Khodasevich, Vladislav – short biography. Biography of Khodasevich V.F. (detailed story about his life) Vladislav Khodasevich biography

Khodasevich was born on May 16 (28), 1886 in Moscow. His father, Felician Ivanovich (c. 1834-1911) came from an impoverished Lithuanian noble family and studied at the Academy of Arts. Young Felitsian's attempts to make a living as an artist failed, and he became a photographer, worked in Tula and Moscow, in particular, photographing Leo Tolstoy, and finally opened a photographic supplies store in Moscow. Life path father is accurately described in Khodasevich’s poem “Dactyls”: “My father had six fingers. Bruni taught him to move a fabric stretched tightly with a soft brush... liked to be silent..."

The poet's mother, Sofya Yakovlevna (1846-1911), was the daughter of the famous Jewish writer Yakov Aleksandrovich Brafman (1824-1879), who later converted to Orthodoxy (1858) and devoted his further life to the so-called. "reform of Jewish life" from a Christian perspective. Despite this, Sofya Yakovlevna was given to a Polish family and raised as a devout Catholic. Khodasevich himself was baptized into Catholicism.

The poet's elder brother, Mikhail Felitsianovich (1865-1925), became a famous lawyer, his daughter, artist Valentina Khodasevich (1894-1970), in particular, painted a portrait of her uncle Vladislav. The poet lived in his brother’s house while studying at the university and subsequently, until leaving Russia, maintained warm relations with him.

In Moscow, Khodasevich’s classmate at the Third Moscow Gymnasium was Alexander Yakovlevich Bryusov, brother of the poet Valery Bryusov. Viktor Hoffman studied a year older than Khodasevich, who greatly influenced the poet’s worldview. After graduating from high school, Khodasevich entered Moscow University - first (in 1904) to the Faculty of Law, and in the fall of 1905 he transferred to the Faculty of History and Philology, where he studied intermittently until the spring of 1910, but did not complete the course. Since the mid-1900s, Khodasevich has been in the thick of Moscow literary life: he visits Valery Bryusov and Teleshov’s “Wednesdays”, the Literary and Art Circle, parties at the Zaitsevs, and is published in magazines and newspapers, including “Vesakh” and “Golden Fleece”.

In 1905 he married Marina Erastovna Ryndina. The marriage was unhappy - at the end of 1907 they separated. Some of the poems from Khodasevich’s first book of poems, “Youth” (1908), are dedicated specifically to his relationship with Marina Ryndina. According to the memoirs of Anna Khodasevich (Chulkova), the poet “was a great dandy” during these years; Don-Aminado Khodasevich was remembered “in a long-skirted student uniform, with a black mop of thick, thin hair trimmed at the back of his head, as if smeared with lamp oil, with yellow, without a single bloody, face, with a cold, deliberately indifferent look of intelligent dark eyes, straight, incredibly thin...”

In 1910-11, Khodasevich suffered from lung disease, which was the reason for his trip with friends (M. Osorgin, B. Zaitsev, P. Muratov and his wife Evgenia, etc.) to Venice, survived a love drama with E. Muratova and death with an interval of several months by both parents. From the end of 1911, the poet established a close relationship with the younger sister of the poet Georgy Chulkov, Anna Chulkova-Grentsion (1887-1964): in 1917 they got married.

Khodasevich's next book was published only in 1914 and was called "Happy House". In the six years that passed from writing “Youth” to “Happy House,” Khodasevich became a professional writer, earning a living from translations, reviews, feuilletons, etc. During the First World War, the poet, who received a “white ticket” for health reasons, collaborates in "Russian Gazette", "Morning of Russia", in 1917 - in "New Life". Due to spinal tuberculosis, he spent the summers of 1916 and 1917 in Koktebel with the poet M. Voloshin.

1917-1939

In 1917, Khodasevich enthusiastically accepted February revolution and at first agrees to cooperate with the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution, but quickly comes to the conclusion that “under the Bolsheviks literary activity impossible,” and decides “to write only for myself.” In 1918, together with L. Yaffe, he published the book “Jewish Anthology. Collection of young Jewish poetry"; works as a secretary of the arbitration court, teaches classes in the literary studio of the Moscow Proletkult. In 1918-19 he serves in the repertory section of the theater department of the People's Commissariat for Education, in 1918-20 he heads the Moscow branch of the publishing house "World Literature", founded by M. Gorky. Accepts participation in the organization of a bookstore on shares (1918-19), where famous writers (Osorgin, Muratov, Zaitsev, B. Griftsov, etc.) were personally on duty at the counter. In March 1920, due to hunger and cold, he fell ill with an acute form of furunculosis and in November he moved to Petrograd, where, with the help of M. Gorky, he received rations and two rooms in the writers' dormitory (the famous "House of Arts", about which he would later write the essay "Disk").

In 1920, his collection “The Path of Grain” was published with the title poem of the same name, which contains the following lines about the year 1917: “And you, my country, and you, its people, / You will die and come to life, passing through this year.” At this time, his poems finally became widely known, and he was recognized as one of the first modern poets. However, on June 22, 1922, Khodasevich, together with the poetess Nina Berberova (1901-1993), whom he met in December 1921, left Russia and went to Berlin through Riga. In the same year, his collection “Heavy Lyre” was published.

In 1922-1923, while living in Berlin, he communicated a lot with Andrei Bely, in 1922-1925 (with interruptions) he lived in the family of M. Gorky, whom he highly valued as a person (but not as a writer), recognized his authority, saw in him guarantor of a hypothetical return to his homeland, but he also knew the weak qualities of Gorky’s character, of which he considered the most vulnerable “an extremely confused attitude to truth and lies, which emerged very early and had a decisive impact on both his work and his entire life.” At the same time, Khodasevich and Gorky founded (with the participation of V. Shklovsky) and edited the magazine "Conversation" (six issues were published), where Soviet authors were published.

By 1925, Khodasevich and Berberova realized that returning to the USSR, and most importantly, life there was now impossible for them. Khodasevich published feuilletons about Soviet literature and articles about the activities of the GPU abroad in several publications, after which the Soviet press accused the poet of “White Guardism.” In March 1925, the Soviet embassy in Rome refused to renew Khodasevich’s passport, suggesting that he return to Moscow. He refused, finally becoming an emigrant.

In 1925, Khodasevich and Berberova moved to Paris, the poet was published in the newspapers "Days" and " Last news", from where he leaves at the insistence of P. Milyukov. From February 1927 until the end of his life, he headed the literary department of the newspaper "Vozrozhdenie". In the same year he published "Collected Poems" with a new cycle "European Night". After this, Khodasevich practically stopped writing poetry, devoting attention to criticism, and soon becomes a leading critic of Russian literature abroad. As a critic, he conducts polemics with G. Ivanov and G. Adamovich, in particular, on the tasks of emigration literature, on the purpose of poetry and its crisis. Together with Berberova, he writes reviews. Soviet literature(signed "Gulliver"), supports the poetry group "Crossroads", speaks highly of the work of V. Nabokov, who becomes his friend.

Since 1928, Khodasevich worked on memoirs: they were included in the book "Necropolis. Memoirs" (1939) - about Bryusov, Bely, a close friend of his youth, the poet Muni, Gumilyov, Sologub, Yesenin, Gorky, etc. He writes a biographical book "Derzhavin", but Khodasevich abandoned his intention to write a biography of Pushkin due to deteriorating health (“Now I have given up on this, as well as on poetry. Now I have nothing,” he wrote on July 19, 1932 to Berberova, who left Khodasevich for N. in April. Makeev). In 1933 he married Olga Margolina (1890-1942), who later died in Auschwitz.

Khodasevich's position in exile was difficult, he lived separately, preferred the suburbs to noisy Paris, he was respected as a poet and mentor of poetic youth, but was not loved. Vladislav Khodasevich died on June 14, 1939 in Paris, after surgery. He was buried on the outskirts of Paris in the Boulogne-Biancourt cemetery.

