Vladislav Khodasevich

This book is devoted to the poorly studied early poetry of Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939), one of the most remarkable poets of the Russian “Silver Age”.
The research focuses primarily on early collections of Khodasevich, Molodost’ (Youth, 1908), Schastlivyj domik (The Happy Little House, 1914), and selection of poems from another book, Vetv’ (Branch, 1917). The mentioned texts are regarded as consequent stages of the poet’s development.
We took into consideration several aspects of the development of Khodasevich’s poetry. The first question of our interest was which texts of the poets of older generation (V. Bryusov, A. Blok, A. Bely) were adopted and revised by Khodasevich in his early verses.
Second, the present thesis analyses Russian poetry of the 19th century in Khodasevich’s treatment. In Molodost’ the references to Pushkin’s epoch were rather conventional and emanated from the influence of Bryusov, who had the reputation of the follower of Pushkin’s tradition. However, over time the presence of Pushkin’s epoch in Khodasevich’s writings was becoming more significant. In the verses written between 1916 and 1917 a new kind of reference to the 19th century literature becomes visible. The poet’s development consisted in gradual disengaging from the influence of Bryusov and other symbolist poets, and in overcoming them through employing the traditions of the 19th century.
The third important theme of the study is Khodasevich’s own evolution. In our opinion, the poet, being under the influence of the “younger” symbolists, had adopted their model of evolution as well. For example, the first stage of Khodasevich’s development, i.e. his “thesis”, corresponds to the “antithesis” of Block and Bely. The following stage of his evolution is in contrast to the first one, similarly to how it happened among the “younger” symbolists.
Having undertaken the analysis of the poems written between 1915 and 1917, when aesthetic themes were replaced with social and ethical problems, helped us reach the conclusion that the third stage of Khodasevich’s evolution (the “synthesis”) corresponds to the “synthesis” of Blok.

Книга посвящена диалогу русских писателей-модернистов с Данте и Петраркой. В трех ее разделах исследуются: общемодернистское преклонение перед «Канцоньере» Петрарки; стихотворения Анненского, Кузмина, Ходасевича и Ахматовой, отмеченные творческой переработкой «Божественной комедии» и «Канцоньере»; и путь, проделанный Мандельштамом от игнорирования Данте и Петрарки к оригинальному переосмыслению их наследия в стихах и прозе. Эти сюжеты рассматриваются на фоне господствовавших в Серебряном веке эстетических тенденции как смена одних форм апроприации Данте и Петрарки другими.
Монография предназначена для специалистов по русскому модернизму и русско-итальянским связям, а также для широкого круга любителей литературы.


In English

Ital’ianias’, ruseia: Dante i Petrarka v khudozhestvennom diskurse Serebrianogo veka ot simvolistov do Mandel’shtama (Going Italian, Going Russian: Dante and Petrarch in Silver Age Letters from the Symbolists to Mandel’shtam) takes its name from a famous line by Osip Mandel’shtam, and Mandel’shtam is in fact its central figure. The first part of the monograph explores the Russian Petrarchism which boomed during the Silver Age, the second is a close analysis of poems by Innokentii Annenskii, Mikhail Kuzmin, Vladislav Khodasevich and Anna Akhmatova written in the shadow of the Dante-Petrarch tradition, while the third and last part focuses exclusively on Mandel’shtam. It explores his journey from a complete lack of interest in the two Italian classics (who, in his mind, were a part of the Russian Symbolist canon, and, thus, not his cup of tea) to admiration and the reworking of their heritage into something qualitatively new. The chapter sheds light on all of Mandel’shtam’s references to New Life, Divine Comedy and Canzoniere, including previously unnoted ones.

