“The Works and Days of Svistonov” by Konstantin Vaginov: two authors and their two narratives

The article analyzes the narrative structure of Konstantin Vaginov’s novel, “The Works and Days of Svistonov” (1928-1929), focusing on a comparison of the authorial and character-based narratives. The study aims to demonstrate the specific nature of their interdependence and mutual conditionality. The work’s relevance stems from the general philological interest in Russian avant-garde literature, the development of which was curtained by the imposition of party control over literature, as well as from the unique composition of the “novel within a novel”, which obscures independent authorial voices. The perspectivity of this research is conditioned by the synchronicity between the cultural situations of the 1920s and the 2020s, specifically concerning the problem of literature’s overload with cultural signs from eras, which paradoxically leads to alienation from the past. Vaginov imbues Svistonov’s text with elements of his own narrative, while the latter incorporates elements selected by Svistonov for his own novel. Both narratives are significantly influenced by cultural codes of the past. Consequently, it is concluded that the external fictional text is built upon another, internal fictional text, and literature is reduced to the recognition of self- and other-quotations. At the level of narrative structure, the study identifies features of recursiveness, or literary autophagy, correlating with the idea of the thanatocentricity of creativity, references to which are present in “The Works and Days of Svistonov” and have been previously described by the other interpreters of the novel. Specific objectives include identifying the creative methods of both narrators, Vaginov’s philosophical views on the nature of creativity and culture as an aggregate of signs expressing universal human experience, examining the visual code pf the novel, and analyzing the ontological status of fictional and real world.

1. Bresler DM. The prose of K.K. Vaginov: Pragmatic aspects of artistic utterance in the context of the literary process of the 1920s–1930s. Summary of dissertation for the degree of Candidate of Philological sciences. Saint Petersburg: 2015:21 (in Russian).

2. Vaginov KK. Complete prose works. Saint Petersburg: Academic project; 1999:590 (in Russian).

3. Kaminskaya YuV. Collections, taxonomies, card indexes: poetics of “systematizing” metawriting in Russian literature of the 1920s–1970s. Dissertation for the Degree of Candidate Philological Sciences. Krasnoyarsk: 2023 (in Russian).

4. Pavlov E. The killing letter: Konstantin Vaginov’s Leningrad baroque. Available at: www.nlobooks.ru/magazines/novoe_literaturnoe_obozrenie/149_nlo_1_2018/article/19427/ [Accessed 14 April 2025] (in Russian).

5. Dolinin A. Cutting and excerpts as an element of artistic text: Nabokov – Vaginov – Tynyanov. Nabokov Online Journal. 2018;XII:1-24 (in Russian).

6. Sandomirskaya II. Blockade in word: essays on critical theory and biopolitics of language. Moscow: New Literary Observer; 2013:432 (in Russian).

7. Kozyura EO. Culture, text, and author in the works of Konstantin Vaginov. Dissertation for the Degree of Candidate of Philological Sciences. Voronezh: 2005:208 (in Russian).

8. Lipovetsky MN. Paralogies: transformation of (Post)modernist discourse in Russian culture of the 1920s–2000s. Moscow: New Literary Observer; 2008:840 (in Russian).

9. Burenina OD. Literature – “Island of the dead” (Nabokov and Vaginov). Available at: http://nabokov-lit.ru/nabokov/kritika/burenina-literatura-ostrov-mertvyh.htm [Accessed 5 May 2025] (in Russian).