The poetry of Konstantin Vaginov.

Abstract

Konstantin Vaginov, who published three books of poetry during the period 1921-1931, and was judged by several major figures, including Gumilev and Kuzmin, to be among the most promising of the younger generation of Petersburg poets, has so far received undeservedly little critical attention. Vaginov's poetry presents many problems: from his contemporary audience to more recent critics, opinion has generally been agreed as to its puzzling, incomprehensibility, its apparent lack of a poetic genealogy, and its idiosyncratic, even anomolous poetics, which resist identification with any of the many groups or schools which he joined, from the Ego-futurists to the Oberiu. This dissertation represents the first attempt at a close reading of Vaginov's poetry. The methods which this task demands involve primarily tracing the sources of the themes, symbols and actual texts from the Russian and wider European literary traditions, which provide so much of the material of Vaginov's poetic world. Chief among these are the Petersburg text of Russian literature and the mythologies of European Decadence, which together shape Vaginov's central theme: the death of the old world of culture, of Petersburg, and of poetry itself. Vaginov's interpretation of this theme through the master model of Rome, with its many attendant ideas, including Degeneration, the desert of culture, being the last in the line, or the coming barbarism, determines an attitude of strained ambivalence, veering between tragedy and mockery, nostalgia and renunciation. Most important of all, this view leads to the extraordinary tension in his poetics between the all-embracing presence of the literary tradition, recollected through maximal erudite allusion, and its simultaneous decomposition, distortion and self-parody, through a poetic language which, at its extreme, is deliberately self-undermining. Thus at the opposite pole from acmeism, Vaginov sums up the cultural past in order painfully to deprive it of its old weight and value. However, even despite its unique, self-appointed task of burying the great culture of Russia's Petersburg period, Vaginov's poetry remains, nevertheless, its last genuine expression.