“We live between horror and desolation.” These harsh words, pronounced by Konstantin K. Vaginov’s character Marya Petrovna Dalmatovna, well describe the atmosphere in which the artist, and his contemporaries, lived in the years that witnessed several historical events that changed the world, such as the First World War (1914-1918) and the Russian Civil War (1917-1922/1923). Vaginov’s entire literary production shows a constant preoccupation with the aftermath of what he considered inevitable yet ambivalent apocalypses for Russian traditions, as Roberts and Anemone maintain. The writer manifested his antagonism towards Russia’s situation and its consequences by developing a peculiar poetics linked to a cult of the past, which becomes concrete, real, through the presence of objects. In his novels characters appear to be victims when facing the terrible facts that shook the world during the first decades of the Twentieth century. His first novel The Goat Song (Козлиная песнь, 1928), together with the poems composed in the same years, already contain the core themes that will become central in his production: the fall of great empires; death and metamorphosis; nothingness, conceived as a cultural tabula rasa, helplessly witnessed by the figures of the ‘cantor-watchman’ and the ‘coffin-maker.’ This essay shows not only the presence and the particular shades these pivotal elements acquire in Vaginov’s fictional worlds, but also it ultimately aims to demonstrate that the author’s pessimistic conception of History led him to devote his poetics to a mourning of the past.

Uchod ot revoljucionnych budnej. Petrograd/Leningrad meždu Pervoj mirovoj i Graždanskoj vojnami v Rossii glazami Kostantina Vaginova

Irina Marchesini
2017

Abstract

“We live between horror and desolation.” These harsh words, pronounced by Konstantin K. Vaginov’s character Marya Petrovna Dalmatovna, well describe the atmosphere in which the artist, and his contemporaries, lived in the years that witnessed several historical events that changed the world, such as the First World War (1914-1918) and the Russian Civil War (1917-1922/1923). Vaginov’s entire literary production shows a constant preoccupation with the aftermath of what he considered inevitable yet ambivalent apocalypses for Russian traditions, as Roberts and Anemone maintain. The writer manifested his antagonism towards Russia’s situation and its consequences by developing a peculiar poetics linked to a cult of the past, which becomes concrete, real, through the presence of objects. In his novels characters appear to be victims when facing the terrible facts that shook the world during the first decades of the Twentieth century. His first novel The Goat Song (Козлиная песнь, 1928), together with the poems composed in the same years, already contain the core themes that will become central in his production: the fall of great empires; death and metamorphosis; nothingness, conceived as a cultural tabula rasa, helplessly witnessed by the figures of the ‘cantor-watchman’ and the ‘coffin-maker.’ This essay shows not only the presence and the particular shades these pivotal elements acquire in Vaginov’s fictional worlds, but also it ultimately aims to demonstrate that the author’s pessimistic conception of History led him to devote his poetics to a mourning of the past.
2017
“Na krajnem predele vekov”: Pervaja mirovaja vojna i kul’tura
252
259
Irina Marchesini
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11585/626524
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