“We Live Between Horror and Desolation”. Konstantin K. Vaginov and War

Still a rather obscure figure in the wider context of Russian modernism, Konstantin Konstantinovich Vaginov (1899-1934) was an eclectic writer who belonged to the Russian avant-garde movement Oberiu, active between the 1920s and 1930s. All his works show his preoccupation with several historical events that changed the world, such as the First World War and, most importantly, the Russian Civil War and the October Revolution. Vaginov saw these upheavals as inevitable yet ambivalent apocalypses for Russian traditions. The writer manifested his resentment towards this situation by developing a particular poetics focussed on a cult of the past. His beautiful images of an idealized, Hellenic Petersburg stand in sharp contrast with the ugliness of the Soviet, post-war Leningrad, creating a utopian alternative to reality that, at the time, went against the mainstream. On the basis of these preliminary assumptions, in my paper I analyze Vaginov’s production, and in particular the novels "The Goat Song" ("Kozlinaja Pesn’", 1927) and "Harpagoniada" ("Garpagoniana", 1934), in order to compare the writer’s utopian depictions of the cityscape with realistic ones, keeping a special eye on the figures of the “cantor-watchman” and the “coffin-maker”, which are pivotal in his oeuvre. A focus on the theme of collections is relevant to the argument since collecting functions, in Vaginov’s novels, as an ideal of living alternative to the present, producing peculiar symbolic effects.