Konstantin Vaginov (1899–1934) was born in St. Petersburg. His mother came from a wealthy family and his father was a high-ranking official, descended from German immigrants whose name had been Russified from Wagenheim. During the Civil War, he served in the Red Army. Active in Nikolai Gumilev's Acmeist movement and the Guild of Poets, he was a core member of the avant-garde group OBERIU and well acquainted with Mikhail Bakhtin and his intellectual circle, who partly inspired his fiction. Vaginov wrote four novels before his death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four.

Ainsley Morse teaches literature and translation at the University of California, San Diego, and translates from Russian, Ukrainian, and Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian.

Geoff Cebula is a translator from Russian to English. He is the author of the novel Adjunct, and has published several articles on the avant-garde collective OBERIU. He lives in Indiana.

Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet and translator. He was born in Leningrad, grew up in New York, and currently lives in New York and Berlin. His poetry collections, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi and Feeling Sonnets, are published in the NYRB Poets series. He selected and translated the poems in Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think, also in the NYRB Poets series, and translated The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Kharms, published in the NYRB Kids series.