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Part 1
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Konstantin the Apostate
I. by Chris Lovett A coffin-maker, not someone who builds
cradles. This was the author of Satyr Chorus. At age 27, ten
years after the October Revolution, Konstantin Konstantinovich
Vaginov set out to write a book of the dead. He was old enough to have
grown up at the height of the "Silver Age" in Russian literature. He was
also young enough to see war and revolution give way
to the slippery compromises that preceded hard-line Stalinism. More
importantly, Vaginov may have also known how little time he had for taking
his measure of Russia's mutability: even as he was writing Satyr
Chorus, he knew his life would be cut short by tuberculosis. He died
in 1934, just as Stalin's reign of terror was intensifying. Though the
cradle-makers failed to enlist Vaginov in their collection of dead souls,
they did postpone his immortality. For thirty years after his death, his
work remained in almost total oblivion. Written between 1925 and 1927, Satyr Chorus is Vaginov's first novel. Its characters are based on members of an intellectual circle grouped around the philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975). As writers, scholars and artists, members of the circle aspire to feats of interpretation and creativity that made Russia's intelligentsia so influential in the last decades before the October Revolution. Drawing on everyday perceptions and a rich assortment of cultural cross-references, they allow Vaginov to use contemporary Leningrad as a window on a larger world extending through space and time, even as far as ancient Rome and the world of mythology. But his characters are also former people in a former capital, under a new government that was changing its stance toward the intelligentsia from ambivalent courtship to outright domination. Some of them are doomed to obscurity and mediocrity, while others would suffer some degree of persecution. Bakhtin himself would spend much of his life in exile after members of his group were arrested in 1929. But, whether regarded as fiction or encrypted documentary, Satyr Chorus is about the mid-1920's, less about conflict between empire and revolution than the banality of transition that, as it were, joins them at the seams. If the pre-revolutionary past was to be mourned as a casualty, then so were its dreams of a post-revolutionary future. As a society in transition,
post-revolutionary Russia was in some ways a reverse of the
post-communist Russia of the 1990's. Under the New Economic Policy (NEP)
introduced by Lenin after the civil war, belief in a
socialist path to a communist future went hand in hand with the practice of day-to-day
capitalism. From the outset, NEP was supposed to have been a temporary
adaptation, a crisis response to shortages of goods and skills. Those shortages
nourished a black
market and fostered a market mentality obsessed with
hoarding and speculation--a mentality shared by many of Vaginov's
characters and, in some respects, the author himself. But NEP also had a
parallel in government relations with artists and thinkers. The burst of
innovation that took place before World War I was, to some extent,
allowed to continue. A tolerance for experimentation gave writers enough
freedom to sometimes irreverently finesse ideology, with all the less
risk if knowledge of their work were confined to small circles of the
avant-garde. The historical background for Satyr Chorus is the death of an empire, announced by two prologues: Petersburg and Leningrad, the before and after. The old city is evoked here without nostalgia, as something shallow, hallucinatory, even chimerical. If the chapters to come, as the author insists, have little to do with Leningrad, the fallen empire that concerns Vaginov is not strictly historical or political. Among his characters, the empire has the less tangible meaning of a potential for greatness that some writers and thinkers might have tried to define on a larger scale as Russia's utopian mission. At the personal level, the empire collapses into the diminished possibilities and compromises of survival, or even a failure to survive. The characters in Satyr Chorus may keep some tokens of attachment to their imperial ideal, or build a parallel empire (even a monument to kitsch), but they are also living in a different world. What makes it a fallen world is not so much a function of political sympathy as the banality of transition and adaptation. Like tragic heroes, Vaginov's characters start by aiming higher and ending with less. Like tragic heroes, they share some of the blame for their common dilemma, the disconnect between pre-revolutionary humanism and post-revolutionary reality. Perhaps less like heroes than a chorus in a tragedy, they are less people of action than a commentary on the events of their time. It might be said that all of these qualities figure in the title of the novel, which is a literal translation of the ancient Greek words for tragedy ("goat song")--in reference to the chorus of goat-footed satyrs. Another key to the significance of the title can be found in the reaction to the October Revolution by the St. Petersburg poet Aleksandr Blok, especially in his 1919 lecture, "The Collapse of Humanism." At the time, Blok saw revolutions of the 19th and early 20th centuries as an eruption of the authentic "wild music" of culture, as opposed to the progressively more fragmented holding action he referred to as "civilization." It might be argued that Vaginov's title divests tragedy of its literary aura (civilization) and reinstates the wild music of a primordial "goat song." That distinction corresponds to a prominent fault line running throughout the novel. One clear example of this is in Chapter VIII, where the unknown poet equates the term "tragedy" with the sublime, eternal and heroic--as opposed to the author's preoccupation with the base material of day-to-day reality. In his lecture, Blok called on the Russian intelligentsia to ally itself with the new culture taking shape from the masses, like the Christianity that superseded the paganism of the Roman Empire (as famously signaled in the 1918 poem, "The Twelve"). For the time being, Blok said, only a few people would have an ear for what he called the "music of the revolution." Guided by a tragic sense of the whole that eluded the optimists of civilization, and meeting with resistance or incomprehension, they would be what Blok described as "living catacombs of culture." And he believed they would also attune themselves to the true music of culture, not by sleepwalking along a straight, chronological line of progress, but waking from the "age-old sleep of civilization" to the frenzied rhythm of recurrence and connection that transcends the grid of "calendar time." Some of Vaginov's characters are eager to create their version of a new culture. One of them, the "unknown poet," likens his circle to Boccaccio's "signori," who went underground to safeguard the cultural treasures of antiquity at a time of plague. But most of the events in Satyr Chorus take place a few years after the death of Blok, amid a political environment that seems less dominated by the "music of revolution" than its antithesis. By the late 1920's, the "new Christian" underdogs who emerged from the revolution are becoming the establishment. The