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The History of Literature
747 Graphomaniac - The Story of a Horrible Russian Poet (with Ilya Vinitsky and James H. McGavran III | My Last Book with Stephanie Sandler | #8 Greatest Book of All Time
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The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hello everyone, it's Jack Wilson telling you that the History of Literature podcast tour through Literary England is still accepting deposits and we'd love to have you join us. We will be visiting some of the greatest literary sites in history, including walks, tours, pub visits, visitors and leisure time activities, and with visits from scholars and other special guests as we experience the amazing cities of London, Oxford and Bath in a small group accompanied by yours truly. If you love literature and if you love life, you are not going to want to miss this. It's next year in May of 2026, but we need you to put down a deposit now so we can finalize the itinerary. 2026 is around the corner, people. Give yourself something to look forward to next spring. You can find out more at John Shors Travel John S H O R S Or you can find the links to the itinerary and sign up page@historyofliterature.com hope to see you soon. This episode is brought to you by Rumchata, a delicious creamy blend of horchata with rum. It's best enjoyed over ice or in your coffee, delivering vacation vibes anyway, or anywhere you drink it. Find out more@rumchata.com Drink responsibly. Caribbean rum with real dairy cream, natural and artificial flavors. Alcohol 13.75% by volume 27.5 proof. Copyright 2025 Agave Loco Brands Pojoaaukee, Wisconsin. All rights reserved. Hello. Move over, bad poets. There's a new sheriff in town. Ilya venitsky and James McGovern make the case for an 18th century Russian poet, Dmitri Khvostov, who was so bad his friend's dying wish was for Kvostov to stop writing poetry. We'll look at how this drum, unbearable for human ears, got started, why he refused to stop, and why, in spite of all the evidence and in spite of unanimous feedback telling him that he was a horrible poet, he continued to believe in himself. Plus, we look at number eight on our list of the greatest novels of all time, and an expert in Russian poetry will select her choice for the last book she will ever read. Will she choose Kvostov? Let's find out. That's all coming up today on the History of Literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm sorry. Whoa, wait. What am I saying I'm sorry for? I just meant to say I'm glad you're here. I just. I just flowed right into being Sorry, I don't know why that. My default position. My default position, as you know, is guilt and fear. And what am I afraid of, you ask? Well, doing something that will make me feel more guilty. So, yes, I guess I am sorry in more ways than one. In every sense of that word. Sorryness is appropriate today. But let me just say quickly that I'm Jack Wilson, your sorry host, and I'm not sorry that you are here. I'm very glad that you chose to join us today. I am a sorry poet. I talked all about that in our episode on Bad Poetry. And guess what? When I was listing the worst poets and running down their details, I missed this guy, Dmitri Khvostov. I should have had him in that episode. He would have belonged. If you'll recall, one of our criteria, the main criteria really, was that the poet must be absolutely certain that he or she is writing good poetry. Our bad poet must try. It's not enough. A lot of people sent in, oh, here's a bad poet. But it's. It's someone who's intentionally writing bad poetry. That's. That doesn't work. It's not enough to write bad poetry on purpose. That's not a bad poet. That's a good poet having fun, punching down a bit. We want the sincere, the sincerest poets who work as hard as they can, who believe in themselves, and who somehow manage to crank out the very worst verse. If I recall correctly, we had a few celebrities in that episode. And also we included my attempts at poetry when I was 20 years old and took John Keats as my role model, of all people. It led to me using the word fain in a poem. F A I N. That's in a poem written in the late 20th century, probably. There's probably about a 200 year gap between that word being used in a poem sometime, sometime by a romantic poet and then by yours truly. I don't know that I've ever revealed more embarrassing details about myself than in that episode on Bad poetry, which is still in our archives. So I am a bad poet. Recovering, but bad. And I don't like bad poetry. I'm not some masochist who collects it or I don't look for it. Ironically, I don't fetishize bad poetry. I'd rather read good poetry. That's how I spend my time. I'm not seeking out bad poetry, but when they come along, I confess I do like not the poetry, but I like the indomitable spirit of the truly bad poets when they're Bad and they know they're bad. Or the world is telling them that they're bad and they defiantly keep going. These are my poems. They shout back at the world. I am proud of them. That's what I like. In reading about Dimitri Kvostov, I was reminded of the movie Superbad. Do you know this movie? It's now almost 20 years old. Hard to believe. Michael Cera and and Jonah Hill played best friends in high school. It's kind of a Judd Apatow related movie. I think he was the executive producer or something, a consultant. It's Seth Rogen's movie and Jonah Hill is kind of playing the young Seth character. It was written by Seth Rogen with his pal, his high school pal. And it's about high school. It's about two guys, best friends in high school, who are looking to, to have a big weekend to buy beer somehow and have some kind of relationship with their crushes before they graduate from high school and go off to college. A big party is coming up and they have this pal named Fogle who says he's going to help out by getting a fake ID so he'll be able to buy the booze. And then he shows up with the ID and Jonah Hill and Michael Cera go crazy on him because Fogle's ID has all kinds of problems with it. On the ID, his name is just one word, McLovin. And Michael Cera says, who are you, Seal? And the ID says he's from Honolulu. It says he's 25. And the two, Jonah Hill and Michael Cera think that McLovin has lost his mind, that he chose the worst possible id, that it's never going to work and they were counting on him. And so they're furious. And when what's great about that scene, the reason why I bring it up, is that Fogle McLovin does not back down at all. He doesn't look embarrassed. There's no flicker of doubt on his face. He defends all of his choices. He says, yeah. They say, why are you 25? And he says, well, you know how many kids go in with fake IDs? They all say they're 21. How many 21 year olds can there be in this town? Right? That's how he supports his decision, where he obviously doesn't look 25, but he's got logic behind it and he's going to stick with it and his name. This is the best part. They say, why McLovin? Why did you call yourself that? And he says, because they Let you choose any name you want. And they say, and you landed on McLovin. He says, yeah, it was between that and Mohammed. They say, why would it be between McLovin and Mohammed? Why wouldn't you pick some common, normal name? And Fogle says, mohammed is the most commonly used name on earth. Read a book for once and they say, do you know anyone named Mohammed? And he smiles and he nods his head and he says, do you know anyone named McLovin? His arguments make no sense, but I am on his side. I love how exasperated his pals are getting and how confident he is in the face of it. That's the beauty of it. Well, as we will hear when our two guests come out today, Dimitri Kvostov was full of that kind of confidence. This was a guy who writes horrible