In italiano

Ital’janias’, ruseja: Dante i Petrarka v chudožestvennom diskurse Serebrjanogo veka ot simvolistov do Mandel’štama (Italianeggiando, russeggiando: Dante e Petrarca nel discorso artistico del secolo d’argento dai simbolisti a Mandel’štam) deve il suo nome al famoso verso di Osip Mandel’štam, il quale è la figura centrale del libro. La prima parte di questa monografia esplora il Petrarchismo russo, che prosperò durante il secolo d’argento; la seconda è un’analisi dettagliata di numerose poesie di Innokentii Annenskii, Michail Kuzmin, Vladislav Chodasevič e Anna Achmatova scritte all’ombra della tradizione dantesca e petrarchesca; mentre la terza e ultima parte si concentra esclusivamente su Mandel’štam. Essa esplora il percorso del poeta dalla sua completa ignoranza dei due classici italiani (i quali inizialmente erano per lui parte del canone del simbolismo russo e perciò non corrispondevano esattamente alla sua poetica) alla sua ammirazione di essi e alla sua rielaborazione della loro eredità in qualche cosa di nuovo. Il capitolo prende in considerazione tutti i riferimenti di Mandel’štam a La vita nuova, La Divina Commedia e il Canzoniere, includendone anche alcuni che non erano stati ancora messi in evidenza.

See http://knigirggu.ru/catalog/literature/978-5-7281-2289-0/

This paper is devoted to the influence that the experience of emigration had on the poetics of Khodasevich's book European Night (Evropeiskaia noch'). Till the spring of 1925 Khodasevich thought that he had the possibility to return to the Soviet Union. This state of mind determined the pragmatic meaning of the poems that Khodasevich wrote in the period between 1922 and 1925, i.e. the time in which he emigrated to Europe and yet did not feel himself a " real " emigrant. These poems are characterized by a satirical orientation as well as by a radical rejection of emigration. On the other hand, the texts that were written between 1925 and 1927 (when Khodasevich formed his self-identification as an emigrant) radically changed the pragmatics of European Night: In this way it becomes a book expressing a deep existential despair. This inner crisis includes the Russian space as well as the space of emigration. In our study we also analyse the way in which Khodasevich mitigates the satirical orientation of the first version of the book.

Статья посвящена тому, как ситуация эмиграции определила поэтику сборника В. Ходасевича «Европейская ночь». До весны 1925 года поэт считал, что может вернуться в СССР. Это обстоятельство определило прагматику текстов, писавшихся в промежуток между 1922-1925 годами, т.е. временем, когда поэт уехал за границу и еще не осознал себя полноценным эмигрантом. Стихи, написанные в это время, отличаются сатирической направленностью и резким неприятием эмиграции. Однако тексты, написанные в 1925-1927 годы (когда у Ходасевича сформировалась эмигрантская самоидентификация), радикальным образом меняют прагматику сборника: «Европейская ночь» становится книгой, выражающей предельное экзситенциальное отчаяние, охватывающее и пространство России, и пространство эмиграции. В статье также рассматривается, как Ходасевич нивелирует изначальную сатирическую направленность поэтического сборника.

In this article we will examine the influence of Alexander Herzen, perhaps the most famous Russian emigré of the 19th century, on the worldview of Vladislav Khodasevich and on the poetics of the latter’s poetry written in emigration. In this study it will be shown that Herzen’s relationship to the Europe of his day and its bourgeois values and political programs was a model for Khodasevich and influenced some of the poems in European Night. The title of this collection of poems and many features of its poetics (the position of the observer, the description of the “deformity” of European culture, political themes that occasionally appear) illustrate Khodasevich’s indebtedness to the works of Herzen. In this article we will also investigate Khodasevich’s social and political views and discuss the question of the pragmatics of his poems written in emigration.

В статье рассматривается влияние А.И. Герцена, пожалуй, самого известного русского эмигранта XIX в., на мировоззрение В.Ф. Ходасевича и поэтику его эмигрантских стихов. В работе показы- вается, что отношение Герцена к современной ему Европе, ее буржуазным ценностям и политиче- ским программам было для Ходасевича модельным и повлияло на некоторые стихи “Европейской ночи”. Заглавие поэтического сборника и особенности его поэтики (позиция наблюдателя, описание “уродства” европейской жизни, возникающие иногда политические темы) восходят к сочинениям Герцена. В статье также рассматриваются социально-политические взгляды Ходасевича и обсуждается вопрос о прагматике его эмигрантских стихов.

Анализ стихотворения "Перед зеркалом" с точки зрения того, какое место в его смысловой конструкции занимают Данте, Петрарка, а также итальянская опера. См. также электронную публикацию на сайте "Рутения" http://www.ruthenia.ru/document/551683.html .