unknown poet and the scholar Teptyolkin view them as philistines, while dedicating themselves to rescuing the legacy of pagan culture that languished before revival by humanism. As formulated by Blok, the continuation of that humanism (or its eventual decline) was supposed to be the adversary of true culture. Less than ten years later, it is possible for Vaginov's pagan humanists to be viewed as heroes, but also as hapless eccentrics losing touch with everyday reality. Are they what Blok meant by "catacombs of culture," or are they figments of a coffin-builder's imagination: containers for a culture whose time has passed? The clash between inner and outer world turns up at the beginning of the first chapter, where Teptyolkin is introduced as an "enigmatic" or "curious" figure. In Russian, the adjective evokes anything from telling fortunes at New Year to seers with mystic powers. Teptyolkin's version of this quality makes him a bridge to internal centuries of humanism. Despite his busy teaching schedule, Teptyolkin is in a way a consummate (if gregarious) escapist, whether taking refuge in the barely habitable ruins of a dacha with a tower, by teaching literature in the south during the civil war (while Petrograd starves), or by merely failing to see what's around him exactly as it is. Early on, Vaginov presents Teptyolkin's imperial fantasy as a feat of philology: the creation of a common language for a new Roman Empire. It's also clear Teptyolkin is inspired less by political agendas than a belief in the value of a cultural treasure and a yearning to cross intellectual frontiers. By the end of the book, the frontiers are much more limited and the balance tips to the point where Teptyolkin can scarcely distinguish himself from an ordinary clerk. By describing this change, the author who grew up with the poetic transports of Russian Symbolism approaches the realm of his enormously popular contemporary, the humorist and short story writer Mikhail Zoshchenko, especially his Sentimental Tales. These, too, as Zoshchenko put it, are a world of refugees from a "past life," the "petty, insignificant people" who draw interest because of their difficulty in adapting to change. They may suffer losses and reversals, but they sometimes also find that eventually life goes on, in some ways, much as before. Years later, Bakhtin would sum up the story of Teptyolkin as "the tragedy of a laughable man." Bakhtin recognized the elements of real life and real people that formed the basis of the book, but also a wider dimension. "And there now," said Bakhtin, "unfolds Vaginov's splendid gift: on the one side, the detailing, the most subtle nuances; and, on the other side, the extraordinary breadth of the horizon, almost cosmic. And it is that uniqueness that unfolds in Teptyolkin." With his madness turned against himself, the unknown poet is another kind of tragic figure, whose striving for greatness leads to destruction. Most of the other characters in Satyr Chorus manage to adapt, whether by political accommodation or a more utilitarian line of work. When the perpetually womanizing poet, Troitsyn, refuses to change, even his self-parody becomes a form of adaptation, intentional or not. As the novel progresses, the reverberation of Blok's epic tone and prophecy gives way increasingly to the chatter of prose--the slip into the raconteur's voice or skaz and even more appearances of an "author" at various stages of the book. Rather than seeing Vaginov's characters as "radiant beings" or heroes, the reader has to settle for something more ambiguous. But satyrs are by definition a double identity: part rational and part animal, part intoxicated and part lucid, part revolutionary and part reactionary, part sublime and part vulgar.
II. Vaginov was born in in St. Petersburg in
1899. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy Siberian businessman and
landowner. His father, a high-ranking police official, was descended
from Germans who came to Russia in the 17th century. During the First
World War, the family name was changed from "Wagenheim" and
given a Russian ending. Following his father's wishes, Vaginov studied
law. During the Civil War, Vaginov served in the Red Army, both at the
Polish front and east of the Urals. He returned to Petrograd 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. One of the first casualties of the
Soviet regime in literary circles, Gumilyov was shot in 1921, after
being falsely accused of plotting against the government. 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. Satyr Chorus was Vaginov's first novel. It was published in
1927 and followed by two other complete novels--Works and Days of
Svistonov (1929) and Bambocciada (1931). As Vaginov's health
declined, he worked on the 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. In 1927 Vaginov became affiliated with a
left avant-garde collective of writers known as The Association of Real
Creativity (in Russian, by the acronym "OBERIU"). This was
only one of several groups with which Vaginov had contact, but the
spirit of OBERIU probably encouraged Vaginov to see new artistic
possibilities in the random debris of everyday life. The group has been
described as absurdist before its time. But the writer Vladimir Uflyand
insists the "Oberiuti" (who also referred to themselves as
"cigarette butts") were the true realists: "They wrote
what they saw. And, all around them, they saw the sheer absurdity called
the dictatorship of the proletariat." The author of the controversial
Shostakovich memoirs, Solomon Volkov, placed OBERIU in the Russian
tradition of the "holy fool." An eccentric who communicates in
code, the holy fool, or "yurodivy," speaks truths that would
be off-limits to normal people. "For these modern yurodivye,"
wrote Volkov, "the world lay in ruins and the attempt to build a
new society was--at least for the time being--an obvious failure. They
were naked people on a naked earth. The lofty values of the past had
been discredited. New ideals, they felt, could be affirmed only 'in
reverse.' They would have to be conveyed through a screen of mockery,
sarcasm, and foolishness." For the best known member of OBERIU,
Daniil Kharms, another screen that made foolishness, absurdity and
fantasy less objectionable was the genre of children's literature. A few years before Satyr Chorus, as Bakhtin recalled, Vaginov pushed the limits of the publishable when he wrote a thinly allegorical poem equating the death of the "great, far-flung empire" with the rise of a new Asiatic horde obediently charging behind red flags and the new heathen power rising in the Kremlin, "Mohammed Ulyan" (Lenin). The political tilt is uncharacteristically explicit, at least by comparison with Vaginov's later works. Overall, it might be more characteristic to describe Vaginov as a writer who (like Blok) wanted to take the side of protecting the autonomy of art from cooptation, something more easily said than done. As Bakhtin put it in his recollections about Vaginov: "You see, there wasn't anybody totally neutral, because life wasn't neutral, and a neutral corner was practically non-existent. Overall, he was a solitary person, that is to say a profoundly neutral person, in and of himself as a person, but life--that wasn't neutral." Despite the shortness of his life, Vaginov managed
to assemble his work on a literary foundation that was broad and deep.
