Konstantin Vaginov

K. Vaginov (1899-1934)

Konstantin Vaginov, member of Oberiy had more renown as a prose writer (“Kozlinaya pesn’”, the Goatsong, "Bambochas", "Garpagonesque".). Vaginov is not really a pseudonym but a Russification of his father's real name, Wagenheim. His father, a high-ranking member of Tsarist federal police, the Gendarmerie, had to change his German-sounding name during World War I. Despite slender, even effeminate looks and aesthetic pretense not unlike Wilde's (and that in post-Revolutionary Petrograd!) he fought in the Red Army unlike many "revolutionary" poets who excelled only in the fields  of venery and Bacchus. Obviously, he enjoyed the "vagina" association of his adopted name as much as Dmitry Prigov enjoyed the affinity of his (birth) name with English "prick", which many considered a smart pseudonym. In his later days, Vaginov abandoned avant-guard esthetics for classical transparency mixed with nostalgic melancholy. Dying from TB, he wrote this short poem, in which he already speaks of himself in the third voice. 

The war and hunger passed like dream,
They left but ugly smell in mouth,

We were Church bells on high, that ring,

But only the temptation counts.

Not that our closest friends enthralled

To see his mouth moving slowly,

The wrinkled gorges in his skull

With morbid sight of deadly sorrows.

New people are walking through the streets,

The beat of other generation,

They laugh at our pride, and spit

At our heartfelt tribulations.

Vaginov, who started under Gumilev as a member of “Singing Seashell” (Zvuchaschaya Rakovina, the last Akmeist society) was untypical in many other respects. Unlike other members of Oberiy, who were future-oriented in their creative activity, he was looking up to the past. One of the expressions of this outlook was prose poem "The monastery of Our Lord, the Apollo." This searing attitude towards history allies him with Cavafy though there is no reason to expect he was  acquainted with his work.