Vladislav Khodasevich
Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich
(Russian: Владислав Фелицианович
Ходасевич) (May 16, 1886 - June 14,
1939) was an influential Russian poet
and literary critic who presided over
the Berlin circle of Russian emigre
litterateurs.
Khodasevich was born in Moscow into a
family of a Polish nobleman and a
converted Jewish woman. He left the
Moscow University after understanding
that poetry was his true vocation.
Khodasevich's first collections of
poems, Youth (1907) and A Happy Little
House (1914), were subsequently
discarded by him as immature.
In the year 1917, Khodasevich gained
wider renown by writing a superb short
piece The Way of Corn. This poem is
eponymous with Khodasevich's best known
collection of verse, first published in
1920 and revised in 1922.
Patronized by Maxim Gorky,
Khodasevich and his wife Nina Berberova
(herself a distinguished littérateur,
1901-1993) left Russia for Gorky's villa
in Sorrento, Italy. Later they moved to
Berlin, where they took up with Andrei
Bely. Khodasevich's complicated
relationship with this maverick genius
ended with a scandalous rupture,
followed by the latter's return to
Moscow. In his memoirs, Bely presented
an unforgettable, expressionistic, and
very partial portrayal of Khodasevich.
During his first years in Berlin,
Khodasevich wrote his two last and most
metaphysical collections of verse, Heavy
Lyre (1923) and European Night (1927).
The former contained the most important
rendition of Orpheus theme in the
Russian poetry, the esoteric Ballad.
Khodasevich didn't align himself with
any of the aesthetic movements of the
day, claiming Pushkin to be his only
model. He even penned several scholarly
articles exploring the master-stroke of
the great Russian poet.
In the mid-1920s, Khodasevich
switched his literary activities from
poetry to criticism. He joined Mark
Aldanov and Alexander Kerensky as the
co-editor of the Berlin periodical Days,
in which he would publish his
penetrating analyses of the contemporary
Soviet literature. He also indulged in a
prolonged controversy with the Parisian
emigre pundits, such as Georgy Adamovich
and Georgy Ivanov, on various issues of
literary theory. As an influential
critic, Khodasevich did his best to
encourage the career of Vladimir
Nabokov, who would always cherish his
memory.
Despite a physical infirmity that
gradually took hold of him, Khodasevich
worked relentlessly during the last
decade of his life. Most notably, he
wrote an important biography of Gavrila
Derzhavin (translated into English and
published by University of Wisconsin
Press in 2007) in 1931, which he
attempted to style in the language of
Pushkin's epoch. Several weeks before
Khodasevich's death his brilliant book
of memoirs, Necropolis, was published.
Although severely partisan, the book is
invaluable for its ingenious
characterizations of Maxim Gorky, Andrei
Bely, and Mikhail Gershenzon.