Part of this foundation was the canon of Russian classics by writers
such as Pushkin and Gogol. A more direct influence came from the artists
and thinkers who flourished around the turn of century in what is known
as Russia's Silver Age. Culturally cosmopolitan and well-grounded
in the humanities, Russian Symbolists were less reliable as guides
through social upheavals in the years ahead. In A History of Russian
Literature, Victor Terras wrote, "Like romanticism, too,
Russian symbolism was an elitist movement. The reintegration of Russian
poetry into western literature came at the expense of giving up on narodnost
(the traditionally Russian and popular) in art. Both romanticism and
symbolism, in spite of a fondness for folk traditions and folk poetry,
gave little thought to a better life for the people. The symbolists'
returning of the individual to a position of absolute value inevitably
happened at the expense of literature's social concerns..." An offshoot of Symbolism, and a reaction
against it, was Acmeism, a movement that took shape in the years just
before World War I. Including poets such as Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna
Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam, the Acmeists were more interested in
depicting tangible realities with precision and with exploring
correspondences among words themselves. Keenly aware of the limitations
of language, the Acmeists (not unlike Imagists) could also be cryptic or
ambitious in mythical and literary cross-references. Unlike the
Symbolists, Acmeists such as Mandelshtam challenged the definition of
the word as a mere signifier of things--material or transcendent.
"The living word doesn't designate an object," wrote
Mandelshtam, "but freely chooses, for a dwelling, as it were, this
or that objective significance, materiality, or beloved body." This
definition of the "living word," of the word that assumed but
extended beyond a single meaning, resembles the formulations of characters in Satyr
Chorus, especially the unknown poet. For him, the word embodied the
autonomy of art at its fundamental level. Used in this way, the word was
too elusive and volatile to serve as a tool of propaganda, but capable
of being the subversive undertone that Blok recognized as the "wild
music" of culture. Roughly contemporaneous with Acmeism were
the Futurists, a loosely defined grouping that went as far as simply
"no ideas" or the nullification of art, even using words that
were "beyond sense," without a place in the dictionary. With
their provocative performance tactics, the Futurists could attract large
crowds. And, although the movement included major writers such as
Mayakovsky, its legacy might have less to do with surviving works
themselves than its challenge to the growing barrier between the
specialists of high art and the general public. The need to break down
the barrier led in different directions--one of which was toward the
quirky eclecticism of the post-revolutionary avant-garde. The prevailing
direction
would finally be determined by the Soviet government. By the mid-1920's,
Vaginov and his contemporaries also could see the emergence of the
official camp, the didactic and squarely representational "socialist realism,"
consistently straightforward in social relevance and allegiance to the
state. In the manifesto written for the OBERIU,
Vaginov's colleague Daniil Kharms tried to meet the most appealing
challenge of socialist realism--the demand for an art that was
accessible to everyone, "even a student in a village school."
But Kharms thought it would be a mistake to demand only that kind of art
while "the reading public of the first Proletarian State pores over
the translated fiction of a western bourgeois writer." Instead,
Kharms called for creating, not only a new poetic language, but a new
way of sensing the world and its objects. "And the world," he
wrote, "cluttered with the languages of a multitude of fools,
tangled in the mire of 'experiences' and 'emotions,' is now reborn in
all the purity of its concrete, virile forms." Although Kharms and other OBERIU artists are often referred to as absurdists, he was eager to renounce the absurdity of "trans-sense" writing. If he was challenging the mainstream canon passed down from the 19th century, Kharms was, like many artists in western Europe, also reacting against Symbolism and Expressionism, in favor of what might be called a Russian version of the German "New Objectivity" (Neue Sachlichkeit). As he wrote in "The OBERIU Manifesto":
The "collision of verbal meanings"
clearly resembles Vaginov's "experiments with the juxtaposition of
words," and both hinge on the volatility of the word described by
Mandelshtam. The goal of mechanical precision betokens an affinity with
Constructivism, which can be viewed as a salute to the new political and
economic order, or as a rival artistic order in its own right. By affirming
the autonomy of art--affirmed a decade earlier by Blok in the name of
revolution, Kharms puts himself at odds with the demand of socialist
realism that art should serve another agenda while staying more or less
within bounds of everyday logic. In his article, "Vaginov's Experiments," Alexei Purin saw the beginning of Vaginov's series of novels in 1925 as a turning point embodied by the mental split between the sublime Philostratus and the sometimes pathetically human Teptyolkin. That "bifurcation" is reinforced by the presence of an "author" in the book who tries to record the words and actions of characters, but also transposes those elements into another context. In such a way, Vaginov juxtaposes transmigratory and eternal culture, whether in a character's mind or represented through architecture, with the everyday world of transience, obsolescence and tastelessness. Purin diagnoses the new direction as a "metaphysical suicide" that may
have been Vaginov's response to political pressure on writers for more
engagement in the world around them in the Soviet Union. Rather than
following the norms of socialist realism, Vaginov splices the doings
of his main characters--the people of "The Tower"--with
nameless emissaries of the street: a vendor peddling
sunflower seeds, a gypsy telling fortunes, a singing beggar or a
promenading pigeon. These elements are presented with little more than a
passing glance, less a matter of bringing the reader closer to the external
world than creating more distance from the internal world of Vaginov's
characters. Taking the novels as a group, Purin sees them moving on a
path of self-trivialization, as main characters degenerate from literati
of the earlier books to eccentrics, charlatans and alcoholics. Even by
the end of
