“Only God Can Be”: Aleksandr Vvedensky, Kant, God, and Time

Abstract

This article discusses the place of God in the poetic system of Aleksandr Vvedensky. Vvedensky’s famous pronouncement on his “poetic critique” is more throughgoing than Kant’s critical enterprise, and invites a comparison between the movement of Kant’s thought in the Critique of Judgment, and what Vvedensky’s recourse to senselessness aims to achieve. Time in Vvedensky poetics may be seen as a radical extension of Kant’s philosophical system where it ultimately resides in an equally inaccessible realm on which its entire edifice is founded.

Keywords

• Alexansder Vedensky
• Russian avant-garde
• time
• God