Main features of poetry and personality

Most often the epithet “bilious” was applied to Khodasevich. Maxim Gorky said in private conversations and letters that it was anger that was the basis of his poetic gift. All memoirists write about his yellow face. He died - in a miserable hospital, in a glass cell scorched by the sun, barely covered with sheets - from liver cancer, suffering from incessant pain. Two days before his death, he told his ex-wife, writer Nina Berberova: “Only he is my brother, only he can recognize him as a person who, like me, suffered in this bed.” This remark is all about Khodasevich. But, perhaps, everything that seemed tart, even tough, in him was only his literary weapon, the forged armor with which he defended real literature in continuous battles. There is immeasurably less bile and malice in his soul than suffering and thirst for compassion. In Russia of the 20th century. It is difficult to find a poet who would look at the world so soberly, so squeamishly, with such disgust - and so strictly follow his laws in it, both literary and moral. “I am considered an evil critic,” said Khodasevich. “But recently I made a “calculation of conscience”, as before confession... Yes, I scolded many. But nothing came of those whom I scolded.”

Khodasevich is specific, dry and laconic. It seems that he speaks with effort, reluctantly opening his lips. Perhaps the brevity of Khodasevich’s poems, their dry laconicism, is a direct consequence of unprecedented concentration, dedication and responsibility. Here is one of his most laconic poems:

Forehead -
Chalk.
Bel
Coffin.

Sang
Pop.
Sheaf
Strel -

Day
Holy!
Crypt
Blind.

Shadow -
In hell

But his dryness, bileness and taciturnity remained only external. This is what his close friend Yuri Mandelstam said about Khodasevich:

In public, Khodasevich was often reserved and dry. He liked to keep silent and laugh it off. By his own admission, “I learned to remain silent and joke in response to tragic conversations.” These jokes are usually without a smile. But when he smiled, the smile was contagious. Under the glasses of a “serious writer,” the sly lights of a boy who had misbehaved lit up in his eyes. I also enjoyed other people's jokes. He laughed, shaking internally: his shoulders trembled. He caught the wit on the spot, developed and supplemented it. In general, I always appreciated witticisms and jokes, even unsuccessful ones. “There is no living business without a joke,” he said more than once.

Khodasevich also liked hoaxes. He admired a certain “non-writing writer”, a master at such things. He himself used hoax as a literary device, and after a while he exposed it. So he wrote several poems “on someone else’s behalf” and even invented the forgotten poet of the 18th century Vasily Travnikov, composing all his poems for him, with the exception of one (“O heart, dusty ear”), written by a friend of Khodasevich Muni. (Kissin Samuil Viktorovich 1885-1916) The poet read about Travnikov at a literary evening and published a study about him (1936). Listening to the poems read by Khodasevich, the enlightened society experienced both embarrassment and surprise, because Khodasevich opened the priceless archive of the greatest poet of the 18th century. A number of reviews appeared on Khodasevich’s article. No one could even imagine that there was no Travnikov in the world.

The influence of symbolism on Khodasevich’s lyrics

Not being rooted in Russian soil created a special psychological complex that was felt in Khodasevich’s poetry from a very early time. His early poems suggest that he was trained by Bryusov, who, not recognizing poetic insights, believed that inspiration should be strictly controlled by knowledge of the secrets of the craft, conscious choice and impeccable embodiment of the form, rhythm, and design of the verse. The young man Khodasevich observed the flowering of symbolism, he was brought up on symbolism, grew up under its moods, was illuminated by its light and is associated with its names. It is clear that the young poet could not help but experience his influence, even if in a student-like, imitative way. “Symbolism is true realism. Both Andrei Bely and Blok spoke about the elements they knew. Undoubtedly, if today we have learned to talk about unreal realities, the most real in reality, it is thanks to the symbolists,” he said. Khodasevich’s early poems are imbued with symbolism and are often poisoned:

The wanderer passed, leaning on his staff -

A carriage rides on red wheels -
For some reason I remembered you.
In the evening the lamp will be lit in the corridor -
I will definitely remember you.
Whatever happens on land, at sea
Or in the sky - I’ll remember you.

On this path of repeating banalities and romantic poses, glorifying femme fatales and hellish passions, Khodasevich, with his natural bile and causticism, sometimes did not avoid cliches characteristic of low-flying poetry:

And again the beat of hearts is steady;
Nodding, the short-lived flame disappeared,
And I realized that I was a dead man,
And you are just my tombstone.

But still, Khodasevich always stood apart. In the autobiographical fragment “Infancy” of 1933, he attaches particular importance to the fact that he was “late” for the flowering of symbolism, “late to be born,” while the aesthetics of Acmeism remained distant from him, and futurism was decidedly unacceptable. Indeed, to be born in Russia at that time six years later than Blok meant entering a different literary era.

Collection "Youth"

Khodasevich published his first book, “Youth,” in 1908 at the Grif publishing house. This is what he said about it later: “The first review of my book stuck with me for the rest of my life. I learned it word for word. It began like this: “There is such a vile bird, the vulture. She feeds on carrion. Recently, this pretty bird hatched a new rotten egg." Although, on the whole, the book was received well.

In the best poems of this book, he declared himself a poet of precise, concrete words. Subsequently, the Acmeists treated the poetic word in approximately the same way, but their characteristic intoxication with joy, masculinity, and love is completely alien to Khodasevich. He remained aloof from all literary trends and trends, on his own, “not a fighter of all camps.” Khodasevich, together with M.I. Tsvetaeva, as he wrote, “having left symbolism, they did not join anything or anyone, they remained forever alone, “wild.” Literary classifiers and compilers of anthologies don’t know where to put us.”

The feeling of hopeless alienation in the world and not belonging to any camp is expressed more clearly in Khodasevich than in any of his contemporaries. He was not shielded from reality by any group philosophy, was not fenced off by literary manifestos, and looked at the world soberly, coldly and sternly. And that is why the feeling of orphanhood, loneliness, and rejection possessed him already in 1907:

Nomadic meager children are evil,
We warm our hands by the fire...
The desert is silent. Into the distance without a sound
The prickly wind drives away the ashes, -
And our songs are wickedly boring
An ulcer curls on the lips.

On the whole, however, "Youth" is a collection of an immature poet. The future Khodasevich can be discerned here only by the precision of words and expressions and skepticism about everything.

Collection "Happy House"

There is much more of the real Khodasevich - at least of his poetic intonation - in the collection "Happy House". The torn, chopped intonation that Khodasevich begins to use in his poems suggests the open disgust with which he throws these words in the face of time. Hence the somewhat ironic, bilious sound of his verse.

O boredom, skinny dog crying to the moon!
You are the wind of time whistling in my ears!

The poet on earth is like the singer Orpheus, who returned to the desolate world from the kingdom of the dead, where he lost his beloved Eurydice forever:

And now I sing, I sing with my last strength
That life has been fully experienced,
That Eurydice is not there, that my dear friend is not there,
And the stupid tiger caresses me -

So in 1910, in “The Return of Orpheus,” Khodasevich declared his longing for harmony in a completely disharmonious world, which is devoid of any hope for happiness and harmony. In the verses of this collection one can hear the longing for the all-understanding, all-seeing God, for whom Orpheus sings, but he has no hope that his earthly voice will be heard.

In "Happy House" Khodasevich paid a generous tribute to stylization (which is generally characteristic of silver age). There are echoes of Greek and Roman poetry, and stanzas that make you remember the romanticism of the 19th century. But these stylizations are full of concrete, visible images and details. Thus, the opening poem of the section with the characteristic title “Star over the Palm Tree” from 1916 ends with the piercing lines:

Oh, I love roses with a lying heart
Only the one that burns with jealous fire,
What are the teeth with a blue tint?
Sly Carmen bit!

Next to the bookish, “dreamt” world, there is another, no less dear to Khodasevich’s heart - the world of memories of his childhood. “Happy House” ends with the poem “Paradise” - about longing for a children’s, toy, Christmas paradise, where a happy child saw a “golden-winged angel” in a dream.

Sentimentality, coupled with bile and proud detachment from the world, became the hallmark of Khodasevich’s poetry and determined its originality in the first post-revolutionary years.

By this time, Khodasevich had two idols. He said: “There was Pushkin and there was Blok. Everything else is in between!”