Another possible explanation of the turning point is that Vaginov found in prose an alternative to a poetry that one critic, Alexander Skidan, described as a kind of dead end, a scheme of multiple meanings he compared to the "collapse of the figurative" in Malevich's painting, Black Square. "In the same way," Skidan argues, Vaginov "takes classical poetry to its logical conclusion, to the formula of collapse, on top of that, literally, but together with that--and here lies an essential distinction between him and Malevich--he plays out this conclusion in the construction of the text, anticipating in just that way the latest practice, the practice of the most miniscule molecular breakdowns, scrambling idiom and, in the words of Félix Guattari, capable of shaking up the dominant polyphony, whether the 'arrangement of the already classified' or the 'arrangement of the classic.'" Skidan also calls this art interpreting art by means of art, or what Vaginov himself may have intended by calling himself in a work dating from 1922 "a poet of tragic amusement." The term "amusement" (забава) has some relation to the neoclassical trends of the 1920's, notably in the work of Stravinsky. But Skidan sees the flight from chaos to artifice as another dead end: "At the end of their creative path, both Vaginov and Malevich arrive at their own kind of quasi-classicism, in whose deathly monstrosity there distinctly comes out a melancholy or monumental onslaught of self-parody." The way out of the cloister of self-parody was opening the door to a collision between the formulism of poetry and the random, anecdotal elements of prose and everyday life. It might be misleading to say Vaginov
came to his turning point all that abruptly. Like the characters in Satyr Chorus,
and the friends and acquaintances on which they were based, he was
a student of both high culture and popular culture. Aside from Russian
and classical western European literature, Vaginov also read works in
French, Italian and Spanish. He knew the works of Freud, Spengler and
Joyce, but his eclectic reading also ranged from
As a collector of collectors, even as a
collector of junk, Vaginov also compiled a snapshot of his time, much as
Joyce had built a ubiquitous and timeless odyssey from scraps of one day
in the life of Dublin. And, unlike a skilled photograph with artistic
pretensions, a snapshot with little mechanical skill or artistic purpose
can be a more authentic flashback. Vaginov's intent to preserve that
authenticity from the ravages of time and political falsification is not
so far removed from the impulse behind the most glorious monuments of
St. Petersburg. As Victor Shirokov wrote, "For Vaginov, the problem
of human immortality came down to the problem of the immortality of the
individual, and these were the paths available: immortality through
literary work, through creative works or ephemeral immortality through
an intellectual imprint on the back-ground of material culture, through
the collection of books, things, museum rarities (the way a fern is
imprinted on a piece of coal or the way an insect remains in amber).
Whence the helping of black humor." In Vaginov's novels the collecting
impulse feeds on the transience of matter and the inexhaustible appetite
for meaning. Only through some power of correspondence--to
signify something beyond function and to exist by association with
something else--can characters overcome
their material and personal losses, or transcend the inadequacies of
their time and place. Vaginov's contemporary, Walter Benjamin, diagnosed the passion for
collecting as a "struggle against dispersion" that inspired Baroque
artists to reconfigure the disarray of their time as allegory.
The political upheavals in the decade leading up to Satyr Chorus
also conspired with the work of collectors by wrenching objects out of
their context and function, whether by obsolescence or political taboo.
But Benjamin saw the collector's urge as an outgrowth of
Benjamin also described collecting as as a kind of
internalized industry, which converts random objects into parts of an
interlocking system: "It is the deepest enchantment of the
collector to enclose the particular item within a magic circle, where,
as a last shudder runs through it (the shudder of being acquired), it
turns to stone." This alchemy of collecting might even be
thought of as a counterpart to Vaginov's
"juxtaposition of words" and a less frenzied version of Rimbaud's delirium of collection
in his "Alchimie du verbe." But collecting can also be viewed
as part of the novelist's mission, as stated in "A Guide to Berlin" by
Vladimir Nabokov:
I think that
here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary
objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of
future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant
tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in
the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life
will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times
when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today
will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade. In Vaginov's last novel, Harpagoniana,
the collecting impulse even supplies the book's title, which derives
from Harpagon, the protagonist of Molière's The Miser. One
character in the novel, a thirty-something bachelor, Lokonov, manages to
part with his belongings while falling in love with a 17 year-old girl
named Iulia. Lokonov is worried that his time and chances are running
out. He contemplates Iulia, not so much as the person he loves, but as a
kind of dowry, the sum of the treasures a more gifted rival might lay at
her feet: For lack of anything better, Lokonov
wants to buy dreams, and another character, the alcoholic Anfertiev,
would like to sell them. Confined to a world of scarcity, and
all-consuming appetites, Vaginov's characters want a way out. Hopelessly
in love, Lokonov also feels a yearning for his own youth and a hunger
for a more interesting life beyond everyday existence in one city. Taken
far enough, a seemingly natural desire can become an urge to go beyond
natural boundaries. In his longing to live outside of nature as we know
it, Lokonov sees himself as the opposite of what the Unknown Poet
aspires to in his definition of a cultured person: Lokonov
felt he was part of some kind of painting. He felt there was no getting
out of this painting, that he was inserted into it, not by his own will,
that he was not a main figure, but of third rank, that this painting was
created by certain social conditions of certain political circumstances
of the first quarter of the 20th century. Lokonov was
tormented by insertion into a certain painting, belonging to a certain
epoch. He felt he was some kind of butterfly stuck on a pin.
