“My soul is a dusty library…”: Systematization and chaos as ways of organization of Konstantin Vaginov’s lyric texts
Authors:   Siberian Federal University, Kaminskaya Yuliya V. 
Published: October 2024

The article attempts to comprehend the genesis and development of the dichotomy of order and chaos in Konstantin Vaginov’s lyrics, establishes its relationship with the poet’s poetics of collecting and the bibliophilic practice. The focus is on the images of Apollo and Dionysus, reinterpreted in the Russian culture of modernism under the influence of Nietzsche’s aesthetic treatise The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. As the article shows, many turn-of-the-century writers turned to the Nietzschean idea of two principles. For instance, Alexander Blok urged to listen to the music of the revolution, that is, he saw the future of Russia in the Dionysian beginning. Andrei Bely clearly distinguished two models of the worldview, but did not decide which of them - Apollonian or Dionysian -would be more suitable for the country. The article expresses and substantiates the idea that Vaginov proposed his own interpretation of Nietzsche’s concept. The material for the study was the writer’s poems, as well as ego-documents, memoirs of contemporaries, and archival data. On representative examples of motive-shaped rows of chaos and its ordering (crowd / herd / swarm, books / shelves / libraries, etc.), the aesthetics of systematization in Vaginov’s poems is considered; its development is outlined in the “poet’s prose”. Methodologically, the article is based on Aleida Assmann’s works on cultural memory, as well as on classical philological works on the history of Russian literature of the 1920s. The article shows that in Vaginov’s works Apollo is presented as a symbol of the culture of the past, of the orderly world. The lyrical hero tries to preserve antiquity by referring to books; respectively, shelves and libraries act as attributes of the organized space of the past. Images of a swarm / round dance / crowd, etc. are used to describe chaotic modernity, that is, they are typical for the Dionysian beginning. However, the contact of the lyrical hero with the culture of the ancient world is far from always marked as positive. In some poems, the meeting with Apollo (the past) gives strength to the lyrical subject; in others, making a sacrifice in the name of the resurrection of the previous culture, the lyrical hero dies or suffers, which does not make sense: the past is irreversible. So Vaginov poses the question of the advisability of referring to the world of the past and the possible consequences of such interaction. Another feature of the poetics and aesthetics of Vaginov’s works is the lack of a clear separation of the Apollonian and Dionysian beginnings. For example, in the poem “I vse zh ya ne zhivoy...” [And Yet I’m Not Alive...], the lyrical hero stands under the Apollo foliage and at the same time compares himself to Prometheus chained to the lyric rock, whose image, according to Nietzsche, is one of the masks of Dionysus. In the same way, the motifs of chaos and order merge: opening the book, the lyrical hero is faced with a round dance of words, sounds, images, which in one case leads to inspiration and in the other to the loss of his own “self”. It is concluded that Vaginov does not take a definite position regarding (a) the nature of the influence of the past on the lyrical hero and (b) the orderliness of the past. The author declares no conflicts of interests.