poetry. Everyone, everyone tells him so he cites. Instead of apologizing or, or backing down, he cites dictionaries to defend himself. He sends copies of his books to universities because he's certain they're going to want to stock his books on their shelves. He even sends busts statues of his head and shoulders to libraries so they too can proudly display a tribute to the great Kvostov in their lobbies. We need this confidence. We can accept it, because without it, literature would lose some of its actually great writing. Writers. Literature is hard. It might not be published. There are gatekeepers everywhere, people who want to tell you no. The Bronte Daughters, the sisters, published a book of poems at their own expense. And that book sold two copies, three poets. You'd think if they even bought one, one apiece, they would have sold more. But no, it sold just two copies. Ezra Pound had to print his own book, Allume Spento, which was his first collection of poems, and he had to review it himself to try to get it out there. And he wrote, quote, the unseizable magic of poetry is in this queer paper book, and words are no good in describing it. End quote. Either he was a good liar or. Or he had impressed himself. Either way, without that confidence, we might not have had those poems or his later works. One author you might have heard of wrote a novel called Soldier's Pay. It had a print run of 2,500 copies sold fewer than half of those. Same thing happened with his second novel, Mosquitoes. But he kept going. That first novel had a hard time attracting buyers. Asked to pay $2.50 for it today, a copy of that first edition will sell for upwards of $35,000 because, of course, the author was someone we now know quite well, William Faulkner, who believed in himself as a novelist. Which brings us to. That's right, you've been waiting. Well, wait no longer, people. We are delivering number eight on our list of the greatest books of all time, Moby Dick by Herman Melville. So we have three things to tell you about it today. One is that it was not viewed as a classic when it first came out in 1851. Reviewers hated it. An ill compounded mixture of romance and matter of fact, said one reviewer. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad rather than bad English, and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly and obscurely managed. End quote. Thrice unlucky. Herman Melville said another review. He is gauging our gullibility and our patience, and this book is generally as clumsy as it is ineffectual. Another review was an absurd book. It's like Spinal Tap. Remember that scene here? I'm really going for the movies today. Super bad. And Spinal Tap. Why not? It's like the scene in Spinal Tap where they say the Rob Reiner character says, here's a review of your album, Shark Sandwich. It's just two words, Shark sandwich. And Nigel and David just laugh. Where'd they print that? You can't print that. Well, Melville had an afterlife, kind of like Spinal Taps famous decline. He had been a bestseller, respected by all, and now he fell into obscurity after a run of bad novels or bad, poorly reviewed novels. I should say run of great novels, but poorly reviewed novels. He fell into obscurity. Puppet show and Spinal Tap said the sign outside their concert. Their manager says, spinal Tap first, puppet show second. If I told him once, I told him a hundred times. Then she says, well, you've got a bigger dressing room. And David St. Hubbins, aka Michael McKean, played by Michael McKean, says, oh, we've got a bigger dressing room than the puppets. That's good. For Melville, it was his years working on a farm first. His next book after Moby Duck, Pierre or the Ambiguities didn't do much better. A New York newspaper published a review entitled Herman Melville Crazy. He kept going, though. He wrote more books. He finally got a job as a customs inspector for New York City, where he had a reputation for being very honest, which was rare among the customs inspectors. He worked there for 19 years until he became more famous in his tiny, localized way as a bureaucratic functionary than he was as a living novelist. When he died, 40 years after Moby Dick came out, the New York Times published an obituary notice that Misspelled the word Moby, they spelled it M, O, B, I, E. It would be another 30 years before the book would find any kind of an audience. If you're doing the Math, we're now 70 years after the book was first published. But flash forward a hundred years after that, 170 years since the first publication, and it's number eight on our list of the greatest books of all time, commonly held to be perhaps the great American novel, maybe the book, among all other American books that can stand toe to toe with classics like the Odyssey or War and Peace. Fact number two, Moby Dick, which tells the story of a sea captain obsessed with a white whale who's willing to put himself and his crew in danger as he chases the whale around the world, was based in part on a true story. That's hard to believe. The ocean is. Is very big. It's hard to imagine that you could find anything in it, even something as big as a whale, when that thing is moving around. But there was a real life inspiration called Mocha Dick, which survived as many as 100 skirmishes with whalers. It too was a white whale covered with barnacles, and it had a peculiar way of spouting, which was how they were able to identify that it was Mocha Dick. Even stranger, it seemed to seek out whalers, sometimes swimming alongside the whaling ship for long stretches, but then once attacked, it would turn on the ship and attack back with great ferocity and cunning. When Mocha Dick was finally killed after coming to the defense of a baby whale that had been attacked by a whaling ship, they found that the beast had 20 harpoons in his body. The captain of the ship that killed Mocha Dick believed from an analysis of his teeth that the whale was between 100 and 200 years old. The third thing about Moby Dick for you today, well, what do you think it would be? We could talk about his famous first line, call me Ishmael, or its famous homoerotic relationship between Ishmael and the quote unquote, pagan harpoonist Queequeg. Or we could talk about the whiteness of the whale, all of which are pretty fascinating. But instead, let's focus on the one person whose opinion meant more to Melville than anyone else's. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter came out in 1850, one year ahead of Moby Dick. But by then, Melville was already a huge Hawthorne fan. He believed Hawthorne to be the greatest writer in America, and he dedicated his book Moby Dick to him. Melville respected Hawthorne was probably at least a little in love with him. He had bought a house close enough to spend so the two of them could spend more time together. And they were friends. Although it appears that eventually Melville's devotion became too much for Hawthorne to absorb and he distanced himself a bit. The great whale that was Hawthorne's genius needed to get away from the hobbling sea captain intent on stabbing him with a harpoon and reeling him in. Or something like that. But what about Moby Dick? This book came out at the height of their friendship. Did Hawthorne praise the work that was dedicated to him? And did he give Herman the kind of nourishment that would sustain the poor man through those lean decades when the book of his life, his masterpiece, was sitting in dusty, out of print obscurity? We don't know directly what Hawthorne said about the book. Melville. When Hawthorne came out with a short story collection, Melville wrote and published a 7,000 word review. Hawthorne did not review Moby Dick in any publications, but he did apparently write a letter to Melville after he read it. And while that letter has not survived, we have Melville's response to it. And Melville, in a word, was elated. Your letter was handed me last night on the road going to Mr. Morwood's, and I read it there. Had I been at home, I would have sat down at once and answered it in me. Divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous. Catch them while you can. The world goes round and the other side comes up. So now I can't write what I felt, but I felt pantheistic. Then your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God's. