Authors

Discussion

The Soviet writer Konstantin Vaginov is often depicted as a mediocre poet facing a crisis of confidence whose exposure to Formalism at the Institute of Art History in the mid-1920s, subsequent participation in Mikhail Bakhtin’s circle, and engagement with the Oberiuty saw him develop into an important avant-garde novelist. There is a tendency to read his work autobiographically, conflating the lyric persona of his poetry and literary personas and characters of his prose with the writer Vaginov, creating a figure to whom singular thematic concerns, poetics and aesthetic outlook are ascribed. Such a reading disregards the facts of his bibliography. Disambiguating the poetics of the poet and novelist in his first two novels, both satirical metafictions, reveals a clearer picture of Vaginov's polemic with the literary trends and theories of Leningrad in the 1920s. In the construction of a dyad of poet and novelist Vaginov articulates two fundamentally different concepts of the Soviet writer, with a different relationship between art and reality, and different approaches to creating or eliding meaning. Vaginov was always both poet and novelist, striving to resurrect and recentre the writer in a period of intense cultural and political upheaval. This dialogue between poet and novelist is a continuous exploration of what Vaginov wanted to say and how he wanted to say it; a reflection of the development of his complex literary personality.