Zehnder, ChristianChristianZehnder0000-0003-4442-00932025-09-302025-09-302025https://fis.uni-bamberg.de/handle/uniba/110517Emigrating from the Soviet Union, the poet Aleksei Khvostenko (1940–2004) arrived in Vienna in the spring of 1977 and lived there, in the city of transit, for almost a year before settling in Paris. This essay aims, first, to correct the wide-spread idea that Paris was the immediate and only possible destination of his departure from the Soviet Union. Second, it analyses the small corpus of six poems that Khvostenko wrote during his year in Vienna, by putting a special focus on their “transitory” character. A tragic temporality as well as an intensive use of deictics constitute the most remarkable qualities of these poems. This essay argues that paradoxically, the fixity of the orientation in time and space and within the frame of poetic form decreases with every mention of the “here” as well as “now” and “then.” The poems deal with a phenomenon that can be described as displaced deixis. Moreover, this essay asks what the case of Khvostenko’s transit might contribute to a nonteleological understanding of emigration literature in a broader perspective.rusPoetryAleksei KhvostenkoSoviet UndergroundEmigrationtemporalitydeixis890articleurn:nbn:de:bvb:473-irb-110517x