Collection "The Path of Grain"

Starting with the collection “The Path of the Grain,” the main theme of his poetry will be overcoming disharmony, which is essentially irremovable. He introduces the prose of life into poetry - not expressive details, but the flow of life, overtaking and overwhelming the poet, giving birth in him, along with constant thoughts of death, a feeling of “bitter death.” The call for the transformation of this stream is obviously utopian in some poems ("Smolensk Market"), in others the poet succeeds in the "miracle of transformation" ("Noon"), but turns out to be a short and temporary loss from "this life." “The Path of Grain” was written in the revolutionary years of 1917-1918. Khodasevich said: “Poetry is not a document of the era, but only that poetry that is close to the era is alive.” Blok understood this and not without reason called for “listening to the music of the revolution.” It’s not about the revolution, but about the music of the time.” Khodasevich also wrote about his era. The poet’s early premonitions of the upheavals awaiting Russia prompted him to perceive the revolution with optimism. He saw in it an opportunity to renew the people’s and creative life, he believed in its humanity and anti-philistine pathos, but sobering came very quickly. Khodasevich understood how the revolution had tormented, how it extinguished real Russian literature. But he did not belong to those who were “frightened” of the revolution, but he was not “afraid” of it. Her collection “The Way of the Grain” expressed his belief in the resurrection of Russia after revolutionary devastation in the same way as a grain, dying in the soil, is resurrected in the ear:

The sower walks along even furrows.
His father and grandfather followed the same paths.
The grain sparkles with gold in his hand,
But it must fall into the black ground.
And where the blind worm makes its way,
It will die and sprout at the appointed time.
So my soul follows the path of grain:
Having descended into darkness, she will die - and she will come to life.
And you, my country, and you, its people,
You will die and come back to life, passing through this year, -
Because only one wisdom has been given to us:
All living things must follow the path of grain.

Here Khodasevich is already a mature master: he has developed his own poetic language, and his view of things, fearlessly accurate and painfully sentimental, allows him to talk about the most subtle matters, while remaining ironic and restrained. Almost all the poems in this collection are constructed in the same way: a deliberately mundanely described episode - and a sudden, sharp ending that shifts the meaning. Thus, in the poem “Monkey,” an endlessly long description of a stuffy summer day, an organ grinder and a sad monkey suddenly resolves with the line: “On that day war was declared.” This is typical of Khodasevich - with one laconic, almost telegraphic line, he can turn inside out or transform the entire poem. As soon as the lyrical hero was visited by a feeling of unity and brotherhood of all life in the world, immediately, contrary to the feeling of love and compassion, the most inhuman thing that can happen begins, and insurmountable discord and disharmony are established in that world, which just for a moment seemed like a “choir of luminaries” and the waves of the sea, the winds and the spheres."

The same feeling of the collapse of harmony, the search for a new meaning and its impossibility (in times of historical rifts, harmony seems lost forever) becomes the theme of the largest and, perhaps, strangest poem in the collection - “November 2” (1918). This describes the first day after the October battles of 1917 in Moscow. It talks about how the city hid. The author talks about two minor incidents: returning from acquaintances to whom he went to find out if they were alive, he sees in the semi-basement window a carpenter, in accordance with the spirit of the new era, painting a newly made coffin with red paint - apparently, for one of the fallen fighters for universal happiness. The author gazes intently at the boy, “about four years old,” who sits “among Moscow, suffering, torn to pieces and fallen,” and smiles to himself, to his secret thought, quietly ripening under his eyebrowless forehead. The only one who looks happy and peaceful in Moscow in 1917 is a four-year-old boy. Only children with their naivety and fanatics with their unreasoning ideology can be cheerful these days. “For the first time in my life,” says Khodasevich, “neither “Mozart and Salieri” nor “Gypsies” quenched my thirst that day." A terrible confession, especially from the lips of Khodasevich, who always idolized Pushkin. Even the all-encompassing Pushkin does not help to contain the shock modern times. Khodasevich’s sober mind at times falls into dullness, into numbness, mechanically records events, but the soul does not respond to them in any way. This is the poem “The Old Woman” of 1919:

A light corpse, numb,
Covered with a white sheet,
In the same sleigh, without a coffin,
The policeman will take you away
Pushing people aside.
Speechless and cold-blooded
There will be one, and a couple of logs,
What did she bring to her house?
We will burn it in our oven.

In this poem, the hero is already completely inscribed in the new reality: the “policeman” does not cause fear in him, and his own readiness to rob a corpse does not cause burning shame. Khodasevich's soul cries over the bloody collapse of the familiar world, over the destruction of morality and culture. But since the poet follows the “path of the grain,” that is, he accepts life as something independent of his desires, tries to see a higher meaning in everything, he does not protest or renounce God. He had not had the most flattering opinion of the world before. And he believes that in the storm that has broken out there must be a higher meaning, which Blok was also looking for when he called for “listening to the music of the revolution.” It is no coincidence that Khodasevich opens his next collection with the poem “Music” from 1920:

And the music seems to come from above.
Cello... and harps, maybe...
...And the sky

Just as tall and just as tall
Feathered angels shine in it.

Khodasevich’s hero hears this music “very clearly” when he is chopping wood (an activity so prosaic, so natural for those years, that one could hear some special music in it only after seeing in this chopping wood, in devastation and disaster some mysterious providence of God and incomprehensible logic). For symbolists, the personification of such craft has always been music, which does not explain anything logically, but overcomes chaos, and sometimes reveals meaning and proportionality in chaos itself. Feathered angels shining in the frosty sky - this is the truth of suffering and courage that was revealed to Khodasevich, and from the height of this Divine music he no longer despises, but pities everyone who does not hear it.

Collection "Heavy Lyre"

During this period, Khodasevich's poetry began to increasingly acquire the character of classicism. Khodasevich's style is connected with Pushkin's style. But his classicism is of a secondary order, for it was not born in Pushkin’s era and not in Pushkin’s world. Khodasevich came out of symbolism. And he made his way to classicism through all the symbolic fogs, not to mention the Soviet era. All this explains his technical predilection for “prose in life and in poetry,” as a counterbalance to the instability and inaccuracy of the poetic “beauties” of those times.

And chasing every verse through prose,
Dislocating every line,
I grafted a classic rose
To the Soviet wildcat.

At the same time, lyricism, both obvious and hidden, begins to disappear from his poetry. Khodasevich did not want to give him power over himself, over the verse. He preferred another, “heavy gift” to the light breath of lyricism.

And someone heavy lyre
He gives it to my hands through the wind.
And there is no plaster sky,
And the sun at sixteen candles.
On smooth black rocks
Orpheus rests his feet.

The image of the soul appears in this collection. Khodasevich’s path lies not through “soulfulness,” but through destruction, overcoming and transformation. The soul, the “bright Psyche,” for him is outside of true existence; in order to get closer to it, it must become a “spirit,” give birth to a spirit within itself. The difference between the psychological and ontological principles is rarely more noticeable than in Khodasevich’s poems. The soul itself is not capable of captivating and bewitching him.

And how can I not love myself,
The vessel is fragile, ugly,
But precious and happy
By what it contains – you?

But the fact of the matter is that the “simple soul” does not even understand why the poet loves her.

And my misfortune doesn’t hurt her,
And she does not understand the groan of my passions.

She is limited to herself, alien to the world and even to her owner. True, the spirit sleeps in her, but it has not yet been born. The poet feels within himself the presence of this principle, connecting him with life and with the world.

The human poet is exhausted together with Psyche in anticipation of grace, but grace is not given for free. In this endeavor, in this struggle, man is condemned to death.

Until all the blood comes out of the pores,
Until your earthly eyes cry out -
You won't become a spirit...

With rare exceptions, death - the transformation of Psyche - is also the real death of a person. Khodasevich in some verses even calls her as liberation, and is even ready to “stab” another to help him. And he sends a wish to the girl from a Berlin tavern - “to get caught by a villain in a deserted grove in the evening.” At other moments, death does not seem to him as a way out, it is only a new and most severe test, the final temptation. But he also accepts this temptation without seeking salvation. Poetry leads to death and only through death to true birth. This is the ontological truth for Khodasevich. Overcoming reality becomes the main theme of the collection "Heavy Lyre".

Step over, jump over,
Fly over whatever you want -
But break free: like a stone from a sling,
A star that fell into the night...
Lost it yourself - now look...
God knows what you're muttering to yourself,
Looking for pince-nez or keys.

The above seven lines are full of complex meanings. Here is a mockery of the everyday, new role of the poet: he is no longer Orpheus, but rather a city madman, muttering something under his breath at a locked door. But “I lost it myself - now look for it...” - the line is clearly not only about keys or pince-nez in literally. Finding the key to a new world, that is, understanding a new reality, is possible only by breaking out of it, overcoming its gravity.

The mature Khodasevich looks at things as if from above, at least from the outside. A hopeless stranger in this world, he does not want to fit into it. In the poem “In a Meeting” of 1921, the lyrical hero tries to fall asleep in order to again see in Petrovsky-Razumovsky (where the poet spent his childhood) “steam over the mirror of the pond” - at least in a dream to meet the bygone world.

