Il΄ia Vinitskii's most recent book, The Count of Sardinia: Dmitrii Khvostov and Russian Culture, continues the “megacycle” of his previous works exploring the “emotional history of Russia” and the principles of the formation and functioning of literary reputation. Vinitskii's book adds a new chapter to his own scholarship and furthers the discussion opened in the groundbreaking 1984 study The Precursors of Slavophilism in Russian Literature by Mark Altshuller, to whom it is dedicated. It also takes over certain themes and approaches introduced by Oleg Proskurin in his brilliant “Literary Scandals of the Pushkin Era” (2000), and throws new light on the literary debates, theories and practices of the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Vinitskii's subject, the notorious count Dmitrii Ivanovich Khvostov (1757–1835), the chief trickster of Russian literature—defines his style. The book's short title—The Count of Sardinia—refers to the honorific surname granted to Khvostov by his wife's mighty uncle, the great commander Aleksandr Suvorov. Its long and playful subtitle (A Historical and Literary Repose from Teaching, Vanity Fair and Sad Thoughts, Caused by a Front Tooth Falling Out, as Well as by Contemporary Historical and Political Circumstances), along with the rap-style annotation placed on the copyright page and the intentionally dysfunctional “short subject index” that crowns the book, alert the reader that this is not a typical academic study.

The Count of Sardinia is daring. First, it is both a daring and a heroic deed to actually (and closely) read Khvostov's poetry, that is to set it free from its author's “parodic persona” (to use Iurii Tynianov's momentous formula) and focus on the text. Secondly, Vinitskii's book is one of the first (if not the first) of its genre, at least in Russian—a fusion of a strict academic study with an ostentatiously anti-academic discourse. Written in a nonchalant, mischievous manner, the study contains true discoveries (for instance, the attribution to Khvostov of the ode “God,” a poetic response to the ode of the same title by Gavriil Derzhavin, which no one, including the omniscient Iakov Grot, had been able to identify before). Two negatives make a positive: writing in a deliberately “unserious” way about a notoriously “unserious” person produces a deconstructive effort of sorts that lead to paradoxically serious results.

In the last twenty-five years there have been two attempts to publish Khvostov “impartially”: the first volume was edited by Maksim Amelin in 1997 (in the Graphomaniac's Library series), and the second was put together by Intrada Publishers in 1999. The fact that both books appeared in the late 1990s is telling. It can be read as an indirect response to a crisis in the ideas of literary “normativity,” caused, on the one hand, by the collapse of the Soviet cultural system, and, on the other, by the appearance in the public sphere of “non-official” authors (like Dmitrii Prigov, who mocked norms and normativity of any kind, creating a very special “literary persona”—not to compare his poetry to Khvostov's, God forbid!) A decade later, Tatiana Neshumova, a Moscow-based scholar, published and commented on an important body of Khvostov's epistolary heritage: his letters to the relatively unknown litterateur Khristophor Kaisarov, a precious source of information on the literaturny byt of the first decade of the nineteenth century. Neshumova's publication falls into three parts, two of which are referred to by Vinitskii, while the last, and most important one has not been taken into account, most likely because it appeared on Academia in 2016, after The Count of Sardinia was probably completed. There were some other Khvostov-related publications and events, yet his exhaustive literary biography remained unwritten. Now Vinitskii has written it.

Every good biography is metonymic by nature: focusing on a single figure, it reconstructs a landscape. The restoration of the literary landscape in Vinitskii's study is especially impressive: behind the “anti-poetic” figure of Khvostov, a diorama of the literary life of late eighteenth-early nineteenth-centuries Russia unfolds—Derzhavin, Dmitriev, Viazemsky, Izmailov, Voeikov, Pushkin, and many other names and faces. Vinitskii develops and “textually proves” Tynianov's idea of the absolute necessity of such an “anti-figure” for the functioning of a literary system. If Khvostov had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him, like the half-fictitious Kozma Prutkov or the entirely imaginary Captain Lebiadkin.

But what was funny or wrong about Khvostov? According to Vinitskii, the most important reason for his fame and shame was that he tried to play four roles at once: those of a Russian Aesop and La Fontaine, a Russian Boileau, a Russian Pindar, and a Russian Racine (160). One of the most exciting parts of the book is the endless saga of Khvostov's translation of Boileau. Translating, editing and amending “L'Art Poétique” with his own poetic precepts, Khvostov started to fancy himself “Parnassus’ legislator.” Vinitskii shows that his hero honestly tried—and invited others—to follow verbatim the rules of classicism, rules that were by their very nature conventional and impossible to realize in full. Not quite falling under the banner of humor, but rather of incongruity, the Khvostov phenomenon is explored as a curious and revealing case of the intersection, interaction and mutual repulsion of different cultural codes and paradigms: European classicism, the last refuge of the rhetorical tradition, and nascent Modernity (much as I would like to avoid using this widely-abused term).

Vinitskii's far-ranging, complex, and thought-provoking book is not simply dedicated to Mark Altshuller, but fashioned as an epistle, a shared meditation on literature and life, addressed to a senior colleague, very much in the spirit of Alexander Pope's dedication of the “Essay on Man” to Henry St John, first viscount Bolingbroke, as an invitation to “expatiate” together over human nature, “a mighty maze, but not without a plan.” Expatiating over the “mighty maze” of Khvostov's works and days, Vinitskii and his imaginary interlocutor leave us with some answers—and many more questions—about “the scene of man,” as every good book should.