Collecting as a Fundamental Creative Principle of Konstantin Vaginov's Poetics

The article analyzes collecting as a creative principle which manifests at different levels of the poetics of Konstantin Vaginov's lyric and epic works. The aim of the article is to investigate how this principle is implemented in the author's literary texts. The materials for the study were Vaginov's poetry anthology Parchovaya Tetrad' [A Brocade Notebook], his novels Kozlinaya Pesn' [Goat Song], Trudy i Dni Svistonova [Works and Days of Svistonov] and Bambocciada, and also archival sources (the writer's Autobiography, 1923), ego-documents and memoirs of his contemporaries. The methodological basis of the research was A. Assmann's works on cultural memory; works on structural poetics by V.Ya. Propp, N.D. Tamarchenko, A.K. Zholkovsky, and Yu.K. Shcheglov; articles on the poetics of the objective world by A.P. Chudakov, L.Ya. Ginzburg, and V.N. Toporov; philosophical works by W. Benjamin, J. Baudrillard, and M. Foucault on the phenomenon of collecting. According to the practice of systematizing, complementing Assmann's thought, two fundamental value accents can be distinguished there: if the initial experiences of world description implied the absolute value of objects placed in the classification ("canon"), then Plyushkin-like collecting of "things", derived form modernity, made it possible to look at the experience of systematization from a slightly different point of view ("archive"). The work shows that archiving is typical to Vaginov. So, in the first poetry collection, Parchovaya Tetrad', poems are organized according to the theme, some works also have a serial number, occupying a certain place in the author's collections. Throughout the collection, a complex author's logic can be traced in the transitions from one set of texts to another. All of them end with the poem "Rossiya" [Russia], which unites all the poems into a system. The further stage of the research was the analysis of the writer's prose. As the research demonstrates, Vaginov's novels present a more complex implementation of the same principle. The characters are fond of collecting different things: from objects of ancient culture to restaurant menus and pornographic pictures. However, the characters' collections characterize them, thus relating them to other levels of poetics and realizing the fundamental principle of constructing the text. The article concludes that Vaginov's intention to structure the cultural chaos in which he suddenly found himself is manifested in his works. Collecting "archival" materials that do not belong to modernity and are irrelevant to it does not in any way affect the development of the new world and does not help the characters of the works find their place in life. However, the creation of an archive of "former people", the details and household items of the departing epoch allows overcoming oblivion in the future and preserving their memory after the change of the cultural paradigm.

Keywords

Authors

References