Arkady Dragomoshchenko. A rose is (a) rose

Konstantin Vaginov. Complete works in prose. Publishing house "Academic Project". St. Petersburg, 1999. 590 pp.; author of the preface T. Nikolskaya; note Vladimir Erl and T. Nikolskaya; artist Yuri Alexandrov.

Without exaggeration, we can say this - this book was expected. There are apparently few reasons for this expectation. In order not to be tiresomely sincere, I will only name the desire for a certain completeness , which, as usual, gives rise to mirages of mythical libraries and completely strange images of books absorbing universes without a trace.

In fact, such a desire allows us to note other prerequisites, other premonitions.

Speaking about the possibility of understanding a text, Ricoeur writes in one of his works (I’m afraid I’m far from accurately reproducing the quote) that the possible space of meaning is not unlimited, that, arising from the unstable meaning of the word itself, then the meaning of words in a sentence, meanings sentences in a work, this space of meaning can ultimately be determined only in the horizon of a certain “life” project of the writer.

Is it not this mysterious and at the same time very vague “life project” that forces textual critics and researchers, not without a certain amount of excitement, to search for the always missing, disappeared fragments, versions, discrepancies, particles - in a word, material evidence, the totality of which ultimately allows the life project to coincide with an academic project, leaving no room for doubt, uncertainty, assumptions, bewilderment, and finally, for the same unclear expectation. Which in our case was fully realized in the publication of “Complete Works in Prose” by Konstantin Vaginov, published by the “Academic Project” per se.

Table of contents. Famous novels - "The Goat's Song", "The Works and Days of Svistonov", as well as "Bombochada", "Harpagoniana", editions, appendices, inserts, list of illustrations, notes. I'm missing something due to tactical cunning. For the time being.

On page 106, Kostya Rotikov awakens, and the thought occurs to him that is possible in this no “mental luxury” country. However, the volume housed in a hardcover frame tells a completely different story.

Evidence of this is also the quite predictable serial design - a slightly repulsive sphinx, taking the place of the previous one (St. Petersburg is by no means poor in this regard), imposing on Druskin’s book, without any connection with which Tyutchev’s lines come to mind:

Nature - Sphinx. And the more faithful she is
His temptation destroys a person,
What may happen, no longer
There is no riddle and she never had one.

However, if not a mystery, then, let’s say, some ambiguity still fills me with uncertainty... My embarrassment is even stronger when I think about the special attractiveness of Vaginov’s prose, about the curiosity that it again began to awaken among writers, and about the , that a purely philological interest was replaced by something else - turning into something similar to a vague recognition of a dream once seen.

And in fact, is it really so important that “The Song of the Goats” is nothing more than a “romance with a key”, a narrative that supposedly acquires its significance only as a result of the coincidence of numbers, right down to the exclamation bingo?

Is it really so urgent that a certain Pumpyansky stopped greeting the author after the novel was published, while his wife, etc. (see note)... and that someone really turned out to look like someone else, was a prototype of someone else, giving remarks and gestures a striking similarity in the mirrors of the heraldic design - or something else is important: namely, that, striving to comprehend the origins of the world, its beginning, the beginning of language itself, speaking, we, at the same time with hope for this, realize the doom of an endless return to the beginning of an endless narrative?

Such a return is catastrophic, critical, crisis-ridden and seeks to overcome itself in the present (both in the category of time and in the inevitable category of “reality”):

“With the help of the sacrifice they followed the trail of the Speech.
They found her included in the compilers of hymns.
Having brought it, they divided it among many."

Rigveda, X, "Knowledge"

The city of desolation/oblivion, as “Petersburg” appears (quotes are necessary, since the city itself is by no means a direct text) in the novel “The Goat Song”, or rather, a story about oblivion, the progressive disappearance of signs, “values”, the evaporation of the very substance of culture , is nothing more than “the active work of forgetting, necessary not so much for completion as for dismemberment, separation” - and, I will continue, for the creation of a text-vacuum, open to the possibility of meaning as such.

However, fragmentation (frangere - part of an incomplete whole) - and in Vaginov’s poetic plays it is more clear and conceptual - to which his writing strives, despite false “connections”, is a strategy for overcoming, first of all, the linearity of time, the most notorious “historicity”, and therefore the habitual at that time of persistent alternation of “retribution” and “retribution” in the structure of the mind.

However, more was said about symbolism than was subsequently spent on it.

But the gift of Midas lies not so much in changing the composition of matter, but in the spatialization of time, its folding, penetration into the core of time as such - into the “now”.

“The Star of Bethlehem” (a work deliberately not mentioned in the listing of table of contents) is such a thing now , the threat of which turned out to be excessive for the writer, who knew full well that the world was only being rewritten, reread , but no one was destined to open either the last or the first page. And because:

"<...> there are no fogs in St. Petersburg, it is clear and simple."

To Svistonov, in his works and days, this clarity is given in an ordinary gesture of recognition of the very fact of clarity.

“Svistonov lay in bed and read, i.e. wrote, since for him it was one and the same thing. He marked a paragraph with a red pencil, and with a black pencil he entered it into his manuscript in a redone form; he did not care about the meaning of the whole and the coherence of everything . Coherence and meaning will appear later."

The elegance of such an assumption is available to few. But a strange thing... “Complete Works in Prose” turned out to be for me only something like a reminder... What? Hard to say.

Perhaps I had a chance to find it, “prose” (not in a complete collection) earlier, and in other places where, for example, in the transparent darkness of the night, Lida and someone else ran their fingers in circles of the zodiac or cocaine... - la trasparentsia es todo lo que quedo (transparency is the only thing that remains).

Without a doubt, the desire to see in Vagin’s textuality what I wanted to see out of the corner of my eye in the present day inflamed the desire for this never-to-be- future book.

Today is always different. Now I am struck with a dizzying disappointment in the very literary fact of the presentation of Vaginov’s prose as a whole. Not in the fact of the phenomenon, but in the speech itself, language, prose, technique, technology.

And my favorite, delightful piece, “The Works and Days of Svistonov,” easily dissolves in the unnecessary, shyly belated completeness of the writer’s project, who, by the end of his days, I think, becomes self-loathing.

Drawing his literature from the decay of legends, random and incomplete versions, withdrawn from the general air of the final century, we were forced again to add, rewrite, live out this prose in its magnificent borderline icy incomprehensibility, in the endless disappearance of the clown Svistonov. Clowns, poets and prostitutes, like articles, are inexplicable and cause a shudder.

When the “full” “collection” lay on the counter, my appetite disappeared. The same one - petit "a".

Everything turned out to be familiar, slightly unnecessary, slightly boring, all at once with epithets, adjectives, sharp inversions of the author, etc. - in a word: “I don’t like St. Petersburg, my dream is over.”