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book and feel spotless as the Lamb. End quote. Hawthorne apparently didn't love everything about it, or he didn't fully get it. But there was enough praise in his letter to suit Melville. He says, you did not care a penny for the book. But now and then, as you read, you understood the pervading thought that impelled the book and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body and embrace the soul. Once you hugged the ugly Socrates because you saw the flame in the mouth and heard the rushing of the demon, the familiar, and recognized the sound, for you have heard it in your own solitudes. End quote. There we go. Sounds like kind of a tepid mixed review, but enough to keep Melville going. Sometimes that's all we need. Sometimes we can be a little bit self deluded and that's enough to keep us going. Speaking of which, one wonders, did Dimitri Zvostov ever have someone who appreciated him the way our man Melville appreciated Hawthorne and believed that Hawthorne appreciated him? I doubt it. Or at least maybe not until now, when author Ilya Venitsky wrote his book about Dmitri Khvostov and James McGaveran translated Ilya's book. We'll talk to both of them together after this. Hey everyone, the days are getting shorter, the holidays are around the corner. It's time for an energy boost. Here's something I've been using AG1, a whole body health program in one easy scoop. After my morning workout, I combine AG1 with water, shake it up, and enjoy a brisk little drink that's packed with antioxidants, prebiotics, probiotics, enzymes, and micronutrients. That little scoop also has multivitamins, greens, immune support, cognitive support, functional mushrooms, and stress adaptogens all in one scoop. And it tastes good too, which was a nice surprise. It's an easy part of my daily routine and I feel great. Head to drinkag1.com literature to get a free welcome kit with an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 when you first subscrib. That's drinkag1.com literature hey folks, the countdown is on. Holiday shopping season is officially here. Uncommon Goods takes the stress out of gifting with thousands of unique, high quality finds you won't see anywhere else. When you shop at Uncommon Goods, you're supporting artists and small independent businesses, but that means they can sell out. So shop now. I bought my dad a very cool throwback radio with Bluetooth so he can listen to his old time radio shows in style. The Uncommon Gifts website has something for everyone from moms and dads to kids and teens. Die hard football fans, history buffs, foodies, avid gardeners, mixologists, and of course, book lovers. So don't wait. Cross those names off your list before the rush to get 15% off your next gift. Get go to uncommongoods.com literature that's uncommongoods.com literature for 15% off uncommon goods were all out of the ordinary. Wayfair's fake sale is returning. Get ready for way day. For four days only, score up to 80% off all things home with free shipping on everything from October 26th through 29th. Score Wayfair's best deal deals like up to 80% off area rugs up to 60% off mattresses up to 60% off bedroom furniture and more exclusive door buster deals. So mark your calendar and shop Wayday starting October 26th at Wayfair.com Wayfair Every style, every home. Okay. Joining me now are Ilya Vinitsky, professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, and James McGavran III, who is an associate professor of Russian at Kenyan College. They're here to discuss their book, the A literary historical discussion of Dmitry Khvostov as a reprieve from teaching. The vanity of worldly affairs and melancholy reflections brought on by the loss of a front tooth, together with the current cultural and political situation, which Ilya wrote and which James translated into English from the original Russian and which just won a prize for the best book in 18th century Slavic studies. Ilya Venitsky and James McGaveron, welcome to the history of literature.
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B
My pleasure to be with you.
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C
Jack, thank you very much. I'm happy to be here.
- [25:32]
A
So I can give you another prize, which is this is the longest title of a book that we have ever covered on the History of Literature podcast.
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B
If I had known about that, I would have probably written something like More.
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A
Yeah, a little longer. Yeah, make sure you hold the title forever. So I did a whole episode on bad poetry, and I am kicking myself for not including this guy, Dmitri Khvostov, because he is exactly the kind kind of poet that I wanted to focus on in that episode. My main criteria was that the poetry had to be bad, but the poet had to be serious about their poetry, not intentionally bad. You know, it's sort of making fun of poetry or trying to write something that's kind of humorously bad. But people who are really genuinely in love with poetry want to write poetry and believe that they're doing something noble and artistic, and somehow it just comes out all wrong. And Kvostov fits the bill perfectly. But why don't we start a little bit with who he was, apart from his poetry, just his general background and his profession and where he was born and his family background and that kind of thing. So I don't know if. Ilya, you want to begin?
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B
I can start by. And Jamie, if you don't mind. Jamie will expand on this. Is it okay?
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C
Please, please.
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B
Yeah. First of all, the first question, who was Vostoki? Was a Russian nobleman, an aristocrat of the 18th century. He lived a very long life. He was part of the Russian government for some time. He was a laughingstock for decade as well, mostly when he retired and focused on composing poetry, which seemed Outdated seemed very bad and at the same time hilarious. And again, the most important fact about his life is that it was long. He outlived major poets of the 18th century, early 19th century, 1820s, some poets and writers who died in the 1830s. And he was still around. And if he hadn't died, he would have still been with us, providing his poetry to the readers, using AI to translate it in all languages available, so everyone, anyone could appreciate the glory of him. But unfortunately, he died in 1835. James, maybe you can concretize.
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C
Well, no, I mean, I would just say, yeah, he was a nobleman. He served in the Senate, he had a lot of different government positions, and I mean, Leah is the expert here, but he served in the Holy Synod. He was the head of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. He was a diplomat for a time, thanks mainly to his connections through marriage. Marriage. He was the nephew by. By marriage of a great Russian war hero, Subarov. And that sort of opened a lot of doors to him. And that, in fact, is why he eventually became a count, Count Vostov. This title was bestowed on him thanks to. Essentially thanks to his uncle, the Count of Sardinia, the. The first and only Russian Count of Sardinia.