But Khodasevich’s poems of the late 10s and early 20s are not just an escape from reality, but a direct denial of it. The conflict between life and existence, spirit and flesh takes on an unprecedented severity. As in the poem “From the Diary” of 1921:

Every sound torments my ears
And every ray is unbearable to the eyes.
The spirit began to erupt,
Like a tooth from under swollen gums.
It will cut through and throw it away.
Worn out shell
Thousand-eyed - will disappear into the night,
Not on this gray night.
And I'll stay here lying -
A banker stabbed to death -
Press the wound with your hands,
Scream and fight in your world.

Khodasevich sees things as they are. Without any illusions. It is no coincidence that the most merciless self-portrait in Russian poetry belongs to him:

Me, me, me. What a wild word!
Is that guy over there really me?
Did mom love someone like that?
Yellow-gray, half-gray
And all-knowing, like a snake?

The natural change of images - a pure child, an ardent young man and today's "yellow-gray, half-gray" - for Khodasevich is a consequence of tragic splits and uncompensated spiritual waste, the longing for integrity sounds in this poem as nowhere else in his poetry. “Everything that I so tenderly hate and love so sarcastically” is an important motive of “The Heavy Lyre.” But "heaviness" is not the only thing keyword this book. There is also Mozart’s lightness of short poems, with plastic precision, the only stroke giving pictures of post-revolutionary, transparent and ghostly, collapsing Petersburg. The city is deserted. But the secret springs of the world are visible, the secret meaning of existence and, most importantly, Divine music is heard.

Oh, inert, beggarly poverty
My hopeless life!
Who should I tell how sorry I am?
Yourself and all these things?
And I start to swing
Hugging your knees,
And suddenly I start in poetry
Talk to yourself in oblivion.
Incoherent, passionate speeches!
You can't understand anything about them
But the sounds are truer than the meaning,
And the word is most powerful.
And music, music, music
Is woven into my song,
And narrow, narrow, narrow
A blade pierces me.

Sounds are truer than meaning - this is the manifesto of Khodasevich’s late poetry, which, however, never ceases to be rationally clear and almost always plot-driven. Nothing dark, fortune-telling, arbitrary. But Khodasevich is sure that the music of poetry is more important, more significant, and finally, more reliable than its crude one-dimensional meaning. Khodasevich’s poems during this period are orchestrated very richly, they have a lot of air, many vowels, there is a clear and light rhythm - this is how a person who “slipped into God’s abyss” can talk about himself and the world. The stylistic beauties so beloved by symbolists are not here, the words are very simple, but what a musical, what a clear and light sound! Still true to the classical tradition, Khodasevich boldly introduces neologisms and jargon into poetry. How calmly the poet speaks about unbearable, unthinkable things - and, in spite of everything, what joy there is in these lines:

Neither living nor singing is almost worthless:
We live in fragile rudeness.
The tailor sews, the carpenter builds:
The seams will fall apart and the house will collapse.
And only sometimes through this decay
Suddenly I hear with emotion
It contains a beating
A completely different existence.
So, spending life's boredom,
Lovingly a woman puts
Your excited hand
On a heavily swollen belly.

The image of a pregnant woman (as well as the image of a nurse) is often found in Khodasevich’s poetry. This is not only a symbol of a living and natural connection with the roots, but also a symbolic image of an era that bears the future. “And the sky is pregnant with the future,” Mandelstam wrote around the same time. The worst thing is that the “pregnancy” of the first twenty turbulent years of the terrible century was resolved not by a bright future, but by a bloody catastrophe, followed by the years of the NEP - the prosperity of traders. Khodasevich realized this before many:

Enough! No need for beauty!
The vile world is not worth singing...
And there is no need for a revolution!
Her scattered army
One is crowned with an award,
One freedom - to trade.
In vain he prophesies in the square
Harmony hungry son:
He doesn't want good news
Prosperous citizen..."

Then Khodasevich draws a conclusion about his fundamental disagreement with the mob:

I love people, I love nature,
But I don't like to go for walks
And I know for sure that the people
My creations cannot be understood.

However, Khodasevich considered only those who strive to “understand poetry” and manage it, those who arrogate to themselves the right to speak on behalf of the people, those who want to rule music in their name, as rabble. Actually, he perceived the people differently - with love and gratitude.

Cycle "European Night"

Despite this, in the emigrant environment Khodasevich for a long time I felt as much of a stranger as I did in my abandoned homeland. This is what he said about emigrant poetry: “The current situation of poetry is difficult. Of course, poetry is delight. Here we have little delight, because there is no action. Young emigrant poetry keeps complaining about boredom - this is because it is not at home, living in a foreign place, she found herself outside of space - and therefore outside of time. The task of emigrant poetry is very thankless, because the Bolsheviks seem to be striving to destroy the spiritual system inherent in Russian literature. The task of emigrant literature is to preserve this system. literary, as well as political. Demand that emigrant poets write poetry in political topics, - of course, nonsense. But it must demand that their creativity has Russian face. Non-Russian poetry does not and will not have a place either in Russian literature or in the future Russia itself. The role of emigrant literature is to connect the past with the future. It is necessary for our poetic past to become our present and - in a new form - our future."

The theme of the “twilight of Europe,” which survived the collapse of a civilization that had been created over centuries, and after this the aggression of vulgarity and impersonality, dominates Khodasevich’s poetry of the emigrant period. The poems of “European Night” are painted in gloomy tones; they are dominated not even by prose, but by the bottom and underground of life. Khodasevich is trying to penetrate into “someone else’s life,” life “ little man"Europe, but a blank wall of misunderstanding, symbolizing not the social, but the general meaninglessness of life, rejects the poet. "European Night" is the experience of breathing in an airless space, poems written almost without regard for the audience, for response, for co-creation. This was for Khodasevich It is all the more unbearable that he left Russia as a recognized poet, and recognition came to him belatedly, just on the eve of his departure. He left at the zenith of his fame, firmly hoping to return, but after a year he realized that there would be nowhere to return (this feeling is best formulated. Marina Tsvetaeva: “...is it possible to return to a house that has been razed?”). However, even before leaving, he wrote:

And I take my Russia with me
I carry it in a travel bag

(we were talking about eight volumes of Pushkin). Perhaps the exile for Khodasevich was not as tragic as for others - because he was a stranger, and youth is equally irrevocable both in Russia and in Europe. But in hungry and impoverished Russia - in its vibrant literary environment - there was music. There was no music here. Night reigned in Europe. The vulgarity, disappointment and despair were even more obvious. If in Russia it might have seemed for some time that “the sky is pregnant with the future,” then in Europe there was no hope - complete darkness, in which speech sounds without response, for itself.

Khodasevich’s muse sympathizes with all the unfortunate, disadvantaged, doomed - he himself is one of them. There are more and more cripples and beggars in his poems. Although in the most important way they are not too different from prosperous and prosperous Europeans: everyone here is doomed, everything is doomed. What difference does it make whether the injury that struck others was spiritual or physical?

It's impossible for me to be myself
I want to go crazy
When with a pregnant wife
The armless man goes to the cinema.
Why your invisible age
Sucks in such inequality
A good-natured, meek man
With an empty sleeve?

There is much more sympathy in these lines than hatred.

Feeling guilty before the whole world, Khodasevich’s lyrical hero does not for a minute give up his gift, which elevates and humiliates him at the same time.

Happy is he who falls headfirst:
The world for him, at least for a moment, is different.

The poet pays for his “soaring” in the same way as a suicide who throws himself head down from a window - with his life.

In 1923, Khodasevich wrote the poem “I get up relaxed from bed...” - about how “prickly radio rays” fly through his consciousness all night; in the chaos of dark visions he catches a harbinger of death, a pan-European, and perhaps a world catastrophe. But those who are threatened by this catastrophe themselves do not know what a dead end their lives are heading towards:

Oh, if only you knew for yourself
Europe's dark sons,
What other rays are you?
Imperceptibly pierced!

1. First poetic experiments.
2. The main features of Khodasevich’s lyrics.
3. “The Path of Grain” and “Heavy Lyre.”
4. Creativity in emigration.