Vladislav Khodasevich's literary activity in emigration (1922–39) may be described as a search for a new identity. Khodasevich's departure abroad induced a powerful self‐image crisis and resulted in the trauma of emigration, which silenced him as a poet. In his attempt to move past this creative crisis, he turned to the biographies of Gavrila Derzhavin and Aleksandr Pushkin. In writing the biographical narratives of the two great poets, Khodasevich projected episodes of his own biography onto the two classic writers and identified with them in his attempt to conquer his own creative crisis. Nevertheless, the trauma of emigration turned out to be the stronger element, and neither of his attempts to identify with the two classical authors was successful: having completed Derzhavin's biography, Khodasevich began to identify instead with the tragi‐comic poet Lebiadkin, a character from Dostoevsky's The Possessed, about whose verses Khodasevich wrote an article. Then, having finished several chapters of Pushkin's biography, he conceived of a literary mystification, which he completed several years later–“The Life of Vasilii Travnikov.” This mystification reflected Khodasevich's traumatic identity: Khodasevich attributed his own world view and several episodes from his own life to its main character. This article examines in detail the mechanisms Khodasevich used to search for a new identity in the emigration, a search that in Khodasevich's case was not crowned with success.

Основная задача статьи заключается в том, чтобы объяснить, почему в последнем эмигрантском лирическом цикле В. Ходасевича "Европейская ночь" так много физически неполноценных персонажей. В работе физическая неполноценность персонажей рассматривается в психологическом ключе как следствие травмы эмиграции. Сама же травма эмиграции выводится из письма Ходасевича к Гершензону 1922 г. В письме поэта проявляются похожие метафоры физической неполноценности. В статье предпринята попытка объяснить травму эмиграции Ходасевича не как метафору, а как случай, родственный реальным психотерапевтическим историям. Отдельное внимание уделяется тому, почему эмиграция оказалась для Ходасевича столь травмирующей, и выдвигается гипотеза о связи травмы эмиграции с неудавшимся жизнетворчеством поэта.

Статья посвящена влиянию Гейне на поэзию Ходасевича. Хотя русская литературная традиция для Ходасевича была важнее, чем европейская, в его лирике обнаруживается ощутимый пласт поэзии Гейне. Обращение к Гейне в ранних стихах Ходасевича можно охарактеризовать как поверхностное. Оно необходимо либо для ироничного изображения любви (“Стихи о кузине”), либо для описания типизированного немецкого города (“В немецком городке”). В стихах “Тяжелой лиры” (1920-1922 гг.) усвоение Гейне оказывается более глубоким. Ходасевич, с одной стороны, развивает едкую гейневскую иронию (“Жизель”), а с другой — усваивает его романтическое отношение к любовной теме (“Странник прошел, опираясь на посох…”). Соседство в рамках книги как смыслового единства двух тематически близких любовных стихотворений, трактующих тему в противоположных — ироничном и романтическом — модусах, несомненно, индикатор влияния Гейне. Это не отменяет и переосмысления ряда гейновских тем в таких стихах, как “Анюте”, “Улика”, “Горит звезда, дрожит эфир…”. Новый этап усвоения поэтики Гейне наметился у Ходасевича в эмиграции. Помимо “Баллады”, показательно в этом плане стихотворение “Старик и девочка горбунья…”, в поэтике которого аккумулируются характерные для немецкой поэзии темы в целом и стихи Гейне в частности. Вместе с тем, влияние Гейне здесь осложняется тематическим влиянием немецких экспрессионистов. Эта новая, сатирическая и социальная, линия усвоения стихов немецкого поэта не получила своего развития в творчестве Ходасевича, и в его эмигрантских стихах мы больше не обнаруживаем обращения к Гейне. Что же касается немецких экспрессионистов, то, по-видимому, Ходасевич в некоторой степени испытал влияние их поэзии, однако его нельзя признать существенным.

