Vaginov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. His mother was the daughter of a wealthy Siberian businessman and landowner. His father, a high-ranking security official for Nicholas II, 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 began studying law in 1917. Studies were interrupted by the civil war, when Vaginov served in the Red Army, at the Polish front and east of the Urals. After he returned to Petrograd, he was not allowed to continue study at the university, because of his father's ties to the old regime. Instead, he attended lectures at the Institute of History of the Arts and joined the "Guild of Poets," a circle of writers around the poet, Nikolai Gumilyov. A world traveler and decorated war hero with clear monarchist sympathies, Gumilyov would later be executed, after being accused of plotting against the government. In 1926, Vaginov married another writer from the group, Alexandra Ivanovna Fedorova.

Despite Vaginov’s privileged background, there were signs of conflict with his father. Some of that may have reflected uneasy relations between his parents, but the father was clearly against his son's decision to pursue a literary career. Vaginov was also part of a new generation of intellectuals that felt on the threshold of a break with the past, even before the upheavals of war and revolution. As a near contemporary and fellow member of the Guild of Poets, Nina Berberova, described her own coming of age in St. Petersburg, “I grew up in Russia in the years when there was no doubt that, sooner or later, the old world would collapse and no one seriously stood up for old principles—in any case, in the milieu in which I grew up.”

By the time Vaginov joined the Guild of Poets, a number of writers who had supported some form of revolutionary change were becoming disillusioned or even going into exile. Along with the almost universal privations of life under “War Communism,” writers were faced with a new regime of censorship which, short of outright persecution, could materially threaten their survival. Gumilyov was arrested in early August, 1921, and executed three weeks later. Four days after the arrest came the death of Blok, after months of physical and creative decline.

In February of 1921, in a lecture on Pushkin, Blok made a clear stand asserting the autonomy of poetry from dictates of bureaucrats. Drawing a parallel between the new regime and censorship under Nicholas I, Blok said Pushkin was killed, not by a bullet, but by the asphyxiation of creativity. Switching to the present tense, Blok accused bureaucrats of stifling creativity, in the name of service to the general public. “And the poet dies,” said Blok, “because there is nothing for him to breathe; life has lost its meaning.” According the one writer in the audience, Kornei Chukovsky, Blok’s indictment of the regime was unmistakable. “It was said so openly,” Chukovsky wrote, “that some didn’t understand.”

In the lecture, “On the Purpose of the Poet,” Blok used Pushkin as the prototype for the poet's tragic role. Ideally, the poet channels the true, secret harmonies that are hidden by the distractions and constructs of everyday life. That requires an absence of internal and external constraints, the “peace” that allows the poet’s “secret will” to create. By interfering with a poet’s ability to reach a general public, censors were also extending their power beyond a single poet’s lifetime. With this sense of tradition behind him, Blok argued, poetry was more than just a question of individual talent. As he said of Pushkin’s death in the lecture, “His culture died with him.”

The same was said six months later, after the death of Blok, an event greeted with near silence by the government and an absence of orations at the funeral. “Most horrible,” wrote Chukovsky, “was that, with Blok, Russian literature was finished.” Like Vaginov, Berberova attended the funeral, walking in a procession from Blok’s home on the Pryazhka to Smolensk Cemetery on Vasilyev Island. In her view, “probably there was not one person—not even for a moment—who did not think that not only Blok had died, but this city, that its particular power over people and the history of an entire people was coming to an end, that a period was coming to an end, that a cycle of Russian fates was concluding, an epoch coming to a stop, to begin whirling toward other periods.”

Along with straddling a change of epochs, Vaginov's writing and literary contacts traced a succession of stylistic movements. His first collection of poetry, “Journey to Chaos,” dates from 1921, when he was still part of the “Ego-Futurist” group of poets known as the K.M. Fofanov Circle. As the literary scholar Sergei Kibalnik notes, the collection shows a mixture of influences—the Symbolism of Blok and the Futurism of Mayakosky. Though exposure to the Acmeism espoused by Gumilyov would count as one more influence, Kibalnik says Vaginov felt a “special reverence” for the work of Blok. One instance was when Vaginov was part of a group that accompanied Blok home from a literary evening at the House of the Arts. A more relevant connection is the degree to which both writers made St. Petersburg the center of their creative universe.

The overall progression in Vaginov's work starts from a poetry of sometimes apocalyptic events, with mythic, metaphorical, and historic allusions spanning many centuries. In one of his early poems, 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. 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."

Vaginov’s other collections of poetry 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. With Vaginov's first novel, Goat Song (1927), the mythic and historical becomes more intertwined with elements of everyday life. Later came two other complete novels--Works and Days of Svistonov (1929) and Bambocciada (1931). As Vaginov's health declined, he worked on a fourth novel, Harpagoniana, which was left incomplete. Shortly before his death, he started work on a novel that was set in the earlier revolutionary year of 1905. The materials for that work were confiscated by authorities.

Throught the 1920's, Vaginov became affiliated with a number of other writers' groups, including the left avant-garde collective of writers known as The Association of Real Creativity (in Russian, by the acronym "OBERIU"). Founded in 1928, OBERIU was based at an institute launched by the artist Kazimir Malevich, and its most famous member was the absurdist writer Daniil Kharms. 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 Kharms, one screen that made foolishness, absurdity and fantasy less objectionable was the genre of children's literature. In Goat Song, it could be said there are multiple screens or masks. These include the layers of prototypes, but also the use of intoxicants (literal and figurative), allowing characters to plot an existence beyond the coordinates of their physical time and place. If the mask of absurdity or dysfunctional behavior allows them to speak with more freedom, and maybe even prophetically, layers of meaning and skewed perspectives can also mean less engagement and credibility from the reader. The experimental writing that marked a cutting edge of innovation in the 1920’s—for example, with Surrealists in Paris—had different backdrop in the Soviet Union, where the other side of the cutting edge could be a slide into trivialization, neglect, or political co-optation.