“The word is stronger than anything,” says Khodasevich, and for him it is a sacred means of liberation: a miracle of inspiration for Khodasevich is, first of all, a miracle of spiritual growth.
S. Ya. Parnok

V. F. Khodasevich was born in Moscow in 1886, in the family of an artist and photographer from impoverished Lithuanian nobles, who was lucky enough to capture L. N. Tolstoy himself for history. Khodasevich’s mother was the daughter of the famous writer Ya. A. Brafman. The family consisted of five brothers and two sisters. The boy began writing poetry at an early age - he was six years old. He soon realized that this was his calling. They remember a funny incident that happened to the poet in childhood - when he was seven years old, visiting his uncle in the summer at his dacha, he learned that the poet A. N. Maikov lived nearby. Khodasevich went to him, met the poet and read his poems with expression. Since then he has been proudly. considered himself an acquaintance of the poet Maykov.

The youngest and favorite child, he learned to read early. He received his education at the Moscow gymnasium, where he was friends with V. Ya. Bryusov’s brother, Alexander. Then he studied at the Faculty of Law of Moscow University, at the Faculty of History and Philology, but did not graduate from the university. At the age of eighteen, Khodasevich married M. E. Ryndina, a spectacular girl from rich family. In 1905, his poems were first published, and soon a collection of poems, “Youth” (1908), was published, in which his feelings for his wife were poured out. Judging by the poems, this love could not be called mutual.

My days have stretched out
Without love, without strength, without complaint...
If I were to cry, there would be no tears.
My days have stretched out.
Stunned by the silence
I hear flying mice bats,
I hear the rustling of spider legs
Behind my back.

Already in this collection the main properties of Khodasevich’s poetry were visible - accuracy, clarity, purity of language, classical traditional poetic form. Critics singled him out from the mass of poets and concluded that much can be expected from him in the future. His circle of contacts at that time included V. Ya. Bryusov, A. Bely, Ellis. Having divorced his wife at the end of 1907, she married S.K. Makovsky, publisher of the Apollo magazine, - Khodasevich settled in furnished rooms. In 1910, he went to Venice, worked there, giving tours of museums and churches, and returned with new poems. Many of them a little later, in 1914, were included in the second collection of poems, “Happy House.”

Look how empty and silent our night is:
Autumn stars pensive network
Calls to live calmly and die wisely,
It's easy to get off the last cliff
To the gentle valley.

The poet's first two collections are usually classified as decadent lyric poetry; they were noted for special attention by the Acmeists. Khodasevich considered A. A. Blok his main teacher. Blok and Bely determined his literary path, as well as the fates of many other young poets. Khodasevich's early collections clearly show the influence of Blok's poems about the Beautiful Lady.

The poet meets his second life partner, Anna, the ex-wife of his friend A. Ya. Bryusov. At the same time, the first work about A.S. Pushkin was published - “Pushkin’s First Step” - the beginning of his Pushkiniana, the theme of his entire life. “He loved Pushkin as a living person, and every line, every word and the slightest experience of Pushkin gave him great pleasure,” recalled his wife A.I. Chulkova. Vladislav Khodasevich becomes a professional writer. His literary works were published one after another - “Russian Poetry” (1914), “Igor Severyanin and Futurism” (1914), “Deceived Hopes” (1915), “Pushkin’s Petersburg Stories” (1915), “Derzhavin” (1916), “On New Poems” (1916), “On “Gabriiliad”” (1918).

Khodasevich works at the Polza publishing house, translating Polish authors - A. Mickiewicz, V. Reymont, S. Przybyszewski. He attends Bryusov’s literary circle, where symbolists gather, and also attends “Wednesdays” of the realistic movement at N.D. Teleshev’s. Showing interest in many literary groups, Khodasevich always kept to himself. The poet publishes a lot in the anthology of the Musaget publishing house, in the magazines “Russian Thought”, “Apollo”, “Northern Notes”, “Grif”.

Khodasevich accepted the revolution - both the February and the October - with joy, joined the Writers' Union, participated in revolutionary printed publications, and collaborated with the Bolsheviks, despite the disapproval of many colleagues. Soon the poet saw the light and changed his attitude towards the new system to the opposite; he had no illusions. He is overcome by misanthropy and wants to escape from reality, but where? The year 1920 was marked for Vladislav Felitsianovich with the publication of the book “The Path of Grain,” the third collection of poems dedicated to the memory of S. V. Kissin, the tragically deceased husband of Khodasevich’s sister, his only close friend. This book put him on a par with his well-known contemporaries. the main idea The collection is contained in the poem of the same name: Russia will die and rise again in the same way as grain sprouts in the ground.

The sower walks along even furrows.
His father and grandfather followed the same paths.
The grain sparkles with gold in his hand,
But it must fall into the black ground.
And where the blind worm makes its way,
It will die and sprout at the desired time.
So my soul follows the path of grain:
Having descended into darkness, she will die - and she will come to life.
And you, my country, and you, its people,
You will die and come back to life, passing through this year,
Because only one wisdom has been given to us:
All living things must follow the path of grain.

The poet expressed the entire pathos of his work in four lines:

Fly, my little boat, fly,
Leaning and not looking for salvation.
He's not on that path
Where does inspiration take you...

Researchers consider this post-revolutionary collection to be the most important in Khodasevich’s work. In it, the poet, remaining “behind the text,” evaluates what is happening from the point of view of history, rising above time, reflecting on the patterns of development of society, analyzing social and moral problems.

The image of home runs through the poet’s entire work, from the first collections to the theme of homelessness and loneliness in emigration. The hearth house from “Happy Little House”, the family house in the collection “The Path of Grain” later turns into a “card house” in “The Heavy Lyre”. The fragility of the surrounding world and destruction are the leitmotif of the poet’s work. “Heavy Lyre” (1922) is the last collection of poems by Khodasevich, published before emigration. The author called this book the final poetic work. It is dominated by the theme of the collapse of illusory happiness, the fragility of the world as a result of human intervention. The next change of guidelines and values leads to destruction. Once again we notice that Khodasevich had no illusions towards people and looked at life skeptically.

With his third wife N.N. Berberova, Khodasevich emigrated to Latvia, Germany, and Italy. His third marriage lasted about ten years. Abroad, Khodasevich, under the tutelage of M. Gorky, edits the magazine “Conversation”, in 1925 he permanently moved to Paris, works as a prose writer, memoirist, literary critic (writes the books “Derzhavin. Biography”, “About Pushkin”. “Necropolis. Memoirs”, “ Bloody Food”, “Literature in Exile”, “Pan Tadeusz”. These are the best fictional biographies. Political Views Khodasevich since 1925 - on the side of the White emigrants. He criticizes the Soviet system and Western philistinism. Khodasevich’s life in exile, like that of his other compatriots, was lived in poverty. He is sick, but does not stop working hard. Thanks to Khodasevich's memoirs and criticism, we now learn more about his famous contemporaries - M. Gorky, A. A. Blok, A. Bel, N. S. Gumilev, V. Ya. Bryusov.

In 1926, he stopped publishing in the Latest News newspaper. A year later, Khodasevich released the series “European Night”. Gradually, poems disappear from his work, being replaced by criticism and polemics with G. V. Adamovich in emigrant publications. In the 30s, Khodasevich was overtaken by disappointment in everything - in literature, political life emigration, to the USSR - he refuses to return to his homeland. In exile he marries again. Khodasevich's fourth wife, a Jewish woman, died in a concentration camp. He himself died before the war began, in 1939, in a Paris hospital for the poor, after a serious operation. In the year of his death, his “Necropolis” was published - the best, according to critics, memoirs in Russian literature.

Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich(May 16 (28), 1886, Moscow - June 14, 1939, Paris) - Russian poet. He also acted as a critic, memoirist and literary historian (Pushkin scholar).

Khodasevich was born into the family of an artist-photographer. The poet's mother, Sofya Yakovlevna, was the daughter of the famous Jewish writer Ya. A. Brafman. Khodasevich felt his calling early, choosing literature as the main occupation of his life. Already at the age of six he composed his first poems.

He studied at the Third Moscow Gymnasium, where his classmate was the brother of the poet Valery Bryusov, and in the senior class Viktor Hoffman studied, who greatly influenced Khodasevich’s worldview. After graduating from high school in 1904, Khodasevich entered first the Faculty of Law at Moscow University, then the Faculty of History and Philology. Khodasevich began publishing in 1905, at the same time he married Marina Erastovna Ryndina. The marriage was unhappy - at the end of 1907 they separated. Some of the poems from Khodasevich’s first book of poems, “Youth” (1908), are dedicated specifically to his relationship with Marina Ryndina.