This article is dedicated to the influence of Heinrich Heine on the poetry of Vladislav Khodasevich. Although for Khodasevich the Russian literary tradition was more important than the European tradition, in his lyric poetry tangible influence of Heine’s poetry can be found. However, links to Heine in Khodasevich’s early poetry can be characterized as superficial and are manifested in either in ironic depictions of love (“Verses about a Cousin”) or for the description of a stylized German city (“In a German Small Town”). In the poetry collection The Heavy Lyre (1922) the assimilation of Heine is deeper. Khodasevich on the one hand develops scathing irony after the fashion of Heine (“Gisele”), and, on the other hand he adopts Heine’s romantic treatment of love themes (“The Wanderer Passed, Leaning on his Staff”). There is a proximity within the framework of the book of a sense of a unity of two thematically similar love poems, which treat the theme of love in opposing ways — ironically and romantically. These are modalities that are probably the result of the influence of Heine. This does not annul the reworking of a range of Heine’s themes in such poems as “To Anyuta,” “Evidence,” and “The Star Shines, the Ether Trembles”. The outlines of a new stage of Khodasevich’s assimilation of Heine’ occur in the former’s emigration. Alongside “Ballad” this trend can be noted in in the poem “The Old Man and the Hunchback Girl,” in which the poetics take on characteristics of German poetry in general, and Heine’s poetry more particularly. Together with this, Heine’s influence here makes complicates the thematic influence of German expressionists. This new satirical and social adoption of the German poet failed to find its development in Khodasevich’s work and in his poetry written in emigration we do not find any more references to Heine. In regards to German expressionists, evidently Khodasevich, to some extent, experienced the influence of their poetry. However one cannot interpret this as fundamental to his work.

Vladislav Khodasevich is known not only as a poet who idolized Pushkin, but also as a Pushkinist. Yet, when the issue of Pushkinian influence in his poem "Не матерью, но тульскою крестьянкой…" (Not by my mother, but by a Tula peasant woman…, 1922) comes up, only one parallel is noted: Khodasevich depicted his wet nurse, the Tula peasant Elena Kuzina, in such a way as to make the name of Pushkin's wet nurse Arina Rodionovna come to mind for the reader. The present article aims to demonstrate that Pushkin permeates literally every cell of this poem, all the more so since Pushkin is made into an index of Russianness in it. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, when the poem was created, the issue of Russianness was front and center: a new Soviet dictatorship and internationalism had supplanted "Old" Russia. Khodasevich, who was planning to emigrate, had to come to grips with his identity. He felt his almost filial attachment to "Old" Russia acutely, and he saw in Pushkin its personification. A monographic analysis of Khodasevich's poem is needed to demonstrate how this set toward Russianness and the concomitant veneration of Pushkin found their embodiment in the poem’s generic range, lyrical plot, intertextuality, rhetoric, and word choice.

В статье рассматривается поэтическая формула В. Ф. Ходасевича «путем зерна», восходящая к Новому Завету и связанная с библейскими представлениями о вневременных ценностях.
Цель статьи показать, что эта формула не в меньшей степени связана с русским поэтическим революционным мифом, в рамках которого аграрная образность последовательно наделялась социальными и революционными коннотациями. В статье анализируется его формирование в лирике А. С. Пушкина и Н. А. Некрасова, а также его трансформации в поэзии символистов и особенно в лирике крестьянских поэтов (С. А. Есенина, Н. А. Клюева, П. В. Орешина), отзывающейся на революции 1917 года.
[The article discusses the poetic formula of Vladislav Khodasevich’s Putiom zerna (Grain’s Way). It is argued that the phrase goes back to the New Testament and is associated with Biblical ideas of timeless values. The aim of the article is to show that the formula putiom zerna (grain’s way) is also tied to the Russian poetic revolutionary myth, in which the agrarian imagery was consistently endowed with the social and revolutionary connotations. Khodasevich’s poem and his collection bearing the same title are a convenient starting point for elucidating this poetical myth. The article considers its development in the lyrics by Alexander Pushkin and Nikolay Nekrasov, as well as its transformation
in the poetry of the Symbolists. Special emphasis is laid on the lyrics of the Peasant Poets and their responses to the Revolution of 1917. In the light of the article’s topic, the poems of the Peasant Poets feature the myth with very high intensity. We’re thus justifi ed in comparing the images of Khodasevich with those of Yesenin, Klyuev and Oreshin]

Using Vladislav Khodasevich's 1927 collection 'European Night' ('Evropeiskaia noch'') as a case study, this article argues for the notion of travel as a new approach to the field of émigré literature. Khodasevich's poems in 'European Night', marked with the dates and place of composition, and implicitly iterative of the contours of a Europe with which his original émigré audience was intimately familiar, represent both an autobiographical narrative and a cartographic attempt to sketch a conceptual map of European exile. Using four visualizations of the coordinates of Khodasevich's travel, composition, place, and publication to investigate the poet's experience and literary output in Europe during these years, I argue that the force of geography on literary production (literature in space) was especially active between 1922 and 1927. This article therefore makes the case for an atlas of the Russian emigration.