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A
So I read that he, apart from his poetry, he was not somebody who kind of walked through life as a buffoon, that he was viewed as an able bureaucrat and politician. He had been in the military. He was honest and incorruptible and modest and good humored and just a likable person. It seems like it just came to what's been described as his abnormal passion for writing and what was more serious, publishing his own poetry.
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B
Yeah, this is correct. And he was likable. He loved poetry with all his heart. So basically, I would say he identified himself with poetry, which made him paradoxically funny in the eyes of his younger contemporaries, for whom he was already, like, outdated. He presented the 18th century neoclassicism. And what made him especially funny in the larger part of his life after he retired was the fact that he believed that he could produce literary works in all genres, in all forms, which were considered as sacred from the point of view of neoclassicism. And since he tried to populate the entire poetry with his own poems, it looks ridiculous for his contemporaries, but I would say that they all loved him as well. So I wouldn't say that in the second part of his life, when he retired, they loved him. The point of the book is that Rostov is a very interesting example of poetaster, the King of Bad Poets who is admired, cherished by his contemporaries, no less than derided. And this ambiguous reputation of Vostov actually created for him the posterity, the longevity of the posterity for his existence. But you are right to that he was an able politician. You know, if we need some kind of comparison, I would say that he was a sort of Nico Peter Khrushchev of the late 18th century. He played sometimes the role of a buffoon in the age when the emperor was a kind of buffoon, Paul I. And he succeeded in many ways. But for him, poetry was the most important thing in his life.
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A
So what makes his poetry so distinctive? What features does it have that made his younger contemporaries kind of snicker and even as they sort of admired it for it being its own thing?
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B
Well, the book actually tries to respond to this question. It started with his lofty odes, which were considered as outdated and funny because of mixture of styles and sometimes really weird syntactic constructions, which are really hilarious even in contemporary Russian usage, and which Jamie translated adequately. So I hope that the English reader will laugh at Jamie's translation. Apropos. It's very difficult to write a truly bad poetry. I call this truly bad poetry. C poetry, catastrophic poetry, or F poetry, if you wish. But I don't want to explain why F. But it's even more difficult to translate it into another language. And English has a very different system, like stylistic system, no registers, like high, medium, low in contemporary English. So James did this. Later on, Bostov published a book of his, Parables, Fables. And in this book he created a ridiculous and extremely funny and unusual world of animals, of beasts, like a dove with teeth, or one animal changed its gender within the narrative in Russian language, the grammar system actually suggests that how did it happen within the attacks is he or she. What's going on? So these things immediately made him an object of numerous jokes and parodies. To be sure, he wrote good poems as well. And the problem was that if he wrote a good poem, not necessarily very good, but a normal poem of the time, his readers, his contemporaries, were disappointed because they expected from him something really disastrous. C Poetry. F poetry. So if he hadn't produced something like this, they made it up. So there is the phenomena of pseudo or fake Vostov, the poems, the lines which were attributed to him and circulated in the society carpet, collected in special books of Guastal's writings, kind of ontologies which did not belong to him. But I would say that it's better if you ask Jamie this question, because he has unique experience of dealing with Guastow from another cultural and linguistic perspective.
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A
Right. Jamie, do you have some examples of poetry that you had to translate and you had to find the right way to capture the. The particularities in English?
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C
Well, honestly, this was very difficult, and I've been combing the book for a couple of days preparing for this conversation, and I'm not sure I have a great example to give you. I mean, Ilya gives a lot of examples of bad poetry that he encountered at different times in his career early in the book. And I really kind of threw myself into the translation of those that were earlier in the book. In one chapter of the book, Ilya gives two versions of a long poem on God. The title of the poem is actually God by Fostor, where he's sort of. He's taking his title and his subject matter from a much more successful and probably much better poet, Dirjavan. And so there's just these. This really, really long poem that I had to sort of deal with. And I have to confess, I. Like, at that point, I wasn't. I wasn't up to the formal challenges of the verse, so I was trying to just convey the meaning of it. But, I mean, I. What I saw again and again was, like Ilya said, a sort of mix of stylistic registers together with a very devoted kind of attention to formal qualities. I mean, like trying to get the rhyme scheme right or the meter right. But occasionally there would be mistakes there as well, where the. The meter doesn't scan properly or things of this sort. So those were very hard to translate, because, I mean, even if I could sort of have the rhythm be right everywhere, it's supposed to be right and then wrong in the places where there's a mistake, it wouldn't be read the same way.
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A
Right.
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C
Because of different sort of literary, cultural norms.
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A
Right.
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C
So this is. I mean, this is a challenge that, to be totally honest, I'm not sure I rose to or really met. I mean, to make the poetry bad in the same way that it's bad in the original.
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A
Right.
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C
This was. This is part of the challenge that drew me to the project because I wanted to try this, but I have to say, it's extremely difficult.
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A
Well, one of the things that I loved in the examples that I saw, and I saw the one about the dove with the teeth, and the dove actually ends up gnawing himself out of the net, and there's a donkey that climbs a tree. But what I loved is that the way he would double down and the way he would insist on he wouldn't kind of sheepishly correct himself. But I read that he, he had one where a crow had dropped a piece of cheese from its jaws. And the critic said, you know, don't you know that crows have beaks and not jaws? And so he put in a footnote that said, I know that obviously, but I used an allegoric substitute because here a crow is an allegory for a man. And then he says of a man, one might easily say he gaped and his jaw dropped. And then he said, see the Russian Academy dictionary? And it's sort of like he's taking on his critics directly. And he's not backing down and saying, well, you know, everybody has a right to their own opinion or something. But he's sort of challenging his critics. Well, maybe you need to go look in the dictionary to see what I'm up to. Which just seems like the spirit that he has strikes me as one of the things that makes him so appealing.