The collections “Youth” (1908) and the later “Happy House” (1914) were well received by readers and critics. The clarity of the verse, the purity of the language, the accuracy in the transmission of thought distinguished Khodasevich from a number of new poetic names and determined his special place in Russian poetry. In the six years that passed from writing “Youth” to “Happy House,” Khodasevich became a professional writer, earning a living from translations, reviews, feuilletons, etc. In 1914, Khodasevich’s first work about Pushkin (“Pushkin’s First Step”) was published, which opened a whole series of his “Pushkiniana”. Khodasevich studied the life and work of the great Russian poet all his life.

In 1917, Khodasevich enthusiastically accepted the February Revolution and initially agreed to cooperate with the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. In 1920, Khodasevich’s third collection “The Path of Grain” was published with the title poem of the same name, which contains the following lines about the year 1917: “And you, my country, and you, its people, // You will die and come to life, having passed through this year " This book put Khodasevich among the most significant poets of his time.

In 1922, a collection of Khodasevich’s poems, “Heavy Lyre,” was published, which became the last one published in Russia. On June 22 of the same year, Khodasevich, together with the poetess Nina Berberova, left Russia and arrived in Berlin through Riga. Abroad, Khodasevich collaborated for some time with M. Gorky, who invited him to jointly edit the magazine Beseda.

In 1925, Khodasevich and Berberova moved to Paris, where two years later Khodasevich released a cycle of poems, “European Night.” After this, the poet writes poetry less and less, paying more attention to criticism. He lives hard, is in need, gets sick a lot, but works hard and fruitfully. He increasingly appears as a prose writer, literary critic and memoirist: “Derzhavin. Biography" (1931), "About Pushkin" and "Necropolis. Memories" (1939).

IN last years Khodasevich published reviews, articles, and essays about outstanding contemporaries in newspapers and magazines - Gorky, Blok, Bely and many others. He translated poetry and prose of Polish, French, Armenian and other writers.

Bibliography

collection "Youth". The first book of poems. - M.: Grif Publishing House, 1908. - ??? With.
collection "Happy House". Second book of poems. - M.: Alcyona, 1914. - 78 p.
collection “From Jewish Poets”, 1918. - ??? With.
collection “The Path of Grain”, 1920. - ??? With.
collection “Happy House. Poetry". - St. Petersburg - Berlin: Z. I. Grzhebin Publishing House, 1922. - ??? With.
collection "Heavy Lyre". The fourth book of poems 1920-1922. - M., Petrograd: State Publishing House. - 1922. - 60 p.
cycle “European Night”, 1927. - ??? With.
biography “Derzhavin”, 1931. - ??? With.
collection of articles “About Pushkin”, 1937. - ??? With.
book of memoirs “Necropolis”, 1939. - ??? With.

Khodasevich V. F. Derzhavin. - M.: Book, 1988. - 384 p. (Writers about writers) Circulation 200,000 copies.
Khodasevich V.F. Collection of poems. - M.: Young Guard, 1989. - 183 p.
Khodasevich V. F. Poems. - L.: Sov. writer, 1989. - 464 p. (Poet's Library, Large Series, Third Edition) Circulation 100,000 copies.
Khodasevich V. F. Poems. - L.: Art, 1989. - 95 p.
Khodasevich V. F. Poems. (Library of the magazine "Poligraphy") - M.: Children's Book, 1990. - 126 p.
Khodasevich V.F. Poems / Comp., intro. art., approx. V. P. Zverev. - M.: Young Guard, 1991. - 223 p.
Khodasevich V. F. Necropolis. - M.: Sov. writer - Olympus, 1991. - 192 p. Circulation 100,000 copies.
Khodasevich V.F. The oscillating tripod: Favorites. - M.: Soviet writer, 1991. - ??? With.
Khodasevich V.F. Collection of poems. - M.: Centurion Interprax, 1992. - 448 p.
Khodasevich V.F. Along the boulevards. Poems 1904-1937 Literary and historical articles. (From the poetic heritage.) / Editor-compiler I. A. Kuramzhina. - M.: Center-100, 1996. - 288 p.
Khodasevich V.F. Collected works in 4 volumes - M.: Soglasie, 1996-1997.
Khodasevich V. F. Necropolis. - M.: Vagrius, 2001. - 244 p.
Khodasevich V.F. Poems / Compiled, prepared. text, intro. Art., note. J. Malmstad. - St. Petersburg: Academic Project, 2001. - 272 p. (New Poet's Library, Small Series)
Khodasevich V.F. Poems / Comp. V. Zverev. - M.: Belfry-MG, 2003. - 320 p.
Khodasevich V. F. Poems. - M.: Profizdat, 2007. - 208 p.

Khodasevich Vladislav Felitsianovich

Khodasevich Vladislav Felitsianovich (1886 - 1939), poet, prose writer, literary critic.

Born on May 16 (28 NS) in Moscow in the family of an artist. He felt his calling very early, choosing literature as the main occupation of his life. Already at the age of six he composed his first poems.

In 1904 he graduated from high school and entered first the Faculty of Law at Moscow University, then the Faculty of History and Philology. He began publishing in 1905. The first books of poems - “Youth” (1908) and “Happy House” (1914) - were well received by readers and critics. The clarity of the verse, the purity of the language, the accuracy in the transmission of thought distinguished Khodasevich from a number of new poetic names and determined his special place in Russian poetry.

In 1920, Khodasevich’s third book of poems, “The Path of Grain,” appeared, putting the author among the most significant poets of his time. Khodasevich’s fourth book of poems, “Heavy Lyre,” was the last to be published in Russia.

Having gone abroad in 1922, the poet was for some time under the influence of M. Gorky, who involved him in co-editing the magazine “Conversation”. In 1925 Khodasevich left for Paris, where he remained for the rest of his life. He lives hard, is in need, gets sick a lot, but works hard and fruitfully. He increasingly appears as a prose writer, literary critic and memoirist: “Derzhavin. Biography" (1931), "About Pushkin" and "Necropolis. Memories" (1939).

In recent years, he has published reviews, articles, and essays in newspapers and magazines about outstanding contemporaries - Gorky, Blok, Bely and many others. He translated poetry and prose of Polish, French, Armenian and other writers. V. Khodasevich died in Paris on June 14, 1939.

Brief biography from the book: Russian writers and poets. Brief biographical dictionary. Moscow, 2000.

Godu Khodasevich enthusiastically accepts the February Revolution and initially agrees to cooperate with the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution. This year his collection “The Path of Grain” is published with the title poem of the same name, which contains the following lines about the year 1917: “And you, my country, and you, its people, // You will die and come to life, having passed through this year.”

Main features of poetry and personality

Most often, the epithet “bilious” was applied to Khodasevich. Maxim Gorky said in private conversations and letters that it was anger that was the basis of his poetic gift. All memoirists write about his yellow face. He died - in a beggarly hospital, in a glass cage scorched by the sun, barely covered with sheets - from liver cancer, suffering from incessant pain. Two days before his death, he told his ex-wife, writer Nina Berberova: “Only he is my brother, only he can I recognize as a person who, like me, suffered in this bed.” This remark is all about Khodasevich. But, perhaps, everything that seemed tart, even tough, in him was only his literary weapon, the forged armor with which he defended real literature in continuous battles. There is immeasurably less bile and malice in his soul than suffering and thirst for compassion. In Russia of the 20th century. It is difficult to find a poet who would look at the world so soberly, so squeamishly, with such disgust - and so strictly follow his laws in it, both literary and moral. “I am considered an evil critic,” said Khodasevich. - But recently I made a “calculation of conscience”, as before confession... Yes, I scolded many. But nothing came of those whom I scolded.”

Khodasevich is specific, dry and laconic. It seems that he speaks with effort, reluctantly opening his lips. Who knows, maybe the brevity of Khodasevich’s poems, their dry laconicism is a direct consequence of unprecedented concentration, dedication and responsibility. Here is one of his most laconic poems:

Forehead -
Chalk.
Bel
Coffin.

Sang
Pop.
Sheaf
Strel -

Day
Holy!
Crypt
Blind.

Shadow -
In hell!

Khodasevich himself distinguished between the poet’s “manner,” that is, something organically inherent in him by nature, and “face,” which is a consequence of the conscious perception of poetry and work on it. He was a master at in every sense words - moreover, by a classical master who strived for extreme clarity, both logical, rhythmic and compositional. His style and poetics were developed to the utmost, to the smallest detail. Every word he says is significant and irreplaceable. Perhaps that is why he created little, and in 1927 he almost fell silent as a poet, having written no more than ten poems before his death.