О «солидарном чтении» (англ. co-opted reading) в авангардоведении и об участии формалистов в его формировании мне уже доводилось писать [Панова, 2009(а); . В настоящей заметке я постараюсь суммировать сделанные ранее наблюдения, а также расставить теоретические точки над «i».

This essay is a monographic analysis of Vladislav Khodasevich's famous poem 'Before the Mirror' (1924). It focuses on the work's biographical context; its meaning (midlife crisis superimposed on the poet's self-portrait in a mirror); its Italian intertexts blended with Russian ones; the metatextual message (the poet ushers himself into the pantheon of great writers such as Dante, Petrarch and Pushkin); and literary craftsmanship (various " mirror " effects).

Настоящая работа – монографический разбор прославленного стихотворения Владислава Ходасевича «Перед зеркалом». В ней выявляются биографический контекст произведения, его смысл (кризис среднего возраста, наложенный на автопортрет в зеркале), итальянские интертексты в соединении с русскими, метатекстуальный посыл (вступление в пантеон писателей первой величины, где уже пребывают Данте, Петрарка и Пушкин) и литературное мастерство (разнообразные «зеркальные» эффекты).

Расширенный вариант русскоязычной статьи «Перед зеркалом» Ходасевича: итальянская амальгама // Восьмая международная летняя школа по русской литературе. Статьи и материалы. Kaukolempiälä (Цвелодубово): Свое издательство, 2012. С. 95-127.

The paper discusses the poems of Vladislav Khodasevich based on the theme of fire. The element of this appeared in the poems of the poet initially in the literal sense, as an element of landscapes, later it became an important carrier of the ontological and aesthetic content. It symbolized the creative inspiration, the safety of home, and above all it was a sign of a higher reality and the human soul, embodied energy, strength and beauty of the dream of a better world.

In this essay, I analyze Maksim Gor’kii’s and Vladislav Khodasevich’s attitudes to Russian neo-peasant poetry as a formative aspect of their respective worldviews. Their approach represented one of the underlying factors in their short-lived émigré rapprochement that seemed so unexpected given their different life experiences and literary backgrounds. Both Gor’kii and Khodasevich considered Russian neo-peasant poetry as a literary expression of a peasant nationalist movement that endangered outcomes of the socialist revolution. Through an analysis of their respective articles dedicated to Sergei Esenin after the poet’s death, I also delineate the difference between Gor’kii’s and Khodasevich’s attitude to neo-peasant poetry. Khodasevich’s exposition portrayed Esenin’s poetry and self-representation as a cultural construct, a mixture of neo-Slavophilism and Modernist “life-creation.” Gor’kii, for his part, “naïvely” perpetuated Esenin’s essentialist peasant self-representation, incorporating it into his vision of the contemporary inexorable struggle between town and country.

This article considers the structure of Vladislav Khodasevich's Necropolis (Nekro-pol', 1939) in relation to the volume's critique of Symbolist life-creation (zhizne-tvorchestvo). Necropolis compiles short memoir-portraits of various turn-of-the-century Russian writers. These acerbic pieces variously implicate life-creative beha-vioral codes in many of these Symbolist writers' tragic fates. I contend that the sequence in which these portraits appear enhances Necropolis' critique. The opening trio of portraits (on Nina Petrovskaia, Valerii Briusov, and Andrei Belyi) compel the reader to repeatedly experience the collapse of those writers' love triangle. Khodasevich thus highlights two things: the degree to which individual Symbolist lives are inevitably " tangled " (in Khodasevich's words) with one another; and the life-creative mandate of reliving one-time, kairotic events. I also argue that Khodasevich's portrait of Maksim Gor'kii (the final piece in Necropolis) represents a counterpoint to the preceding Symbolist lives. Gor'kii's life is just as " tangled " and artificial; however, he recognizes the falsity of his life-creative biography, and embraces the revisionist " ennobling truth " that Khodasevich offers him. Gor'kii's portrait thus throws Necropolis' more famous Symbolist content into relief, and demonstrates Khodasevich's prerogative to write his contemporaries' biographies. Thus, Necropolis' critique of life-creation becomes more meaningful when one reads its constituent pieces as a unified whole.