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B
He was very well educated. He contributed actually to this dictionary, which was a grand project of the late 18th century. He spoke several languages. He considered himself as one of the best, if not the best, expert in neoclassicist theory. So from this perspective, he considered that those who criticized him were wrong. And he just tried to tell them, guys, you just don't understand what I'm doing. I'm right, and you might be wrong. But the most important thing for him was that these people paid attention at him. So it was really important. He had some problem with PR as he believed it. One of the consequences of his constant desire to be seen and discussed, even from the negative perspective, is in the fact, which probably is unique in, I don't know, European literary traditions at least. He always used his own lines as epigraphs to his own poems, a kind of self sufficient poetry. He published his collections of works and then republished them, made some changes to, according to some criticism or something. He stubbornly left as it was. He distributed his collections, his poems, copies of them between his friends, friends of their friends send them to schools, universities, theological seminaries. And that's what made him funny. But I believe that he was aware of this. He just wanted to be seen. But the point of my book, which is translated by Jamie, was not just to tell the story of a guy who wrote poems, was obsessed with poetry. There are two points. Number one is that I tried to consider his phenomenon as a part of a Russian poetic system. What actually happened in Russia in the 18th, especially in the 19th century, they created not only a Logo centric. Not only literature, centric culture, but poetry, centristic culture. And if they had poetry as the center of cultural life, they needed the king of the poets. By the 1830s, even earlier, it was Alexander Pushkin who was considered as the major poet. So my argument was that from the systematic point of view, this culture, this system, needed an anti poet, the shadow, the trickster, the doppelganger of Pushkin. And Rostov successfully play this role, and Pushkin helped him to play the role to him and write and also parodies of Kvostov. So there was a kind of symbiosis, because both of them share the idea that poetry is central. But how can you learn what is good if you don't know what is or what is bad? So that's the way the system created itself and functioned for a very long period with this anti poet is, from my perspective, no less important than Pushkin. Of course, provocatively speaking.
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A
Right. It reminds me, I don't know if you saw. This is getting kind of old now, but there was a movie called American Movie where some guys in Wisconsin tried to fund their own.
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B
Exactly.
- [40:15]
A
Horror movie. Yeah, their thriller movie. And they're so bad, but they're so determined to do it.
- [40:23]
D
And.
- [40:23]
A
And one of the things that comes out of watching this documentary of them trying to, you know, make a real movie with no budget and no equipment and, you know, friends for actors and so on, but an absolute passion for doing it and a determination to make it really good, is it. What comes across is how important moviemaking is in the 1990s. You know, that this was like a way to get something done and to become famous and to maybe make, you know, a contribution to the culture and all of these things. And you probably wouldn't have seen a poet doing something similar in America in the 1990s. But what you're saying with this is the era of Pushkin and Ferkostov. If he had been around in the 1990s, he might have been doing that with film, but he was doing it with poetry, because that's how central poetry was at the time.
- [41:16]
B
Yeah, that's the point. It's all about the system. Because what we consider as bad changes, what we consider as good also changes. Aesthetic criteria are flexible, even in concrete historical appearance, not to speak of different historical eras. So there is no firm criteria. But what remains firm is the passionate love of something you are doing. So maybe he would have been in America, following the American president and American cultural system, something like a film producer or film director. But fortunately, there was a similar phenomena in England. The famous poetaster of the Victorian age, William Topaz McGonagall, not to confuse with the character of Harry Potter, who composed bad poems, which were of immediate success and people learned them by hard. They're still at McGonagall Society in Scotland. So this is also a very interesting case because he represents something similar to Klostov, but it's different because he's a part of the English, well, Scottish English, British system of the Victorian culture. He isn't kind of anti Tennyson, anti Wordsworth, whereas Kvastov was perceived as first anti Derzavin, the 18th century poet, and then anti Pushkin. But they go hand in hand and they share what is the most important thing for them as well as for their readers. Poetry.
- [42:44]
A
Okay, so I want to take a break, and then when we come back, I want to ask you about the graphomaniac. Your book, Ilya, and the one that you translated, Jamie. But before we leave him behind, I've just got a few more things in my notes here that I want to make sure we get on the table. One is you mentioned that he used his own verse as epigraphs, and I saw that in a collection of his works, he used the epigraph, something he wrote which was just, I love to write verse and see it printed, which is really a funny thing to put as an epigraph.
- [43:18]
B
But at least he was sincere. How many people wanted the same thing? They do not acknowledge, they don't confess.
- [43:25]
A
And that I have here. Pushkin mocked his use of footnotes. And another poet called his poetry a drum, unbearable for human ears. And a friend said that his dying wish was that Kvostov would stop writing poetry. But I'll give the last word to Nikolai Karamzin. I hope that's how you pronounce it. And he said, count Kvostov, with his unbroken passion for verse making, is very touching to me. Here is love that is worthy of a talent. He's got none, but he deserve having it, which is kind of what we've been talking about here, that there is something beautiful about his sincerity and his passion for poetry. So let's take a quick break and then we'll come back with more about the graphomaniac.
- [44:18]
C
Okay, sounds good.
- [44:28]
D
Foreign.
- [44:33]
A
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C
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- [45:34]
A
Okay, we're back. So, Ilia, you mentioned a little bit what interested you about this example and what you tried to put in your book. But I was just wondering if you could talk a little more about your interest in this figure. Is. Is he someone you've known about since you were a child? Or did you come across him at some point and decide that this might make a really good and interesting endeavor to kind of put together this graphomaniac or what triggered your interest here?
