Konstantin Konstantinovich Vaginov (, born ''Wagenheim'', – April 26, 1934) was a Russian poet and novelist.

Biography

Vaginov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy

Siberian Siberia ( ; , ) is an extensive geographical region comprising all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has formed a part of the sovereign territory of Russia and its predecessor states si ...

businessman and landowner. His father, a high-ranking police official, was descended from

Germans Germans (, ) are the natives or inhabitants of Germany, or sometimes more broadly any people who are of German descent or native speakers of the German language. The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, constitution of Germany, imple ...

who came to Russia in the 17th century. During the

First World War World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

, the family name was changed from Wagenheim () and given a Russian ending. Following his father's wishes, Vaginov studied law. During the

Civil War A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same Sovereign state, state (or country). The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies.J ...

, Vaginov served in the

Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Republic and, from 1922, the Soviet Union. The army was established in January 1918 by a decree of the Council of People ...

, both at the Polish front and east of the

Urals The Ural Mountains ( ),; , ; , or simply the Urals, are a mountain range in Eurasia that runs north–south mostly through Russia, from the coast of the Arctic Ocean to the river Ural (river), Ural and northwestern Kazakhstan.

. He returned to

Petrograd Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. The city had a population of 5,601, ...

and, after being demobilized, continued studies in the arts and humanities. In 1926 he married Alexandra Ivanovna Fedorova. She and Vaginov were both part of a group of writers who gathered about the poet, world traveler and decorated war hero

Nikolai Gumilyov Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev (also Gumilyov; , ; – August 26, 1921) was a Russian poet, literary critic, traveler, and military officer. He was a co-founder of the Acmeist movement. He was the husband of Anna Akhmatova and the father of Lev ...

, who was shot in 1921, after being wrongly accused of plotting against the government. Konstantin Vaginov died of tuberculosis in 1934.

Work

Vaginov wrote his earliest poetry when he was a teenager, and his first collection, ''Journey to Chaos'', was published in 1921. Other collections were published in 1926 and 1931. His first prose works, "The Monastery of Our Lord Apollo" and "The Star of Bethlehem," were published in 1922. Vaginov's first novel, ''Kozlinaya Pesn (literally "Goat Song," but also translated into English as " he Tower and "Satyr Chorus," was written between 1925 and 1927. The novel is based on the intellectual circle grouped around the philosopher and literary theorist

Mikhail Bakhtin Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (; rus, Михаи́л Миха́йлович Бахти́н, , mʲɪxɐˈil mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪdʑ bɐxˈtʲin; – 7 March 1975) was a Russian people, Russian philosopher and literary critic who worked on the phi ...

. Vaginov completed two other novels, ''Works and Days of Svistonov'' (1929) and ''Bambocciada'' (1931). As Vaginov's health declined, he worked on a fourth novel, ''Harpagoniana'', which was left incomplete. Shortly before his death, he started work on a novel about the 1905 revolution. The materials for that work were confiscated by the authorities. Through the mid-1920s, Vaginov mainly wrote poetry that might be described as post-

Symbolist Symbolism or symbolist may refer to: *Symbol, any object or sign that represents an idea Arts *Artistic symbol, an element of a literary, visual, or other work of art that represents an idea ** Color symbolism, the use of colors within various c ...

and

Acmeist Acmeism, or the Guild of Poets, was a modernist transient poetic school, which emerged or in 1912 in Russia under the leadership of Nikolay Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetsky. Their ideals were compactness of form and clarity of expression. The term ...

. With its overlapping allusions to contemporary upheavals, along with historical and mythological references, the poetry is at times almost hermetic. His turn to the novel marks a turning point. And ''Kozlinaya Pesn'' might be thought of as a transitional work, with its fragments of poetry and scattered commentary on the generation of poetry and its degeneration. The book also marks the author's most transparent examination of the role of literature and criticism in society. During the 1920s, Vaginov had some contact with most of the major literary circles in Petrograd/Leningrad. In 1927, he became affiliated with a left avant-garde collective of writers known as

OBERIU OBERIU (Russian: ОБЭРИУ - Объединение реального искусства; English: the Union of Real Art or the Association for Real Art) was a short-lived avant-garde collective of Russian Futurist writers, musicians, and ar ...

, sometimes described as " Absurdist" and chiefly known through the work of

Daniil Kharms Daniil Ivanovich Kharms (; – 2 February 1942) was a Russian avant-gardist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist in the early Soviet era. Early years Kharms was born as Daniil Yuvachev in Saint Petersburg, then the capital of the Ru ...

. Around this time, Vaginov's turn to prose was marked by a drift toward a preoccupation with

Surrealism Surrealism is an art movement, art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike s ...

—the throwaway mythology of everyday life. A man who devoured literature in multiple languages from various centuries, Vaginov was an avid collector of books, many of them salvaged from ransacked libraries and peddled secondhand on the street. But he was also a collector of anything from old coins to candy wrappers and cigarette packs. While some of his characters collected things having at least an association with high culture, Vaginov explored the intersection between the mutability of matter and minds haunted by monuments, even those in ruins.

Solomon Volkov Solomon Moiseyevich Volkov (; born 17 April 1944) is a Russian journalist and musicologist. He is best known for ''Testimony'', which was published in 1979 following his emigration from the Soviet Union in 1976. According to him, the book was the ...

writes:

He likened the victory of the Russian Revolution, which ruined his family, to the triumph of the barbaric tribes over the Roman Empire. For Vaginov, Petersburg had been a magical stage for that cultural tragedy, and he sang the praises of the spectral city in dadaist poems (which also showed the influence of Mandelstam), in which "pale blue sails of dead ships" appeared tellingly. Mandelstam, in turn, rated Vaginov highly, including him as a poet "not for today but forever" in a list with Akhmatova, Pasternak, Gumilyov, and Khodasevich.Solomon Volkov, ''St. Petersburg: A Cultural History'' (Simon & Schuster, 1995, repr. 1997), p. 405.

Biography

Work

References

Further reading