Instead of a collector, an object in a
collection. In his second novel, The Works and
Days of Svistinov, Vaginov defined the collector's mission in the
words of the fictional author who is the novel's main character.
Svistinov describes his job as transplanting characters from real life
into the grave--and the immortality--of art, where they are still just
beginning to experience the prime of their life and change to
everlastingness: There
aren't many fishers of souls in the world. There's nothing more terrible
than a true fisherman. They're quiet, the true fishermen, they're
courteous, because they're connected with the outside world only by
courtesy. They, of course, have neither horns nor hooves. Of course,
they give the appearance of loving life, but they love only art and
nothing else. Understand... art is by no means a ceremony, by no means a
job. It's the struggle for the settling of the other world, and for that
world to be thickly settled, so there will be variety in it, so there
will be fullness of life there. One might compare literature to
existence beyond the grave. Indeed, literature is existence beyond the
grave. As a "fisher of souls," Vaginov all but
declares a connection with Gogol's Chichikov. For some of Vaginov's characters,
collecting is also an excess that invites some form of retribution, from
outright madness to the slow torture of habit and repetition. Like
alchemy, collecting holds out the promise of transforming base
matter--random, disparate objects--into something more precious--or at
least into links in a greater and more orderly whole. To the extent
Vaginov tried to restore the perfectionism of a collection to the
context of an imperfect world, he might have taken some satisfaction in
the loss of the many books collected by him and his wife. As she told
the scholar Sergei Kibalnik many years later, she and Vaginov took great
pains to assemble the library--for their reading enjoyment, and also to
rescue what might otherwise have been lost. She had to leave the library
behind when she was evacuated during the siege of Leningrad in World War
II. When she came back, the library was gone. Her apartment had been
taken over by a man who returned from the front and traded in the books
for a car. III. Just as Vaginov built on his literary
antecedents, he also built on the renamed but preserved city of St.
Petersburg. Located on a swamp by the Tsar Peter I, and built at great
loss of human life, the city took its distinct shape in foreign
architecture and artificial waterways. Unlike the circular and organic
labyrinth of Russia's old capital, Moscow, the new capital was a
spacious, rectilinear grid of streetscapes, with palaces, cathedrals and government buildings
imitating foreign splendors. In early summer, under the untimely glow of "white
nights," even the difference between darkness and light becomes artificial.
Known as the capital city with a
provincial destiny, St. Petersburg is both coffin and cradle. In the
burgeoning empire of Peter I and Catherine II, St. Petersburg was a
strategic port and a foothold for Russia's expansion to the west. In
1917, it was the cradle of two revolutions--the February Revolution and
the October Revolution. In the first years of this century, the city was
also the center stage for struggle between various forces of political
change--from revolutionary to reformist and reactionary. During these
same years, the literary home of Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky became
the nucleus of the cultural revival known as the Silver Age.
Under Communism, as a former capital, the
city became the empire's coffin. Even before Communism, St. Petersburg
had been a coffin for lost causes: for the revolutionaries of 1905, the
Decembrists of 1825, and the hopes for reform by the monarchy under
Alexander II, who was assassinated in 1881. Even today, various
memorials and figures of public sculpture are continually strewn with
flowers, as a token of connection to some private milestone or the
impulse to worship. This is especially noticeable around statues of
Pushkin, which might also be considered memorials to a hypothetical
Russia. Just as this Russia could inspire the loyalty of its subjects
and the distrust of rulers, the anonymous offerings might even be
thought of as affirming the powers of representation over the powers of
material history. It was Mandelshtam who saw the coffin as
the logic behind the city's architecture--the landmark structures that
Vaginov referred to as the "baroque, neo-Roman, neo-Greek architectural
islands." By evoking antiquity through architecture, the city was a way
for the state to immortalize itself, or at least to outlive its own
destruction. As Mandelshtam wrote in "Word and Culture," the hunger for
immortality by the state was even stronger than that of the individual.
And even greater than the hunger of the state, he believed, was the
hunger of time. If Saint Petersburg was also a "window on
Europe" and a showcase of western influence--from architecture and
painting to music and philosophy--it was also a defense against a west
whose incursions were sometimes forceful and unwelcome. In the 19th
century, even those Russian thinkers who studied and, in some ways
admired, western European culture felt it was also a threat. The
Slavophiles believed the industrialized countries of the west were too
materialistic, and that their liberal democracy with its privileged
middle class was less a model of enlightenment than a caste system that
exalted wealth over quality. The left wing of the Russian intelligentsia
had been more receptive to industrialization, but it, too, saw the
prevailing values of the west as harmful. In his 1880 lecture on Pushkin,
Dostoevsky tried to reconcile the two intellectual currents, as well as
the split between the real people ("narod") of Russia and
the artificial, privileged society of St. Petersburg, with its fickle appetite for the exotic. In place of these divisions,
Dostoevsky espoused a belief in Russia's native genius, but as a bridge
among cultures and a call to unity among peoples. If both wings of the intelligentsia could
be critical of Russia's rulers in their own way, they sometimes found
themselves at odds with Russian artists. Writers had to fear both the
censorship of cultural reactionaries in the government and the censure
of left-wing intellectuals who insisted that works of art have a clear
social relevance. At its worst, that relevance amounted to polemic and
political correctness. When the pressures of censorship fell more
heavily on the more explicit channels of public discourse, such as journalism,
the desire to carry on that discourse flowed more heavily to less
explicit channels, such as literature, philosophy, and criticism. At the turn of the century,
leading figures of Russia's "Silver Age" had all the more reason to feel
influential, but they would also more boldly insist that the arts had a mission of their own--art for its own
sake. This parallels the growth of Russia's middle class in the years
before World War I, and it was the ensuing depletion and disorientation
of the middle class that would leave the autonomous artist all the more
vulnerable to marginalization or even scapegoating.
