The Soviet Writer Konstantin Vaginov: From Poetics to Subjectivity NATALIA FALIKOVA AND PAVEL USPENSKIJ A fter the death of the writer Konstantin Vaginov (1899–1934), literary colleagues who knew him published a number of obituary notices that radically contradicted each other. Vaginov’s Leningrad friends described him as a “fellow-traveler,” who in the last years of his life sought to merge with the proletariat through his prose works. 1 “Intelligentsia themes” had become “too narrow” for Vaginov, so he dedicated himself to describing the “life and livelihood of the workers” at the Svetlana factory and the Narva outpost. 2 A completely different impression of the deceased’s fate emerged from the Russian emigration. In his obituary notice, Georgii Adamovich disregarded Vaginov’s prose altogether in order to create the image of a poet, unrecognized and “solitary” in Soviet literature, who preserved modernist traditions in his work: “To his last days he never ceased to write poems that were just as incomprehensibly melodious as those he wrote while still a boy.” 3 The different points of view expressed by Vaginov’s Soviet colleagues and by émigré literary figures can obviously be explained by their ideological positions. In 1934, writers living in the Soviet Union could not have called the death of an author who was alien to Soviet reality a “heavy loss” (tiazhelaia poteria), as N. K. Chikovskii did in the title of his encomium to Vaginov. Similarly, Russian émigré authors could not have published a sympathetic obituary for a pro-Soviet writer, since the foundation myth of the Russian diaspora was built on repulsing the ideology of “Bolshevik Russia.” The paradox lies not in the fact that the opinions of the authors of the obituaries differed on ideological grounds, but in the notion that Vaginov’s oeuvre could be construed to fit successfully within each of these two mutually exclusive ideological systems. 1 Vs[evolod] Rozhdestvenskii, “Konstantin Vaginov,” Literaturnyi Leningrad 20 (April 30, 1934): 3. 2 N. K. Chukovskii, “Tiazhelaia poteria,” and N. S. Tikhonov et al., “Pamiati Kosti Vaginova,” both in Literaturnyi Leningrad 20 (April 30, 1934): 3. 3 Georgii Adamovich mentions two “novellas” (povesti) by Vaginov and maintains that they should be denounced. See G. A., “Pamiati K. Vaginova,” Poslednie novosti 4830 (June 14, 1934): 3. Vaginov, however, managed to write not two novellas, but four satirical novels, three of which were published. The Russian Review 78 (October 2019): 619–40 Copyright 2019 The Russian Review