- [46:05]
B
It was the other way around. When I was a child, I composed verses, poems. And they were terrible. Not just terrible. I included some of the quotations in my epigraphs to the chapter. Yeah, they were totally disastrous. And I don't even understand how I could have written such when I was a child. I did write some mediocre poetry when I was a teenager. And I even considered applying to the so called Writers Institution University in Moscow. Fortunately, I did not do that. I became a literary scholar. When I became a literary scholar, when I took courses in the history of Russian literature, I learned about Vostov, but I did not think about writing about Vostov. But then the idea came into my mind, look, how many literary scholars, I hope that it's not about myself, wrote bs. How many of them wrote like boring thing, arrogant things and did not acknowledge this fact. So I would say that my personal experience on both ends, on the end of bad poetry, as a producer and a literary critic who actually works with his colleagues all the time, it created the. I don't know, the milieu which was ready, the soil which was ready to accept the seed of Wostov's design. In my mind, the last drop which actually affected the choice of the character and originated the book was that I did lose the front tooth in an eatery in Brooklyn. And I was so sad and I needed some kind of funny story, some kind of entertaining myself. And suddenly it just happened that I read an article about Kvostov with denunciation of Kvostov, but I left reading Khvastov himself. So if you take all these ingredients of this Khvostov's design cocktail, you will see that I was already ready to write a book about poetry, about my failed attempt to write poems about Russian passion of composing verses, this kind of Dr. Seuss, from the beginning to the end of your life, attach my kind of critical view of contemporary literary criticism, which is always oriented towards something important, meaningful, socially meaningful as well. So all these things led to the idea of why can't I try at least to write a book, an academic book about someone who loves poetry, but not from an academic point of view of writing. So the book is a parody, but it's a serious parody. And when they asked me, the book was originally published in Russian, of course, when they asked me to write a blurb for the book, for advertising purposes, as always, I did it in imitation of Kvostov. And this is as far as I know. I'm boasting now, like Kvastov, probably he incarnated into me as a graphomaniac. So I am a graphomaniac, okay, But a principal graphomaniac, a total graphic, if you will. So this is the only blurb which was written in doggerels, in Russian. I translated it into English. Can I recite it?
- [49:22]
A
Sure.
- [49:23]
B
So it sounds like this. I can tell you that each word of this mocking blurb is serious, although it doesn't look like this. In this study we endeavor to understand and master the works and days of the endlessly clever yet notorious Russian poetaster Dmitri Ivanovich Vostov account of Sardinia and very well off. We examined his biography and delusions of authorial grandiosity and find the features of a stable genius, as well as his artistry and compulsive verbosity, which was both pathological and devious. All aspects of his parodic personality are explained by the theory of poetic vitality. See Professor Tushkin, McGonagall and Shitoff. The book argues that only the nation that gave us Pushkin could give us a poet as bad as Kvostov. And it was published, so I was proud, at least not of the book, but of the fact that I invented a new format for the blurb.
- [50:21]
A
Right. So, Jamie, when did you become aware of Count Kvostov and his works? Was he a figure that you knew before you started on this project, or did you come to him after deciding you were going to translate this work that Ilya had written?
- [50:38]
C
I had never. I mean, like a lot of people, I think I'm aware of Fostov mainly because of actually A single reference to him in Pushkin's the Bronze Horseman, one of the. One of Pushkin's greatest poems about the flood of St. Petersburg in 1824. And there's a line in there, something. The day after the flood, this poet, beloved of the heavens, had already written his verse, his immortal verse about the tragedy on the banks of the Neva. Ilya talks about this reference in a late chapter in the book. The point is that at this point in his life, Rostov was sort of acting as a kind of poetic journalist almost. He would react in verse almost instantly to current events and publish or, you know, self publish or get these poems out there. And Pushkin is sort of commenting on the fact that. But the morning after the flood, there was already a, you know, a poem, a long poem on it by Kvostov. So, anyway, I was aware of that reference to Kvostov. I was aware that he was considered this terrible poet. But no, I mean, I never dreamed of his significance in the way that Ilya lays it out in the book.
- [51:48]
A
So had you read the book? I mean, how did it come about that you translated it?
- [51:53]
C
So, I mean, I know Ilya. We work together at University of Pennsylvania, and we've been in touch with ever since then. I was. I was aware of his book when it came out in Russian, and I. I read it then and thought, this is. This is a book that deserves a wider audience. For. For reasons I can. I can talk about, if you like. I also had a happy experience. I. I translated an article by Ilya about Mandelstam, actually, before. I think it was before I started working on this. On this book, or it might have actually even been concurrent. But. So I. I had worked with Ouya before, and he's a great person to work with because he's hilarious and brilliant and very patient.
- [52:35]
A
Well, let's ask the question you teed up for us there. Why did you think that this book deserved a wider audience?
- [52:42]
C
So, I mean, Ilya himself sort of touched on some of this. I think there are three things that are really remarkable about the book. One is its subject matter. Just the idea that taking a close look at someone who everyone dismisses as a terrible poet is this sort of novel but effective way to shed light on multiple eras of Russian culture, Russian literature, because, as Ilya said, Rostov lived very long, and he sort of straddled these at least two major sort of epochs in Russian poetry. So just the subject matter and the approach. Another thing is just the depth of the research and the Knowledge that went into this book, Ilya is probably too modest to say it, but I think it's a major scholarly achievement. It does it with a lot of humor, but there's a huge amount of erudition in the book and a huge amount of research went into it. And then finally, what really sort of attracted me as a translator was this Ilya's sort of unique style, which is a combination of erudition and playfulness. And, I mean, Elia talks about this himself, you know, eloquently and in the book. But this idea that serious literary scholarship can also be hilariously funny, I think that's extremely important. This is, you know, a message I would like to shout from the rooftops, basically. So, yeah, it was those things. Thank you, Jimmy.
- [54:08]
A
Would either of you. Or we could give you both a turn, like, to read a passage that would give us a sense of the Bookstone. Because it really is. I mean, we've talked a lot about the Count and we've talked about the era and all of that, but really, it's sort of impossible to convey the book just by talking about it. I think you have to. Actually, I didn't really get it until I opened it up and started reading it. Exactly what was going on inside it. So maybe we could hear a paragraph or something that would give us a sense of the book's tone and the author's style. Who would like to start?
- [54:49]
B
Can I start with the dedication of the book? The entire book is actually dedicated to a very close friend of mine, Professor Mark Altar, who just turned 96 and who is one of the best, and now I would say the best scholar of Russian 18th century, with a great sense of humor. But this is the dedication to the English edition by Northwestern University Press, the book, which was translated by Jamie. And it's very short. And this is the only poem I wrote in English in my entire life. For long belittled and derided, or sage or fool or lord or worm, your soul remains Apollo guided. It soars and sparkles, plump and firm, both in this sleepy constellation and in the fury of the sea, a star of decolonization of Pushkin, Rus and Poesi. And maybe James can continue with the paragraph or several paragraphs, which he translated brilliantly.