Despite the gap between Russia's
political and artistic spheres, there was a parallel between the Silver
Age and the political upheaval in the first years of the 20th century.
At its extreme, this renaissance made ambitious claims for the powers
of culture to influence people and change the world--as in the music and
extra-musical pronouncements of Alexander Scriabin. Another example was
Blok's notion of Symbolism as a special power to unlock secret knowledge
through the poet's incantation (similar to powers of the seer or "vates" invoked
by Vaginov's unknown poet). The renaissance was
also marked by a frenzy of mysticism, escapism and decadence--the excess
that provokes a tragic reversal. For some Russian artists, that
reversal--or retribution--took the form of war and totalitarianism. For St. Petersburg, renamed
The historic significance of St.
Petersburg goes hand in hand with the mythological. By usurping Moscow
as Russia's capital, St. Petersburg dared to become the fourth Rome.
This was an affront to the prophecy of Russia's messianic destiny after
the fall of Constantinople: Moscow is the third Rome, there will be no
fourth. Yet another metaphorical connection lies between St. Petersburg
and a figment of Russian legend: the magical, submerged utopia, Kitezh.
Both ideal cities point to an ideal that lies beyond the boundaries of
Russia. But, as early as Pushkin's poem, "The Bronze Horseman," the very
majesty of this artificial city at the mouth of a river is a work of
hubris that is punished by a flood--which drives the poem's protagonist,
a Russian everyman, over the edge of insanity. As an instant, artificial capital, St.
Petersburg defied reality from its inception. Falling short of Moscow as
a historic heart of Russia, St. Petersburg was an attempt to surpass it
as the "window on Europe." As a result, St. Petersburg took shape as the
simulacrum of a quintessentially European capital. With its orderly
architectural ensembles and the seemingly infinite trajectories of its
major avenues (or "prospects"), St. Petersburg was built to be looked
at. Primarily a legacy of Peter I and Catherine II, the canals, bridges,
buildings and parks in the city's center evoke another world--be it
France, Italy or ancient Rome. St. Petersburg might even be considered
the ultimate Potemkin village. As a backdrop for the drabness and
squalor of everyday life, as lived by most its inhabitants, the utopian
perfection and sheer strangeness of St. Petersburg make everyday life
appear hallucinatory, and the hallucinatory more plausible, whether in a
story by Gogol or a novel by Bely. For Vaginov's characters, as they try to maintain the city's
intellectual tradition, the former St. Petersburg becomes a setting
where it is all too easy to confuse Another native of the city, the poet
Joseph Brodsky, would write, "There is no other place in Russia where
thoughts depart so willingly from reality: it is with the emergence of
St. Petersburg that Russian literature came into existence." In the same essay on Gogol, Nabokov would
describe Petersburg as a "smudged reflection in a mirror, a transparent
muddle of objects used not according to design..." In Satyr Chorus,
Vaginov notes the city's illusory quality in the very first prologue,
calling St. Petersburg a painted city--in the literal sense because its
buildings are periodically repainted in various pastel shades, but also
because the city is a changeable and perishable surface at odds with
some underlying reality (even starting with the bones of its slave
builders). This quality also figures in the prologue's depiction of
people turning into reptiles, whether as a perceiver's tendency to
hallucinate, or the way the city's inhabitants change out of their skins
like snakes in response to the political upheavals of their time. And
the predominant color, as Vaginov notes, is green: the color of some
buildings and even the scaly, reptilian layer of oxidized metal on the
"Bronze Horseman." Or yet a spiteful mirror that turns appetite into
feverish hallucinations and joyless laughter. In his lecture on Pushkin, it is the artificiality of St. Petersburg that Dostoevsky equates with the central flaw in the eponymous protagonist of the poem Evgeny Onegin. On the scale of arrogance and privilege, the characters in Satyr Chorus are no match for Onegin. But some of them, especially the unknown poet, share traits that Dostoevsky associates with that recurring figure, the "unhappy wanderer" on Russia's earth--unhappily turning up in a society cut off from the Russian people. The unknown poet fits the definition primarily by his search for answers in other times, places and civilizations. There is also a parallel in his attraction to Lida, not unlike that of another Pushkin wanderer, Alyoko, drawn to a gypsy camp by his attraction to the exotic Zemfira. Like Pushkin in Evgeny Onegin, Vaginov outgrows his highly autobiographical character. And, like Dostoevsky and Pushkin, Vaginov shows awareness of the troubling disconnect between people and society (whether pre- or post-revolutionary). For Dostoevsky, the ideal counter-balance to the rootless artificiality of Onegin and St. Petersburg is anything but a retreat to provinciality. Instead, he extols Pushkin for drawing on what might be called a native universality--in its foundations as modest as the childhood memories of Pushkin's heroine, Tatyana, but potentially revealing Russia's utopian destiny: a striving for world unity that could overcome divisions in Russia and even beyond. And, despite the troubling contradictions embodied in the new capital city, Dostoevsky even saw that native universality as the unfinished potential in the reforms introduced by Peter I. IV. In their own way, the learned outsiders in Satyr Chorus try to carry on what Dostoevsky saw as the mission of Peter I. The limited constituency for their empire of culture before the revolution is sharply diminished by political and economic necessity, not to mention emigration. What remains is what that world culture used to feed--an appetite to live, whether in time or space, beyond the insignificance of one time and place. To the extent the characters try to keep a hold on that culture within their small circle, they lose hold of the world around them. Even when one character, Kostya Rotikov, asserts (in Chapter XXV) that culture can remain their legitimate pursuit regardless what happens in government, he's not very persuasive. Arguing against him is the demise of the unknown poet, who tries to maintain his notion of culture but fails to build bridges to society. Drawn together by a common youthful
passion for "high culture," the characters in Satyr Chorus
gradually drift apart. In their attempts to maintain a hold on that
culture and each other, the
characters instead latch onto fragments that are a symbolic
transformation, or even a caricature, of their past. As in Ovid's
Metamorphoses (which Vaginov admired from an early age), each of the
main characters starts as one thing and turns into something else. Even when they are
physically still alive, they will have crossed that tipping point beyond
which the critical mass of what matters in their life is in the past.