Биографический словарь существует и имеет смысл прежде всего как справоч ное издание, основной критерий которого -достоверность. Чтобы обеспечить до стоверность всех сведений картотеки «Предварительного списка», их необходимо проверить в соответствии с описанной выше методикой Венгерова и тем самым со блюсти принцип аутентичности авторскому замыслу. Ведь в нашем распоряже нии -весь комплекс Венгеровских картотек, а также собрание автобиографий. Большим подспорьем послужило бы появившееся сравнительно недавно, но уже прочно вошедшее в научный оборот издание «Русская интеллигенция». 37 Разумеется, это долгий и трудный путь. Гораздо быстрее можно осуществить работу иного формата: в виде словника (репертуара имен) представленных в карто теке лиц. В таком случае ошибки фактического характера будут минимизированы, но исследователь лишится содержательной, справочно-биографической части кар тотеки. По сути, подобный формат издания имеет сугубо мемориальное значение.

This article considers the function of tears and crying in the “biographical legend” of Maksim Gor’kii. His Nietzschean sympathies notwithstanding, Gor’kii was widely acknowledged to be a weepy individual, and many memoirists discuss moments wen Gor’kii cried in their presence. Among Gor’kii’s contemporaries, discussions (often politically charged) of these tears tend to focus on whether or not they were genuine. Reddy frames emotives not as in/authentic but rather as “instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions” that seek to foster change in the self and in the world.  This article suggests that Gor’kii used tears and emotional utterances as a means of testing himself, assessing the meaning of (his) art, and forging affective communities with others. References to tears in Gor’kii’s Childhood are used to demonstrate the Zarathustran mettle of his autobiographical protagonist and undo sentimental(ist) tropes about the peasantry in Russian literature, while establishing a Nietzschean bifurcation of undersirable “pity” and heroic “sympathy.” In his sketch “Lev Tolstoi,” tears and emotives emerge as tools for assessing and formulating Gor’kii’s Oedipal relationship with his surrogate father figure. Memoirs about Gor’kii are more varied. Vladislav Khodasevich initiated the memoiristic trend of discussing when and why Gor’kii cried. Khodasevich treats Gor’kii’s tears as authentic (if laughably indiscriminate), but fails to note how much tears and other sentimental gestures multiply around him—a sign of their efficacy in transforming the world.  Nina Berberova, however, observes this tendency and finds much to criticize in it: having elicited Gor’kii’s tears became a ubiquitous and thus meaningless commodity in the Soviet literary process, which is to blame for the narrowly hagiographic image of Gor’kii in Soviet culture—a result for which Gor’kii shoulders some of the blame. On the other hand, Kornei Chukovskii’s memoir of Gor’kii puts the author’s weepiness in a more positive light. His text mirrors (and references) Gor’kii’s own treatment of Tolstoi, and establishes a sentimental genealogy of surrogate “orphanhood” on which Chukovskii could rely during politically dangerous moments in Soviet history.  In sum, the article argues for a more nuanced relationship between seemingly contradictory aspects of Gor’kii’s aggregate personality, and suggests that his tears might be better read not as symptoms of his personal shortcomings but rather as artifacts of interpersonal relations.

My Introduction to "Four Poems' is here: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/693257.
... What we have before us (speaking thematically), is Khodasevich’s own testimony to the shattered certainties of the old world, its shell-shocked survivors stumbling about literally and existentially naked in the ruins of their formerly high culture, in the wake of the Russian Revolution (the poems date to 1918–1919). A poet whose only professed influence was Pushkin, Khodasevich here suddenly “abandons form” (though not really), as though poetic words have failed him, and temporarily adopts a looser, spoken line.

The article describes Khodasevich's copy of Pushkin's Works and Days (1910) by N.O. Lerner with the author's inscription. This copy contains notes to Khoda-sevich's historical and literary works: the plan of Pushkin's biography and the remarks on the book Baron Del'vig (1922) by Iurii Verkhovskii; they are published and commented in the article.

