Two letters to Rome: Oleg Okhapkin to Evgeny Vagin

The poet Oleg Okhapkin (1944–2008) and the journalist and literary critic Evgeny Vagin (1938–2009) belong to the so-called Leningrad samizdat . Two recently discovered letters from Okhapkin are addressed to his friend Vagin and contain the former’s comprehensive comments on his symbolic calendar of Russian culture, which follows N. Danilevsky’s and K. Leontiev’s ideas. According to this calendar, Okhapkin and his contemporaries belong to the Bronze Age of Russian poetry, which explains several recurrent patterns in the unfolding cultural process.