Hence, Vaginov really is like an undertaker in viewing his subjects
primarily as an exercise in representation, a representation very much
of their own making, even to the point of revisionism. With his faith in hallucination, the unknown poet has the Symbolist's thirst for metaphor and connections between distant points of time and space. "A cultured person lives intellectually, not in one country but in many, not in one epoch but in many, and can choose whichever destruction he likes," he tells Teptyolkin. "He doesn't grieve when destruction finds him at home, he's simply bored. He mumbles, 'I've met you once again,' and for him it will become a joke." In his thoughts on the mission and powers of poetry, the unknown poet draws on the younger generation of Symbolists (especially Blok), though his preoccupation with the craft of poetry--the "juxtaposition of words" and the changeable chemistry of meaning--is closer to Acmeism and Baroque poets of the 16th and 17th centuries. In the course of the novel, the unknown poet becomes more
isolated. On the one side, he encounters the genuine enthusiasm of the
genuinely insane emigré poet, September; on the other, the trivialization of poetry by dabblers.
There is also a deconstruction of the unknown poet's version of the
"Eternal Feminine," Lida. She is portrayed initially with a touch of
vulnerable glamour worthy of an ill-fated heroine in a French novel and,
like Blok's "Unknown Woman," associated with mind-altering substances. By
A different kind of way out is used by Asphodelyev, a well-paid but less than satisfied literary
talent who
does his share of word-smithing for the Communist Party. He offsets his
professed distaste for his career by collecting artifacts
of literature--be it rare editions of Goethe and Pushkin or an expensive
bookcase. The poet Troitsyn becomes bald,
philistine and passé, and the mistresses he collects are progressively
less charmed, but he nonetheless remains the passionate collector of poetic
artifacts. Where others see the Soviet Leningrad of the mid-1920's, Troitsyn
still sees St. Petersburg, a "fairy-tale
city" but quintessentially Russian: "Even
though a foreigner had built it, wasn't it as Russian as the Uspensky
Cathedral in Moscow? Or St. Sophia in Kiev? In Petersburg, Russian Manon
Lescauts, ladies with camellias, came out to feast their eyes upon the
Neva, on the pearls floating in the springtime." Corresponding to the tale of fragmentation is the form
of Satyr Chorus. The book consists mainly
of short chapters,
with the narrative focus hopping from one character to another. Even
within chapters, there are shifts of focus and abrupt swerves from outward reality to
internal hallucination. The shifts and changing combinations lead to
revisions, evoking an earlier semblance only to place it in a different
light. In this experiment in the "juxtaposition of words," even the role of the
author is fragmented--split between Vaginov himself and the so-called
"author" who appears before, after and during the writing of
the book. In one version, the author is a less than
autobiographical mutation with three fingers, whose conception of
writing is disputed by the unknown poet, and who throws his manuscript
of a so-called "novel" into the fire. If the fragmentation undermines the
linear continuity and progress of conventional narrative, it can
emphasize patterns of recurrence, even or especially if that recurrence
is a parody of a character's earlier state--a kind of
contrappasso. For the unknown poet, the pursuit of "sacred madness"
or poetic inspiration leads to outright insanity and status as a "former
unknown poet." To support his preoccupation with taste and
tastelessness, Kostya Rotikov needs to make a living by dealing in
antiques. Misha Kotikov converts his passion for reconstruction into
dental practice. Minus his university chair, the philosopher becomes a
roving lecturer who assures his politically correct
audience that philosophy is only a game. And Teptyolkin ends up earning
a salary by teaching revolutionary
history, all the while serving as superintendent for his apartment
building. Instead of spiritual communion with the Eternal Feminine, he settles
(not always blissfully) for
marriage--as does his wife, Marya Petrovna. She wanted to be a singer or
a scholar but settles for being a homebody and even, on occasion,
Teptyolkin's surrogate mother.