But his dryness, bileness and taciturnity remained only external. This is what his close friend Yuri Mandelstam said about Khodasevich:

In public, Khodasevich was often reserved and dry. He liked to keep silent and laugh it off. By his own admission, “I learned to remain silent and joke in response to tragic conversations.” These jokes are usually without a smile. But when he smiled, the smile was contagious. Under the glasses of a “serious writer,” the sly lights of a boy who had misbehaved lit up in his eyes. I also enjoyed other people's jokes. He laughed, shaking internally: his shoulders trembled. He caught the wit on the spot, developed and supplemented it. In general, I always appreciated witticisms and jokes, even unsuccessful ones. “Without a joke there is no living business,” he said more than once.

Khodasevich also liked hoaxes. He admired a certain “non-writing writer”, a master at such things. He himself used hoax as a literary device, and after a while he exposed it. So he wrote several poems “in someone else’s name” and even invented the forgotten poet of the 18th century Vasily Travnikov, composing all his poems for him, with the exception of one (“O heart, dusty ear”), written by Khodasevich’s friend Muni. The poet read about Travnikov at a literary evening and published a study about him. Listening to the poems read by Khodasevich, the enlightened society experienced both embarrassment and surprise, because Khodasevich opened the priceless archive of the greatest poet of the 18th century. A number of reviews appeared on Khodasevich’s article. No one could even imagine that there was no Travnikov in the world.

The influence of symbolism on Khodasevich’s lyrics

Not being rooted in Russian soil created a special psychological complex that was felt in Khodasevich’s poetry from a very early time.

His early poems suggest that he was trained by Bryusov, who, without recognizing poetic insights, believed that inspiration should be strictly controlled by knowledge of the secrets of the craft, conscious choice and impeccable embodiment of the form, rhythm, and design of the verse. The young man Khodasevich observed the flowering of symbolism, he was brought up on symbolism, grew up under its moods, was illuminated by its light and is associated with its names. It is clear that the young poet could not help but experience his influence, even if in a student-like, imitative way. “Symbolism is true realism. Both Andrei Bely and Blok spoke about the elements they knew. Undoubtedly, if today we have learned to talk about unreal realities, the most real in reality, it is thanks to the symbolists,” he said. Khodasevich’s early poems are imbued with symbolism and are often poisoned:

The wanderer walked by, leaning on his staff - For some reason I remembered you. A cab rides on red wheels - For some reason I remembered you. In the evening the lamp will be lit in the corridor - I will certainly remember you. No matter what happens on land, on the sea, or in the sky, I will remember you.

And again the beat of hearts is steady; Nodding, the short-lived flame disappeared, And I realized that I was a dead man, And you were just my tombstone.

But still, Khodasevich always stood apart. In the autobiographical fragment “Infancy” of 1933, he attaches particular importance to the fact that he was “late” to the heyday of symbolism, “late to be born,” while the aesthetics of Acmeism remained distant to him, and futurism was decidedly unacceptable. Indeed, to be born in Russia at that time six years later than Blok meant entering a different literary era.

The main stages of creativity

Collection "Youth"

Khodasevich published his first book, “Youth,” in 1908 at the Grif publishing house. This is what he said about it later: “The first review of my book stuck with me for the rest of my life. I learned it word for word. It began like this: “There is such a vile bird, the vulture. It feeds on carrion. Recently, this pretty bird hatched a new rotten egg.” Although in general the book was received favorably.

In the best poems of this book, he declared himself a poet of precise, concrete words. Subsequently, the Acmeists treated the poetic word in approximately the same way, but their characteristic intoxication with joy, masculinity, and love is completely alien to Khodasevich. He remained aloof from all literary trends and trends, on his own, “not a fighter of all camps.” Khodasevich, together with M.I. Tsvetaeva, as he wrote, “having left symbolism, they did not join anything or anyone, and remained forever alone, “wild.” Literary classifiers and compilers of anthologies don’t know where to put us.”

Nomadic poor children are angry, We warm our hands by the fire... The desert is silent. The prickly wind drives the ashes into the distance without a sound, And the evil boredom of our songs The ulcer curls on the lips.

In general, however, “Youth” is a collection of an immature poet. The future Khodasevich can be discerned here only by the precision of words and expressions and skepticism about everything.

Collection “Happy House”

Much more from the real Khodasevich - at least from his poetic intonation - in the collection “Happy House”. The torn, chopped intonation that Khodasevich begins to use in his poems suggests the open disgust with which he throws these words in the face of time. Hence the somewhat ironic, bilious sound of his verse.

O boredom, skinny dog crying to the moon! You are the wind of time whistling in my ears!

The poet on earth is like the singer Orpheus, who returned to the desolate world from the kingdom of the dead, where he lost his beloved Eurydice forever:

And so I sing, I sing with my last strength About the fact that life has been completely experienced, That Eurydice is gone, that my dear friend is gone, And the stupid tiger caresses me -

In “Happy House,” Khodasevich paid a generous tribute to stylization (which is generally characteristic of the Silver Age). There are echoes of Greek and Roman poetry, and stanzas that make you remember the romanticism of the 19th century. But these stylizations are full of concrete, visible images and details. Thus, the opening poem with the characteristic title “Star over a Palm Tree” from 1916 ends with the piercing lines:

Ah, of the roses I love with a deceitful heart Only the one that burns with jealous fire, That the cunning Carmen bit with her teeth with a blue tint!

Sentimentality, coupled with bile and proud detachment from the world, became the hallmark of Khodasevich’s poetry and determined its originality in the first post-revolutionary years.

By this time, Khodasevich had two idols. He said: “There was Pushkin and there was Blok. Everything else is in between!”

Collection “The Path of Grain”

Beginning with the collection “The Path of the Grain,” the main theme of his poetry will be overcoming disharmony, which is essentially irremovable. He introduces the prose of life into poetry - not expressive details, but the flow of life, overtaking and overwhelming the poet, giving birth in him, along with constant thoughts of death, a feeling of “bitter death.” The call for the transformation of this stream is obviously utopian in some poems (“Smolensk Market”), in others the poet succeeds in the “miracle of transformation” (“Noon”), but turns out to be a brief and temporary loss from “this life.” “The Path of Grain” was written in the revolutionary years of 1917-1918. Khodasevich said: “Poetry is not a document of the era, but only that poetry that is close to the era is alive. Blok understood this and not without reason called for “listening to the music of the revolution.” It’s not about the revolution, but about the music of the times.” Khodasevich also wrote about his era. The poet's early premonitions of the upheavals awaiting Russia prompted him to perceive the revolution with optimism. He saw in it an opportunity to renew folk and creative life, he believed in its humanity and anti-philistine pathos, but sobering up came very quickly. Khodasevich understood how the revolution had tormented and extinguished real Russian literature. But he did not belong to those who were “scared” of the revolution. He was not delighted with her, but he was not “afraid” of her either. The collection “The Path of Grain” expressed his belief in the resurrection of Russia after revolutionary devastation in the same way as grain, dying in the soil, is resurrected in the ear:

The sower walks along even furrows. His father and grandfather followed the same paths. The grain sparkles with gold in his hand, But it must fall into the black ground. And where the blind worm makes its way, It will die and sprout at the promised time. So my soul follows the path of grain: Having descended into darkness, it dies - and it comes to life. And you, my country, and you, its people, will die and come to life, having passed through this year, - Because the only wisdom has been given to us: All living things should follow the path of grain.

Here Khodasevich is already a mature master: he has developed his own poetic language, and his view of things, fearlessly accurate and painfully sentimental, allows him to talk about the most subtle matters, while remaining ironic and restrained. Almost all the poems in this collection are constructed in the same way: a deliberately mundanely described episode - and a sudden, sharp ending that shifts the meaning. Thus, in the poem “Monkey,” an endlessly long description of a stuffy summer day, an organ grinder and a sad monkey is suddenly resolved with the line: “On that day war was declared.” This is typical of Khodasevich - with one laconic, almost telegraphic line, he can turn inside out or transform the entire poem. As soon as the lyrical hero was visited by a feeling of unity and brotherhood of all life in the world, immediately, contrary to the feeling of love and compassion, the most inhuman thing that can happen begins, and insurmountable discord and disharmony are established in that world, which just for a moment seemed like a “choir of luminaries” and the waves of the sea, the winds and the spheres.”

