As is evident from the title, The Graphomaniac is an unusual scholarly work, one that combines a close study of the infamously untalented, yet endlessly prolific Russian poet Count Dmitrii Ivanovich Khvostov (1757–1835) with a playful adoption of a Khvostovian verbosity that serves as a meditation on literature and literary scholarship in its own right. In this, Ilya Vinitsky crafts a work that is rich with Golden Age historical detail, insightful as to the broad context of what constitutes a literary age, and entertaining to read. James MacGavran has completed an outstanding translation of a complex text that includes poetry and extensive word play.

Given the chatty nature of the title, it is perhaps not surprising that The Graphomaniac is framed by a Swiftian authorial scaffolding that includes an “Author’s Dedication” in verse, “An Ode from the Translator,” an “Appeal to a Colleague,” and a “Memorandum on the Citing of Sources,” all before the reader reaches the prologue, “On Poetic Antipoetry.” These framing devices indicate a self-aware conflation of the scholarly narrator with the object of scholarship; both the narrator and Khvostov are invested in the apparatus of literariness, with the distinction that Khvostov’s application of said apparatus was in earnest while Vinitsky’s approach is both ironic and analytical. The title is instructive as it parodies Khvostov’s obsessive commemoration of any and every subject in elevating verse, such as his 1820 contribution to the scintillating “tradition of didactic scientific poetry,” “Epistle to Lomonosov on Mineralogy.” As scholars, we are all perhaps guilty of the same impulse to over-commemorate, something Vinitsky wryly suggests in the very fact of choosing Khvostov as an object of attention.

The Graphomaniac details Khvostov’s earlier years and later creative activity in the 1810s and 1820s in chapters that combine biography and analysis of Khvostov’s poetic output with a layering in of Vinitsky’s autobiographical reflections on his own poetic ambitions, the source of a personal affinity with Khvostov. The extensively researched discussion superbly places Khvostov within the Russian literary world of the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, The Graphomaniac both deepens and broadens the picture of how Russian poetry developed from its Enlightenment origins, bound by rules of genre and style and largely dedicated to extolling the monarch, into a greater Romantic freedom of expression.

Khvostov was notable for his single-minded commitment to Enlightenment-era formulae of poetic production and faith in the “unchanging principles of art” (199). His conviction that literature could be produced according to these principles led him into wobbly aesthetic territory. For example, in his 1802 translation of La Fontaine’s fable “The Two Pigeons,” Khvostov described one of the pigeons as chewing through a net to freedom. This addition of teeth to pigeon anatomy became the source of endless jokes and mockery. As Vinitsky asserts, “in the history of Russian literary mythology, it is precisely Khvostov and Khvostov alone who occupies the place of chief antipoet, king of the graphomaniacs, composer of pathetic odes, ridiculous parables, and unbearably boring poetic translations” (9). It is in this very ridiculousness, however, that Khvostov’s importance lies for, as Vinitsky argues, “a terrible poet is himself a distorted reflection … of his poetic epoch,” one that exposes the impulses, desires, and prejudices of the age (7). In essence, Khvostov’s career reveals the pitfalls of a too-deliberate construction of a national literature according to borrowed formulae.

Some of the more extensive quotations of Khvostov’s poetry might be reduced. At times, the line between whether the reader should understand Khvostov as critical to his time or join in with the rather nasty mockery of him that was a feature of his gossipy age feels blurred. Minor peccadilloes aside, the argument of The Graphomaniac comes together brilliantly in the concluding discussion of Aleksandr Pushkin’s mocking 1825 “Ode to his Excellency Dmitry Ivanovich Khvostov.” The place of the Khvostovian antipoet as foil to Pushkin’s poetic genius is sharply illuminated here; at the same time, Khvostov’s value as a “star of decolonization of Pushkin, Rus, and Poésie!” becomes apparent (xi). As a reader, one is torn between an appalled sense of Khvostov’s narcissistic delusion about his talents, pity for his lack of self-awareness, and a grudging admiration for his dogged efforts to publish despite wholesale rejection. The Graphomaniac masterfully fills out the picture of a time too easily reduced to its stars; as Vinitsky demonstrates, there can be no Pushkin without Khvostov. And we would do well to embrace Vinitsky’s creed that “literary criticism needs laughter!” (309).