St Petersburg полностью

Rozanov’s innovative prose is “polyphonic,” to use Bakhtin’s term. Its pages are filled with arguing voices that are seemingly independent of the author. This disturbing prose, which lures readers into its magic circle to make them take part in a philosophical dispute, seems to have been created for Bakhtin’s analysis.

As befits the author of the carnival theory, Bakhtin liked to surround himself with carnival personalities—exceptionally gifted eccentrics. The radical break in traditional culture gave rise to highly unusual situations and eccentric personalities. One observer noted, “In eccentricities, strangeness, and incongruities the intelligentsia expressed its need to deal with its past…. Just the way, after an explosion, the dust remains for a long time, settling slowly, and individual dust specks, totally unconnected and unattached, perform the most inventive pirouettes.”102

In Bakhtin’s Leningrad circle one of the most remarkable figures of the carnival type was the young poet and prose writer Konstantin Vaginov. The son of a fabulously wealthy colonel in the tsarist gendarmes, who was taught western European languages by his private tutors, Vaginov was a cocaine addict and bibliophile. He likened the victory of the Russian Revolution, which ruined his family, to the triumph of the barbaric tribes over the Roman Empire. For Vaginov, Petersburg had been a magical stage for that cultural tragedy, and he sang the praises of the spectral city in dadaist poems (which also showed the influence of Mandelstam), in which “pale blue sails of dead ships” appeared tellingly. Mandelstam, in turn, rated Vaginov highly, including him as a poet “not for today but forever” in a list with Akhmatova, Pasternak, Gumilyov, and Khodasevich.

Vaginov was part of the left wing of Oberiu. Like the group’s leader, Kharms, he also wrote experimental prose, which he read aloud to his friends. They were particularly interested in Vaginov’s novel The Goat Song. According to one witness, the listeners followed the thin, stoop-shouldered author from apartment to apartment to hear excerpts from the novel again and again in his masterly reading. This avid curiosity existed primarily because The Goat Song was a roman à clef: its characters were easily recognizable as some of the Bakhtin group members and other notable figures of literary Leningrad.

With the frightening speed of change in historical eras, people and events were instantly “bronzed,” becoming natural fodder for fiction that grew directly out of memoirs or for fictionalized memoirs, like Georgy Ivanov’s entertaining Petersburg Winters, published in Paris in 1928, which could also be considered new Petersburg prose.

Ivanov’s memoirs and Vaginov’s novel were written at approximately the same time, and it is not difficult to find much in common between them, especially the acute sense of and mourning for the end of the Petersburg era, the destruction of the Venice of the North. Both Ivanov and Vaginov agreed that the rose of Petersburg culture was about to fade anyway and that the unexpected revolutionary frost had merely hastened its demise. But in his memoirs, Ivanov, a subtle poet of the acmeist circle, an aesthete and snob, provides a nostalgic description of the decadent charms of prerevolutionary Petersburg. The book’s origins in newspaper columns is evident in the amusing albeit not always reliable anecdotes and vivid, prejudiced sketches of Blok, Gumilyov, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and the carnival world of Vyacheslav Ivanov’s Tower and The Stray Dog cabaret.

Vaginov’s novel, on the other hand, while written in equally translucent prose and imbued with a melodic quality characteristic of a “poet’s prose,” is a philosophical work, filled with learned allusions to obscure ancient and medieval authors. Even the title The Goat Song is a literal translation of the Greek word “tragedy.” For Vaginov, Petersburg was “Athens on the Neva,” the center of a refined Hellenism. The protagonists of The Goat Song carry on profound eschatological discussions à la Rozanov or Bakhtin, vainly trying to escape from the ugliness of Soviet reality in a “tall tower of humanism.” Vaginov describes these people with love, irony, and pity. He understands their utter doom but hopes for a renaissance of the old values in a new quality. When this will happen Vaginov does not know. He states sadly, in a sarcastic refutation of the clichéd official designation of Leningrad as the “Cradle of the Revolution,” “Now there is no Petersburg. There is Leningrad; but Leningrad has nothing to do with us. The author is a coffin maker by profession, not a master of cradle works.”

Vaginov, who died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of thirty-five, depicted himself in The Goat Song, with ironic allusions to Blok and Akhmatova, as the last inhabitant of Hellenic Petersburg: