A Note on Vaginov: The Novel as a Compensatory Realm

Abstract

Between Envy and Master, Konstantin Vaginov, a close friend of Bakhtin and briefly a member of the OBERIU, approached the same theme with a similar ambiguity but with a greater sense of foreboding. In 1928 Vaginov produced his best-known novel Koeлuнar necнb (Satyr’s Song)¹ prefaced with the words ‘my dream is finished’. This novel, which, as Anemone notes, traces ‘the gradual degradation of the author, his heroes and culture itself, was considered by Bakhtin to be the most important novel after Bely’s Petersburg in all Russian literature of the twentieth century.² It was, however, Vaginov’s next novel that most closely followed Bakhtin’s observations regarding the self-critique of the creative process, indeed taking many of these features to an extreme. Thus Tpydbl u dнu Cbycmoнoba (The Work and Days of Svistonov), as Gerasimova describes it, is a ‘novel about a writer, who is writing a novel about a writer, who is writing a novel about a writer…’, and so on.³ Furthermore, one of the main characters, and the hero of Svistonov’s novel, Ivan Ivanovich Kuku, is a ‘literary man’ who tries to look at life through the eyes of literature and who tries to live ‘according to literature’ to such an extent that he ‘had nothing of his own, not mind, not heart, not imagination’.⁴