- [55:54]
C
Absolutely. Yeah. I won't read. So this book has not a note from the translator, but an ode from the translator. I will not read that. You have to buy the book to get that, I guess. But first of all, I have to say this was a difficult choice because, as Ilya said, the Whole book is dedicated to his friend and colleague Mark Alchuler. And throughout the book there are passages in italics where Ilya addresses Mark Grigorjevich directly, to the extent that in the index of the book you can find colleague, comma, dear. And it lists the entire book, basically because they're peppered throughout the book. And any one of these passages, I think, would. They're all wonderful. Any one of them would convey what Ilya is going for. But I think he also sets the tone for the book at the very beginning, at the start of the prologue, which is called Unpoetic anti poetry. And I can read a bit from that, if you'd like. Okay, so Ilya says, in my early youth, dear Colleague, I took part in a poetry seminar organized by the Young Poets Commission of the Moscow branch of the Writers Union of the rsfsr. We met in the editorial offices of a certain literary newspaper on the New Arvat. At our first workshop, we went around the circle of participants and each read their verse aloud. The last to read was a young woman who acted very strangely. She stood up, asked the person beside her to scoot back because he was inhibiting her gesticulations, threw back her head, drew in air, and began to recite with great pomp and passion. The poetry was awful. I only remember two lines, but I believe they were the main. Two lines quote, to light the way for today's youth. I must forever a virgin remain, unquote. The audience reacted negatively. To be more specific, everyone laughed. The poet was clearly offended. She got angry and left. We all assumed she had quit the seminar for good. But at our next workshop she appeared again, this time wearing a black veil and smelling strongly of perfume in the mists of March. I recognized her immediately, despite the new getup. She sat by the window in a far corner of the room. When it was her turn to read, she stood up just like the first time, used one hand to push back a poet who was in her way, lifted her veil with the other and cried out the title of her poem, Milady, or rather Milady from this poem, horrendous in both its form and content. What had happened to the maid of Orleans in the space of just one year? I will always remember the first line. Count de la Fere took hold of me. I remember that, my mind supplied by inertia the continuation, and blessed me with one foot in the grave. But her next line was something different. The poem ended with a strange promise that to this day resounds in my memory. I will poke out My eye sockets and croak in bed with thee. Then she walked out again. I attended the seminar for about two years, but I don't remember a single poem, not a single line read during that time by the other young poets. Only those five lines, inseparable in my memory from the frightening image of their author. I now know exactly who she was. She was the muse of Anti poetry, a fallen and disgraced angel of light forever striving back toward her source, but forever bouncing off it like a rubber ball of covering cosmic distances. I think that's an excellent introduction. He goes on to quote other poets and his experience who were visited by this muse of Anti poetry. But that really grabbed hold of me when I first read it.
- [59:31]
A
For sure, it feels like a very. The author, the authorial voice here feels very liberated that it does not feel like you felt too confined by convention or expectations or rules or. I mean, it follows its own course, it circles back and comes back to its. Its points. And it has a kind of logic and structure to it. But it also feels like anything goes, like you were completely free to go on excursions and digressions and. And all of that. And I guess in a way it's sort of the book that it's very suitable to its topic. You found the style that would kind of mirror what you wanted to say about what was great about Kvastov.
- [60:20]
B
Oh, thank you. It's really good definition of the process. I also think that this is an attempt, at least for me, and I hope for Jamie as well, to keep our own voice the same way as Rostov, I believed, tried to create, to keep. To deliver, convey his own voice to his readers. In spite of the fact that they laughed at him, in spite of the fact that some critics may not be happy with the book. There was one. Most of reviews of the book were positive, but there was one negative review, just one sentence was negative. That Professor Winitsky writes a funny book, but he is not a young man already. And at the time I was. I did consider myself like I'm now 56 year old. I wrote it earlier and I was actually considering, concerned with the situation and ask myself, when you stop laughing, when you are no longer allowed as a scholar to be played, when you are no longer allowed to chat with your readers if you have something to say or want to hear something, something back. And I responded to myself, actually, as long as I can, I will do what I want. And if I prefer to be playful, I will be playful. If I prefer to write a super serious or a boring article. I will do that, but no one can dictate me what I should write. I'm already tenured.
- [61:54]
A
Right. And Kvostov, I guess, had kind of an equivalent of tenure in that he had money that he could use to publish these books. And I read that he not only sent the books to schools and academies and so on to make sure people were reading his poetry, he would leave it behind on trains and leave him in train stations and so on, but he would also send statues of himself to these academies and busts to make sure that they were all celebrating the great Count Kvostov, the poet. So is there anything that you would say that we can learn from his example? Any lessons that we can apply to our age? And I mean, you've already kind of given us one, which is to kind of follow your heart and follow your true voice and don't let the critics get you down. But is there anything else that you would say that we'd like to take away from this example as a point we can make about our own times?
- [62:53]
C
I think. Well, so, I mean, in addition to. Baskov was a great son to his parents, he was a great husband to his wife, he was by all accounts, an honest and dedicated public servant. But, I mean, I think that his service to literature and to poetry is absolutely an example worth. Worth following. He served poetry with absolutely boundless energy. And he had this ability, as you pointed out, Jack, to sort of. Well, not only to take criticism in stride. I mean, he could do that too, but he could also sort of rise up to meet the challenges, double down on whatever it is that he believed in. And. And honestly, I think all of that is worthy of emulation, basically.
- [63:35]
B
Yeah, I absolutely agree with Jamie. I could only add that this phenomenal love of poetry is important nowadays, I believe, as an antidote against all this serious, tragic, super tragic bloody things and events which are happening around and sometimes inside of us. So from this perspective, it's a sort of window onto the utterly naive happiness which even a bad catastrophic poetry can provide you with. And thinking and writing and reading about it can at least make your life a little bit less sad. And in this case, I would say this book would be successful. It's not guaranteed, but that's what I felt while I was writing it, and that's what I hope the reader can experience through Jamie's translation. One more point. I really, really want to thank our amazing editors and particularly who actually inspired us for this project.
- [64:39]
A
Well, there is not another book that I've ever Seen that's like it. The book is called the Graphomaniac. I won't give the full title, but we'll have it in the show. Notes by Ilya Venitsky, Translated from the Russian by James H. McGaveran III. Ilya, and thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [64:59]
B
Thank you. Thank you very much.