During the mid-1920's, Chukovsky found the real world of the Soviet Union also had its screens and masks or, as he put it, a "socialist glove" worn awkwardly on a petty bourgeois, peasant hand. Rather than a conflict between political values a few years earlier, Chukovsky was thinking of the difference between the ideal and everyday reality. While sitting in on a trial for embezzlement at a potato factory, he witnessed a group of defendants he described as "pseudo-Communists" who hid their scheming to get rich behind a facade of political slogans and gestures. In its own way, this was a parallel to the overlay of masks and prototypes in Vaginov's novels, and to the kind of contradictions that would be exposed even more overtly by Bulgakov in Master and Margarita. In Chukovsky's opinion, the defendants were psychologically typical of their society, and the Soviet Union of the 1920's was a place that had yet to squeeze Gogol's dead souls out of its blood: "A country where everybody still believes in paper, and not in people, where totally unlofty 'petty bourgeois' practice is not infrequently hidden under the cover of lofty slogans--a country full of people like them."

But contradictions between forms and substance had long been a concern of Russian classics, whether by Pushkin, Gogol, Chekhov, or Bely. Growing up in St. Petersburg during the height of Symbolist influence in Russia, Vaginov was also conditioned to think of past literatures and ages as layers to combine with the present, like multiple overtones on a single string. If Blok was the most direct channel of Symbolism, there were other artists and thinkers in Russia, most notably the philosophers Vladimir Solovyov and Vyacheslav Ivanov.

Like its earlier examples in western Europe, Russian Symbolism was a reaction against the more materialist approach to literature in the 19th century novel, as in the works of Tolstoy, Dickens and Flaubert. As formulated in Verlaine's "Art Poétique," Symbolism favored music over matter: nuance, vagueness, and suggestion, as opposed to color, rhetoric and the prefabricated upholstery of style. In the words of another French Symbolist, Baudelaire (mentioned by the young Vaginov as one of his favorite poets), the mission of the artist was to show the way to a higher reality by deciphering the "correspondences" between different levels of reality. For Silver Age writers such as Blok and Andrei Bely, St. Petersburg was the consummate Symbolist vehicle: a microcosm of larger, and sometimes conflicting, worlds, symbolically extended over time and space.

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 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 still be cryptic or ambitious in mythical and literary cross-references.

In his diaries, Chukovsky described one version of the difference between Symbolism and Acmeism in a debate between Gumilyov and Blok. According to Gumilyov, the Symbolists were, for the most part, hucksters, “specialists in insights into the world beyond.” Or, as he puts it metaphorically, they hoist and twirl a dumbbell with a label saying 10 pounds, but whose weights are actually hollow. Blok’s response was that hucksterism was a fault of second-rate talents in all schools. He accused Gumilyov of being too much the disengaged literary craftsperson, rather than a writer also grounded in politics and social engagement.

In the work of writers such as Mandelshtam, Acmeism can be seen as a way of taking the free-ranging nature of Symbolism to another dimension, by challenging 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 Goat Song, 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. Besides being a literary notion, the volatility of the word also reflected Vaginov’s time and place, with its upheaval in social order and the resulting shake-up in language.

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. 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.

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":

In our works we broaden and deepen the meaning of the object and the word, but in no way destroy it. The concrete object, shorn of its literary and customary rind, is made worthy of art. In poetry, this object is expressed by the collision of verbal meanings with the precision of a mechanic. Are you, as it were, beginning to protest that this isn't the object we see in life? Come up closer and touch it with your fingers. Look at the object with your naked eyes and you will see it for the first time stripped of its dilapidated literary gilding. Maybe you will maintain that our subjects are "unreal" and "unlogical?" But who said everyday logic is necessary for art? We're struck by the beauty of a woman in a painting, despite the fact that, contrary to the logic of anatomy, the artist has dislocated the heroine's shoulder blade and moved it aside. Art has its own logic and doesn't destroy the object, but helps comprehend it.

The interior is the asylum where art takes refuge. The collector proves to be the true resident of the interior. He makes his concern the idealization of objects. To him falls the Sisyphean task of divesting things of their commodity character by taking possession of them. But he can bestow on them only connoisseur value, rather than use value. The collector delights in evoking a world that is not just distant and long gone but also better--a world in which, to be sure, human beings are no better provided with what they need than in the real world, but in which things are freed from the drudgery of being useful.

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.

"He's probably a ladies' man and visited by all sorts of creatures, but--scented and dressed in all foreign clothes--he entertains and jokes sublimely. Evenings , he goes to the ballet or the opera or gets together with foreigners and looks upon the world with radiant eyes. His life is like A Thousand and One Nights. Of course, he doesn't need any dreams! But for me, maladjusted and feeling the world is horrible, dreams are necessary... What can I offer my beloved?" Lokonov considered, "what kind of palace, what kind of rarities can I amuse her with, what foreigners can I introduce her to? Rumors, gossip, standing over the primus stove--that's all her future life will be if she links her fate with mine. I don't possess a single common idea. Nothing interests me anymore. And there's my rival now, telling her about his travels round the world, about London, Paris, Genoa and Constantinople and showing photographs: here's where I was, there's where I walked, here's where I climbed this mountain."

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.

...Art--that is the extraction of people from one world and their insertion into another sphere. Literature is more real than this disintegrating minute-to-minute world. 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.