On the unexpected pleasures and provocations of bad poetry
 
The only Russian Count of Sardinia, Dmitry Ivanovich Khvostov (1757–1835) didn’t achieve fame in his lifetime—he achieved infamy. Pathologically prolific and delusionally dedicated to a craft for which he had no talent, the count was renowned for his compulsive output, driven by a passion for poetry that was as strong as his abilities were weak. Only the country that gave the world Pushkin, however, could produce Khvostov, in whom we find a distorted yet illuminating reflection of his poetic epoch, with all its numerous cultural manifestations and hidden impulses, its desires and prejudices.
 
As he leads us on a playful journey across Russia’s Golden Age and beyond, from neoclassical salon to faculty lounge, Ilya Vinitsky reflects on the challenges and necessities of literary critique and on the unexpected rewards of bad art as a subject of study, not just ridicule. Mischievous but erudite, sensitive but never self-serious, The Graphomaniac is an intellectual biography of the anti-hero, a cultural figure whose paradoxes yield new insights into his era.

 

ILYA VINITSKY is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. He is the author of Vasily Zhukovsky's Romanticism and the Emotional History of Russia (Northwestern University Press).
 
JAMES H. MCGAVRAN III is an associate professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Kenyon College. He is the translator of Selected Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky (Northwestern University Press).