- [65:08]
A
And finally today, we turn to an expert in Russian poetry, Stephanie Sandler. After she and I discussed contemporary Russian poetry, the good stuff, not the impossibly, but kind of adorably horrible, well, I asked her a special question. Okay. Joining me now is Stephanie Sandler, expert in Russian literature, both the Golden Age and contemporary Russian poetry. Stephanie, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [66:04]
D
So I'm unable to choose one. I'll just say that at the outset, I think an awful lot will depend on exactly how my last moments are going. I believe that one of the greatest things ever written is Tolstoy's novel War and Peace. So if I have a long time to contemplate my demise, that's a book that will accompany me for quite a while and will exhilarate me, distract me, thrill me. If it's going to be short and sweet, then I might want something that is. Again, if it's going to be Russian, it might be Pushkin's Eugene on Yegin, which has so much pleasure along the way that I could just have individual 14 line bits from Onegin and it would put a smile on my face and calm me as I prepare to meet my maker.
- [66:55]
A
Yeah. Now, how fortunate would you say that you are that you can read that in Russian? Because that has famously been a kind of contested translated work, let's say, where people will say you cannot really translate it and capture everything there is to capture from it. But is that your opinion as well? And is there any hope for those of us who don't read Russian?
- [67:21]
D
So there are two answers to that question. One, you're young, you can still learn Russian and any other language. And learning a language is a great gift. It's good for our minds and it really expands all of the ways in which we can see the world. But I'm very pro translation. None of us will ever learn all of the languages in which there are so many things that we would like to read. And although especially, especially Eugene Onegin, people argue about it. Nabokov had strong views other people. But there are superb translations of Eugene Onegin. James Phelan did a wonderful translation of Eugene Onegin into English, which preserves the form. Charles Johnston also did a great translation that preserves the form. So I'm in favor of the translations and encourage people to read and respect the work of translators, which they bring us all kinds of gifts. We're very lucky that people will undertake that work.
- [68:18]
A
Right. As far as War and Peace goes, I think that is on my short list as well. War and Peace, really? Yeah. And I think it's what I think I would value the most at that time in my life is just spending time in that world with those people and those characters and just the ideas and just the. There's something about it that just feels like you're transported to this other place where you can inhabit this society along with the people in the book.
- [68:59]
D
Absolutely. I'm a great fan of listening to books and Audible. Audible has things in Russian. There are other sources that we have for recorded books. A few years ago, I and a colleague of mine, Justin Weir, we both listened to War and Peace over the summer in Russian. It was like 90 hours. And it was bliss. It was just bliss. And there are many different ways to do these recorded books. There's some great readers. The great Juliet Stevenson reads a lot of the classics of English literature and she does all the voices. But this reader, Yevgeny Chernowsky, in reading Tolstoy, he doesn't do any of the voices, but you have the sense that he's become Tolstoy or God or something like that. And it's just this magisterial, calm, incredibly well paced unfolding of what you said, of an entire fictional world. So we live with the Rostovs and the Volkonskis and we live on the battlefield. It's a gift.
- [70:04]
A
That is beautiful. It is a gift. I'll put in a plug for my favorite audiobook, which is one we had for my son when he was 2 and 3 years old, I guess. And we had the audiobook of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory read by Eric Idle. And he was doing all the voices. And my son was going through this phase, the language acquisition phase. So it was very easy for him to sort of memorize long stretches of the book we would listen to in the car and so on, and he would do the voices that Eric Idle was doing. It was so sweet. Yeah. So it was really. But it was just a pleasure because I don't think I could have listened to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. A thousand times the way we ended up doing. Except that because Eric Idle made it so much fun, that it was a book that I never got tired of either, even though it was one that was on heavy repeat for several months.
- [71:00]
D
When my son was little, Harry Potter books were coming out and we did the same thing with those books, such that then it was, of course, this is in the age of CDs, this is my child and such that we could just pop in any CD and enter that world at any stage. Like, one minute we'd be in the Prisoner of Azkaban, and the next minute in a totally different segment of it.
- [71:25]
A
Right. Because you have like one CD is in the car and the other one is in there. You go in the bedroom. Yeah.
- [71:32]
D
But to go back to your listener's question, in my dying moments, probably I'm not going to be holding books. And so to be able to listen to a book or to the music of Bach, that'll be a good way to go out.
- [71:47]
A
Okay. Stephanie Sandler, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [71:52]
D
My pleasure. Thank you.
- [71:59]
A
Okay, that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Ilya venitsky, James H. McGaveran and Stephanie Sandler for joining me. We will be back on Monday with an episode on New Zealand's master of the short story, Kathryn Mansfield. The only writing I was ever jealous of said Virginia Woolf. We'll find out why. We'll also travel to Renaissance England after that. And you can travel to Renaissance England sort of with all of us at the History of Literature podcast, which means Emma and me as we check out Shakespeare's Globe Theater together with a full week's worth of other great spots. It's part of our History of Literature podcast tour and it's happening in May of 2026. So sign up now at John Shores Travel. That's S H O r s or historyofliterature.com Put down your deposit to make sure you have secured your spot. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [73:22]
C
Foreign.
- [73:30]
A
Hi, it's Julie Klausner, and I'd like to talk to you about a podcast called How Was yous Week with Julie Klausner? It's hosted by me, Julie Klausner, New York City comedy legend much. And it's on the Forever Dog Network. Now you might remember how is your week from its humble inception back in 2011. Now I'm back and I've got much monologues and pop culture takes and interviews with experts, comedians, writers, documentary filmmakers and authors about all kinds of fascinating stuff. So tune in to How Was yous Week? Every Tuesday and Thursday for new episodes available on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Dan Harris, host of the 10% Happier podcast. There's so much bad news in the world, but one amazing piece of news is that happiness is actually a skill you can train. So every week I talk with top scientists, meditation experts, even the occasional celebrity about anxiety, depression, depression, productivity, focus, dealing with difficult people, how to get enlightened, psychedelics, etc, ancient wisdom, and modern science to help you do your life just a little bit better. The 10% Happier podcast listen now. Wherever you get your podcasts.