By the end of the novel, Teptyolkin has
second thoughts about his earlier dream of bliss in the tower of
culture. The author invites us to wonder: is the flaw with Teptyolkin's
dream, or with Teptyolkin himself? To judge from the text, it would be
more correct to fault a sentimentalizing of culture, instead of the
culture itself. If "burying" characters is an exorcism of sentimentality,
Vaginov nonetheless shows affection for them and seems to share some of their enthusiasms, even
when they're being ridiculed. What is buried in his characters and his
city are the perishable pretensions that pass into and out of existence
in "calendar time." What survives is something neither physically
monumental nor entirely cut off from everyday life. In
this there is a parallel with Mandelshtam's notion of classicism--not as
something to be preserved by collectors, but as something to
rediscover--an epiphany, a momentary flash of recognition that ripples
through time. Nor is rediscovered classicism to be confused
with the counterfeit precision of a simulacrum. Mandelshtam refers to the felicity of recognition--a face groped through
blindness, or the kind of memory that emerges through forgetfulness: "So
then, the poet has yet to be. We are free from the burden of
remembrances. But, on the other hand, there are so many uncommon
presentiments: Pushkin, Ovid, Homer. When a lover in a silent tangle of
tender names suddenly remembers that this has happened before--the words
and the hair and cock that crowed outside the window had crowed back in
Ovid's Tristia--he is overcome with a profound joy of repetition,
a head-spinning joy." Like the musical resolution of harmonic polarities
in sonata form, this repetition corresponds to Mandelshtam's idea of
harmony in his essay "Pushkin and Scriabin." The harmony to be arrived
at is not merely an instance of repetition, but the cross-section
through time, which Mandelshtam called the "crystallization of
eternity." For Vaginov's characters there are
comparable moments of recognition. Misha Kotikov will finally see beyond
the shortcomings of Zaevphratsky's widow, Ekaterina Ivanovna, as a
biographical source, and fall in love with her as a human being--whose
childishness is something better, and even more ageless than her
supposed stupidity in literary matters. And Vaginov appreciates her
value as a source of characterization who understands the men in her
life better than they understand her. Another recognition, and very
reminiscent of the groping analogy in Mandelshtam, is when Marya
Petrovna, on the verge of death, wants for one last time to feel the
various objects in her apartment--ordinary objects to be grasped and let
go of, as it were, the book's farewell to objects. Unlike the other
collectors trying to live vicariously beyond their own life, Marya
Petrovna is acting in connection with the ordinary life of her marriage.
And the dying woman Teptyolkin holds in his arms no longer has the
lightness he worshiped in the first chapter as a figment of immutability
(all too predictably dressed in silk). What he feels instead is the
unbearable heaviness of a human being recognized as mutability and loss.
In his first, early morning walk as a widower, Teptyolkin realizes that
he is indeed alone, and that even the winged creature following his
steps is not a mythological phoenix or firebird, but--despite the
"scorched" or dappled color--a common Leningrad pigeon. It is possible to read Satyr Chorus
as an outcome of political climate, but its wayward mix of the ideal and
mundane go all the way back to the "Silver Age" of Spain, in the
interplay of delusion and ridicule in
Don Quixote. In the earlier book the conflict between the ideal
and the commonplace is, in a way, resolved. When the aged protagonist
(another laughable figure) finally gave up his identity of knight-errant,
As much as it is a book of mourning and
memory, Satyr Chorus is a book of laughter and forgetting. The
degeneration from the poetic to the prosaic is at the heart of the novel
and its title. It is precisely because the characters are treated as
part of everyday life, rather than as "radiant beings," that they
deserve attention. This can be interpreted politically, but the Czech novelist Milan Kundera
argues that is in the prosaic that the novel as an art form
reveals its capacity for poetry. In his essay, Betrayed Testaments,
Kundera defines this prose of life--the everyday, the concrete, the
momentary, what Russians call byt--as the opposite of the
mythical. In that very prose, he writes, "we touch upon the most
profound conviction of every novelist: nothing is more disguised than
the prose of life; every man tries perpetually to transform his life
into myth, tries, so to speak, to transcribe it into verse, to cloak it
with verse (with bad verse). If the novel is an art and not just a
'literary genre,' it is because the discovery of prose is its
ontological mission which no other art can assume entirely." If "bad verse" would be an unfair description of Vaginov's poetry, he is still being rediscovered mainly as a former unknown novelist. His autobiographical double in Satyr Chorus, the unknown poet, was keenly aware of the difference between prose and poetry. He would have preferred a different book, one that would have cast its heroes as radiant beings. Instead, as Vaginov wrote, the poet gave birth to an author who "seduced his soul and turned it into laughter." If not with the laughter of Gogol or Juvenal, then something more like the blend of grief, sarcasm and dissimulation in the works of Shostakovich. For all its refusal to put the new political reality on a pedestal, Vaginov's novel is hardly a reversal of changes over time. What is restored is the freedom to move outside "calendar time," providing acoustical space where the genuine "music of revolution" and its recurring promise of change can reverberate. What is also restored is the ability to recreate a world in the imagination, the same ability which had been used on St. Petersburg by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Blok. Satyr Chorus is, after all, a book of the living. In the Russia of the 1990's, soviet and pre-soviet customs mingle with the norms and appetites of global capitalism. High culture still succumbs to trash, even if the cause lies in market forces. In what is again St. Petersburg, starry nights still give way to white nights, just as surely as a statue of Lenin can give way to a statue of Peter I. Behind the repainted facades of apartment buildings, cats prowl dingy courtyards, and another generation of former soldiers, disfigured by war, peddles cigarettes. Just as in Vaginov's and Pushkin's times, all kinds of people take to the streets for walking and conversation, and couples continue strolling through the Summer Garden, along the Neva and the canals. Some might even stray into the Smolensk Cemetery, where Vaginov's coffin lies somewhere amid the ruined memorials and unparsed vegetation. In this empire of forgetfulness, they can head for the chapel of Xenia the Blessed, light a candle and pray for happiness, while old believers feed mendicant orders of stray cats. |