering his country's new political/social reality. When the bureaucrats who controlled artistic output finally realized Vaginov's "heresy" they set out to arrest him. But he had the last laugh. Vaginov had already died that year of tuberculosis.

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