This paper is devoted to the influence of Chodasevič’s poetic technique on Mandel′štam’s poetry. We make an attempt to analyze Mandel′štam’s late Novye stichi (“Ne govori nikomu…”, “Kuda kak strašno nam s toboj…” and “My s toboj na kuchne posidim…”), which are connected to each other through the theme of fear. From the point of view of the poetic technique, these texts are also connected to each other through the literary device of the unexpected twist of meaning, which was associated with Chodasevič’s lyrics in Mandel′štam’s consciousness.

This paper contextualizes Khodasevich's poem 'Slezy Rakhili' ('Rachel's Tears'; 1916) and his article 'Voina i poeziia' ('War and Poetry'; 1938) as his responses to World War I and to the Munich agreement, respectively. I contend that the First World War provided the impetus to Khodasevich for starting to write modernist poetry, in which he explicitly opposed " then " and " now " , a contrast that lies at the core of modernist consciousness. In Khodasevich's case, this acute awareness of a break with previous values had a personal quality, as the birth of his modernist poetics evolved out of a personal crisis in the wake of the suicide of his closest friend, Samuil Kissin, on 22 March 1916. Khodasevich's poem 'Slezy Rakhili' recapitulates macro-and micro-histories, referring to the broader issue of refugees and deportees and to Kissin's tragic end. 'Slezy Rakhili' is also a self-referential war poem as it reflects on current war poetry and questions whether poetry can adequately negotiate modernity in its most extreme form of a modern war. It is a conscious exploration of the contrast between " established things " and the new catastrophic reality of war and postwar Russia and Europe that makes Khodasevich a modernist poet and unites him with other modernist poets, like Vladimir Maiakovskii, despite their personal and literary animosities.

My Introduction to "Four Poems' is here: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/693257.
... What we have before us (speaking thematically), is Khodasevich’s own testimony to the shattered certainties of the old world, its shell-shocked survivors stumbling about literally and existentially naked in the ruins of their formerly high culture, in the wake of the Russian Revolution (the poems date to 1918–1919). A poet whose only professed influence was Pushkin, Khodasevich here suddenly “abandons form” (though not really), as though poetic words have failed him, and temporarily adopts a looser, spoken line.

The leading first generation Russian Symbolist poet Konstatin Balmont (1867-1942) said it best (in 1899):

I love this universe’s squeaking axes,
The vulture’s screeching at night’s ditch,
And this life’s rutted and eroded paths….

(He had began another poem, in 1901: “Above all else, it is necessary to love and kill….”) On the eve of the 20th Century, the First Russian Revolution (1905), First World War (1914-1917,) and the Russian Civil War (1917-1922), for some presaging their own death (Blok and Khlebnikov,) for others exile (Voloshin’s, self-imposed, on the Crimean peninsula, Khodasevich’s, first in Paris, then in Berlin,) in part carrying on the tradition of the French Symbolists and/or responding to rapid modernization, for these poets, beauty is to be found in its opposite, ugliness: the macabre, the maudlin, in mysticism, decadence, decay, destruction and, often, in despair. In different ways (determined in part by each poet’s individual character,) this was true for both the second generation of Russian Symbolists, Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely (both born in 1880) and for the Russian Futurists (Velimir Khlebnikov’s manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” declared the group’s intention to “throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity.”)

The unaligned poets, Maximilian Voloshin and Vladislav Khodasevich, were Neo-Classicists who constructed a haven for themselves from history in eternal things. Voloshin, who wrote mostly in the epic mode and produced brilliant translations of the French Symbolist poets into Russian, retreated into harmony and proportion, into nature and painting. For the jaundiced cynic Khodasevich, the world was a reflection in the eye of a blind man (his poem “The Blind Man”). In a sequence of seminal blank verse poems that date to 1918-1920, a poet whose only professed influence was Pushkin, Khodasevich suddenly “abandoned form,” as though poetic words had failed him, and temporarily adopted a looser, spoken lyric. (One must recall that Russian poetry hasn’t its own Whitman or Pound, so that the latter’s prescriptions are still largely alien to Russian verse and culture: “To use the language of common speech”; “express … individuality of a poet …. better in free verse”; “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not the metronome”.) In these poems, Khodasevich’s bore testimony to the shattered certainties of the old world, its shell-shocked survivors stumbling about literally and existentially naked in the ruins of their formerly high culture in the wake of the Russian Revolution. (One might speculate whether and how he later imbibed the influence of German Expressionism in his Berlin exile.)

