place
Vagankovo Cemetery
Vagankovo
also: Ваганьково, Vagankovskoye Cemetery
A real historic Moscow cemetery, established in the eighteenth century, west of the city center; the drunk narrator stumbles among its gravestones and crosses in the dark, mistaking a stray dog and a night watchman for the dead.
Reading notes
- The Darling §28 Vagankovo
A historic Moscow cemetery where Kukin is buried, far from the provincial town where Olenka lives.
- Good People §78 Ваганьковском кладбище
Vagankovo Cemetery, a historic Moscow burial ground established in the eighteenth century, includes a section traditionally reserved for actors and literary men -- fitting, ironic company for a critic whose entire identity was built on being a man of letters, and whose grave the story shows going untended and forgotten within a matter of pages.
- A Night in the Cemetery §14 Vagankovo
A real, long-established Moscow cemetery on the city's western side, still in use today and the resting place of many notable Russians; naming it (rather than an invented graveyard) grounds the parody's central 'haunting' in an actual, recognizable place.
- In Moscow §53 Vagankovo
A historic Moscow cemetery west of the city center; the narrator imagines his own eventual burial there and swift forgetting -- one of the piece's few moments of genuine, if self-pitying, mortality.
- In Moscow §55 Vagankovo
Repeated from section 53: the narrator's mock-command to be carted off to the cemetery, closing the confessional self-indictment.
- Notebooks. Diaries §4028 Vagankovo Cemetery
A major historic Moscow cemetery, here linked to the mass burial of victims of the Khodynka catastrophe.