The image of Philostratus in the works of K.K. Vaginov: experience of deconstruction

Abstract

The article examines the image of the ancient rhetorician Flavius Philostratus (II–III centuries) in the works of the St. Petersburg and Leningrad poet and writer Konstantin Konstantinovich Vaginov (1899–1934). Flavius Philostratus is a figure symbolizing the complex and contradictory transition from ancient culture to the Christian era. In Vaginov’s work, Philostratus also appears as a symbol of the passing Silver Age and the collapse of the ideals of creative youth. The purpose of the study is to show the hidden interpretative possibilities of the works of K.K. Vaginov, which relate to the general cultural context of the Silver Age and the ideas of its largest representatives: N.A. Berdyaev, P.A. Florensky, Vyach. Ivanov, F.F. Zelinsky, and authors from the inner circle of the writer. Some interpretive codes, which are implicitly present in the texts of Vaginov, allow the possibility of their hermeneutic interpretation followed by the deconstruction of the paralogical model of artistic reality of Vaginov’s works, as well as the deconstruction of the nomadically moving semantic center and hermetic artifact of this model: the image of Philostratus as a hypostatic and other-named character. The experience of deconstructing the paralogical model of artistic reality of Vaginov’s works and the “displaced” center of this model, the image of Philostratus, is justified by the methodological principle of complementarity, in which a formally absent element becomes conceptually significant in the interpretation, because it complements the entire system of meanings. In the works of K.K. Vaginov, such formally absent elements in the structure of other-named-hypostatic images-doubles of Philostratus are unnamed Dionysus, Apollo of Hyperborean, and Pythagoras.