cover image The Works and Days of Svistonov: In Resistance of the New Order

The Works and Days of Svistonov: In Resistance of the New Order

Konstantin Vaginov. Creative Arts Book Company, $14.95 (240pp) ISBN 978-0-88739-341-9

Somewhere between Andrey Biely's symbolist St. Petersburg and the 1930s onslaught of Soviet realism lies Vaginov's slim novel of the decline of Russia's Modernist intelligentsia and the rise of crass materialism. Writer Andrey Svistonov dreams of pursuing the citizens of St. Petersburg/Leningrad ""as if they were unusual wild game,"" or trophies to display in his fiction. His name suggests a Russian expression for a sneak-thief, and he has Mephistophelean qualities that pull some of the city's curious characters into his orbit. One is the pompous, middle-aged Ivan Kuku, who has always wanted to be a character in a Turgenev novel; he readily seals a Faustian pact with Svistonov, who promises to make him a character in his next novel. Of course, the resulting fictional Kukureku and his make-believe affair with a younger woman only disillusion the real Kuku. Although Svistonov seems to be waging a guerrilla war against everyone from the city's bourgeoisie to its marginalized mystics, it finally becomes clear that the fragmented portraits he assembles of his compromised acquaintances are only his version of Peter the Great's ""cabinet of curiosities."" Svistonov's incomplete histories come off well in Shernoff's exacting translation, but this is ultimately an alienatingly oblique satire of Bolshevism's influence on Russian culture and society, the Stalinist future lying outside its scope. (Mar. 15)