“The goat song” of Vaginov in brief
The beginning of the 20-ies. Petersburg, painted “in greenish color, shimmering and blinking, color awful, phosphorous.” Appearing in the preface, the author ends his opening speech with the words: “I do not like Petersburg, my dream is over.”
The hero of the novel, Teptyolkin, “mysterious creature” – long, thin, with graying dry hair, eternally immersed in dreams and meditations. “Beautiful groves smelled sweet for him in the most fetid dreams, and cutesy statues, a legacy of the eighteenth century, seemed to him like shining suns made of Pentelian marble.”
Among his friends – an unknown poet, Kostya Rotikov and Misha Kotikov, Marya Petrovna Dolmatova, Natasha Golubets, The city has changed terribly and strangely. Teptyolkin lives on the Second Street of the Village Poor. “The grass grew between the stones, and the children sang obscene songs.” In this almost unfamiliar city, in a new unknown world,
But the flow of life picks them all up. And now Misha Kotikov, an admirer of the recently drowned artist and poet Zaevfratsky, marries his widow, stupid and pretty Catherine Ivanovna, and becomes a dentist. Kostya Rotikov, a connoisseur of art, who reads in the original Gongora and delicately talks about baroque, “magnificent and somewhat insane style,” collects bad taste. Natasha marries Kandalykin’s technique, vulgar and hypocrites. Teptyolkin throws the work of his life “Hierarchy of Meanings” and earns by lecturing for the day. Maria
Maria Petrovna is dying. And after her death, Teptyolkin becomes “not a poor club worker, but a prominent but stupid official.” He screams at his subordinates and is terribly proud of the achieved position. The novel ends with an afterword, where the author appears again. He and his friends “argue and are excited and utter toasts for high art, not afraid of shame, crime and spiritual death.”
In the final of the novel, the author and his friends “leave the tavern in the charming Petersburg spring night, sweeping the souls over the Neva, over the palaces, over the cathedrals, the night rustling like a garden singing like youth and flying like an arrow for them already flown.”
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