Writing as Mortification: Allegories of History in Konstantin Vaginovʼs Trudy i Dni Svistonova

The article proposes examining Konstantin Vaginovʼs best-known novel as an experiment in the allegorical reading of Soviet modernity. Analysed to date mainly as a work of metafiction, Trudy i dni Svistonova can be profitably approached in the light of what Walter Benjamin saw as a radical revalorization of allegory in modernism. It is the allegorical mode that denies death and time by mortifying its object. Such a form of writing is well formulated in Baudelaireʼs “spleen et idéal” from Fleurs du mal, the book which, by Vaginovʼs own admission, gave him the strongest push to start writing poetry of his own. The article argues that the allegorical mode informs much of Vaginovʼs poetry and even more so, his prose which is still understudied, particularly when it comes to situating it within the context of European modernism. According to Walter Benjamin, Baudelaireʼs allegory had the powerful ability to unmask the bourgeois order, with its illusion of totality and organic wholeness. Vaginovʼs weapon of preference against the newly minted façade of the Stalinist order, complete with its metaphysics of time and history, is exactly the same one that both Baudelaire and Benjamin directed against the façades of their own worlds. To Vaginov, writing historically means writing allegorically; it means petrifying trembling actuality which then becomes a tomb that writes and to which the writing subject is also sacrificed.