The final line of William Butler Yeats’s “Easter, 1916” (like our five, by the way, a “civic poet”) is also still apropos and emblematic for us today (I think): “A terrible beauty is born.”

The article opens with critical remarks on the highly valuable, but abounding in lacunae edition of The Complete Poetical Works of V. Khodasevich, published in 2009 by John Malmstad and Robert Hughes as the first volume of the Collected Works of the poet. It is regrettable that the rich manuscript collection held by The Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (Moscow) has found but little use in the edition. As a result, many subsequently revised or discarded variants preserved in the manuscripts of the poems of 1900s and 1910s as well as a number of sketches still remain unpublished. Another lacuna is the poem In a Polish Church (1918): it was published by Malmstad and Hughes in the supplements to the second volume of their Ardis edition (1990), but strangely disappeared from The Collected Poetical Works. It is an eight-line piece which paints, as could be gathered from the rough notes, a burial service held for a killed soldier and is in itself a curious macaronic experiment, for in each of the two four-line rhyming verses, two lines are in Russian, while the remaining two — fragments of the funeral mass and the Gospels — are in Latin. This article offers a critical edition of these verses together with an attempt of a commentary.

My Introduction to "Four Poems' is here: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/693257.
... What we have before us (speaking thematically), is Khodasevich’s own testimony to the shattered certainties of the old world, its shell-shocked survivors stumbling about literally and existentially naked in the ruins of their formerly high culture, in the wake of the Russian Revolution (the poems date to 1918–1919). A poet whose only professed influence was Pushkin, Khodasevich here suddenly “abandons form” (though not really), as though poetic words have failed him, and temporarily adopts a looser, spoken line.

Arguably "next in line" after the Russian "Big Four," (Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, and Akhmatova), the poet and critic Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939) has been, by comparison, neglected....  The Russian originals of these blank-verse poems constitute the strongest possible argument for a mastery that undermines Robert Frost's argument against "playing with the net down"....  The crowning achievement of every major Russian poet ... has been a dramatic identification of one's highly personal fate with that of Russia entire. That is, as a document, the work succeeds in capturing its historical moment in time.... What we have before us (speaking thematically), is Khodasevich's own testimony to the shattered certainties of the old world, its shell-shocked survivors stumbling about literally and existentially naked in the ruins of their formerly high culture, in the wake of the Russian Revolution (the poems date to 1918–1919). A poet whose only professed influence was Pushkin, Khodasevich here suddenly "abandons form" (though not really), as though poetic words have failed him, and temporarily adopts a looser, spoken line....

http://muse.jhu.edu/article/693258 (NOV. 2nd)
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/693259 (MIDDAY)
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/693260 (ENCOUNTER)
http://muse.jhu.edu/article/693261 (HOUSE)

My Introduction to "Four Poems' is here: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/693257
... What we have before us (speaking thematically), is Khodasevich’s own testimony to the shattered certainties of the old world, its shell-shocked survivors stumbling about literally and existentially naked in the ruins of their formerly high culture, in the wake of the Russian Revolution (the poems date to 1918–1919). A poet whose only professed influence was Pushkin, Khodasevich here suddenly “abandons form” (though not really), as though poetic words have failed him, and temporarily adopts a looser, spoken line.

This article suggests a literary analysis of " Renata's End " , a memoir essay written by V. Khodasevich (1928), one of the key examples for understanding the particular nature of Russian symbolism. It is focused on the interpretation that Khoda-sevich gave to Petrovskaya's life abroad. The author of the memoir looks at the life of his character through the prism of a symbolist life-creation (zhiznetvorcheskaya) model based on the concept of doppelgangers, or doubles. Simultaneously, the author's commentary of Petrovskaya'a life abroad is related directly to his own arduous experience as an émigré. In other words, in the article " Renata's End " is examined as a text where Khodasevich reflects upon his trauma of emigration. In this perspective it is clear that Petrovskaya's biography – in keeping with Symbolism – was perceived by Khodasevich as an alternative version of his own life. Particular attention is paid to the composition of the memoir essay and to its textological history.