The same feeling of the collapse of harmony, the search for a new meaning and its impossibility (in times of historical rifts, harmony seems lost forever) becomes the theme of the largest and, perhaps, strangest poem in the collection - “November 2” (1918). This describes the first day after the October battles of 1917 in Moscow. It talks about how the city hid. The author talks about two minor incidents: returning from acquaintances to whom he went to find out if they were alive, he sees in the semi-basement window a carpenter, in accordance with the spirit of the new era, painting a newly made coffin with red paint - apparently, for one of the fallen fighters for universal happiness. The author gazes intently at the boy, “about four years old,” who sits “among Moscow, suffering, torn to pieces and fallen,” and smiles to himself, to his secret thought, quietly ripening under his eyebrowless forehead. The only one who looks happy and peaceful in Moscow in 1917 is a four-year-old boy. Only children with their naivety and fanatics with their unreasoning ideology can be cheerful these days. “For the first time in my life,” says Khodasevich, “neither “Mozart and Salieri” nor “Gypsies” quenched my thirst that day.” A terrible confession, especially from the lips of Khodasevich, who always idolized Pushkin. Even the all-encompassing Pushkin does not help to contain the shock of modern times, Khodasevich’s sober mind at times falls into dullness, into numbness, mechanically records events, but the soul does not respond to them in any way. This is the poem “The Old Woman” of 1919:

The light corpse, numb, Covered with a white sheet, In the same sleigh, without a coffin, The policeman will take it away, Pushing the people aside with his shoulder. He will be unspoken and cold-blooded, and we will burn a couple of logs that she was carrying to her house in our oven.

In this poem, the hero is already completely integrated into the new reality: the “policeman” does not cause fear in him, and his own readiness to rob a corpse does not cause burning shame. Khodasevich's soul cries over the bloody collapse of the familiar world, over the destruction of morality and culture. But since the poet follows the “path of the grain,” that is, he accepts life as something independent of his desires, tries to see a higher meaning in everything, he does not protest or renounce God. He had not had the most flattering opinion of the world before. And he believes that in the storm that has broken out there must be a higher meaning, which Blok was also looking for when he called for “listening to the music of the revolution.” It is no coincidence that Khodasevich opens his next collection with the poem “Music” from 1920:

And the music seems to come from above. Cello... and harps, maybe... ...And the sky is just as high, and just as feathered angels shine in it.

Collection “Heavy Lyre”

During this period, Khodasevich's poetry began to increasingly acquire the character of classicism. Khodasevich's style is connected with Pushkin's style. But his classicism is of a secondary order, for it was not born in Pushkin’s era and not in Pushkin’s world. Khodasevich came out of symbolism. And he made his way to classicism through all the symbolic fogs, not to mention the Soviet era. All this explains his technical passion for “prose in life and in poetry,” as a counterbalance to the instability and inaccuracy of the poetic “beauties” of those times.

And chasing every verse through prose, Dislocating every line, I grafted a classic rose onto a Soviet wild child.

And someone hands a heavy lyre into my hands through the wind. And there is no plaster sky, And the sun is sixteen candles. Orpheus rests his feet on the smooth black rocks.

The image of the soul appears in this collection. Khodasevich’s path lies not through “soulfulness,” but through destruction, overcoming and transformation. The soul, the “bright Psyche,” for him is outside of true existence; in order to get closer to it, it must become a “spirit”, give birth to a spirit in itself. The difference between the psychological and ontological principles is rarely more noticeable than in Khodasevich’s poems. The soul itself is not capable of captivating and bewitching him.

And how can I not love myself, a fragile, ugly vessel, but precious and happy because it contains you?

But the fact of the matter is that the “simple soul” does not even understand why the poet loves her.

And my misfortune does not hurt her, And she does not understand the groan of my passions.

The human poet is exhausted together with Psyche in anticipation of grace, but grace is not given for free. In this endeavor, in this struggle, man is condemned to death.

Until all the blood comes out of your pores, Until you cry out your earthly eyes - You will not become a spirit...

Step over, jump over, Fly over whatever you want - But break out: like a stone from a sling, like a star that fell in the night... You lost it yourself - now look for it... God knows what you’re muttering to yourself, Looking for pince-nez or keys.

The above seven lines are full of complex meanings. Here is a mockery of the everyday, new role of the poet: he is no longer Orpheus, but rather a city madman, muttering something under his breath at a locked door. But “I lost it myself - now look for it...” - the line is clearly not only about keys or pince-nez in the literal sense. Finding the key to a new world, that is, understanding a new reality, is possible only by breaking out of it, overcoming its gravity.

Every sound torments my ears and every ray is unbearable to my eyes. The spirit began to erupt, Like a tooth from under swollen gums. It will cut through and throw it away. The worn-out shell, Thousand-eyed, will sink into the night, Not into this gray night. And I will remain lying here - A banker, stabbed to death, - Pressing the wound with my hands, Screaming and fighting in your world.

Khodasevich sees things as they are. Without any illusions. It is no coincidence that the most merciless self-portrait in Russian poetry belongs to him:

Me, me, me. What a wild word! Is that guy over there really me? Did mom really love someone like that, yellow-gray, half-gray, and all-knowing, like a snake?

The natural change of images - a pure child, an ardent young man and today's, “yellow-gray, half-grayed” - for Khodasevich is a consequence of tragic splits and uncompensated spiritual waste, the longing for integrity sounds in this poem as nowhere else in his poetry. “Everything that I hate so tenderly and love so sarcastically” - this is an important motive of “Heavy Lyre”. But “heaviness” is not the only key word in this book. There is also Mozart’s lightness of short poems, with plastic precision, the only stroke giving pictures of post-revolutionary, transparent and ghostly, collapsing Petersburg. The city is deserted. But the secret springs of the world are visible, the secret meaning of existence and, most importantly, Divine music is heard.

Oh, the inert, beggarly poverty of my hopeless life! Who should I tell how sorry I am for myself and all these things? And I begin to sway, hugging my knees, and suddenly I begin to speak in poetry to myself in oblivion. Incoherent, passionate speeches! It is impossible to understand anything in them, But the sounds are truer than the meaning, And the word is strongest. And music, music, music is woven into my singing, And a narrow, narrow, narrow blade pierces me.

Neither living nor singing is almost worth living: We live in fragile rudeness. The tailor sews, the carpenter builds: The seams will fall apart, the house will collapse. And only sometimes, through this decay, I suddenly hear with emotion The contained beating of a completely different existence. So, seeing off the boredom of life, a woman lovingly places her excited hand on her heavily swollen belly.

Enough! No need for beauty! The vile world is not worth singing... And there is no need for the Revolution! Her scattered army is crowned with one reward, one freedom - to trade. In vain, in the square, a hungry son prophesies to Harmony: A prosperous citizen does not want his good news...”

Then Khodasevich draws a conclusion about his fundamental disagreement with the mob:

I love people, I love nature, But I don’t like to go for walks. And I firmly know that people cannot understand My creations.

Cycle “European Night”

Despite this, in the emigrant environment, Khodasevich for a long time felt like the same stranger as in his abandoned homeland. This is what he said about emigrant poetry: “The current situation of poetry is difficult. Of course, poetry is delight. Here we have little delight, because there is no action. Young emigrant poetry keeps complaining about boredom - this is because she is not at home, she lives in a foreign place, she finds herself outside of space - and therefore outside of time. The task of emigrant poetry is, in appearance, very thankless, because it seems conservative. The Bolsheviks strive to destroy the spiritual order inherent in Russian literature. The task of emigrant literature is to preserve this system. This task is as literary as it is political. To demand that emigrant poets write poems on political topics is, of course, nonsense. But they must demand that their work have a Russian face. Non-Russian poetry does not and will not have a place either in Russian literature or in the future Russia itself. The role of emigrant literature is to connect the past with the future. We need our poetic past to become our present and, in a new form, our future.”

The theme of the “twilight of Europe,” which survived the collapse of a civilization that had been created over centuries, and after this the aggression of vulgarity and impersonality, dominates Khodasevich’s poetry of the emigrant period. The poems of “European Night” are painted in gloomy tones; they are dominated not even by prose, but by the bottom and underground of life. Khodasevich tries to penetrate into “someone else’s life,” the life of the “little man” of Europe, but a blank wall of misunderstanding, symbolizing not the social, but the general meaninglessness of life, rejects the poet. “European Night” is the experience of breathing in an airless space, poems written almost without taking into account the audience, response, or co-creation. This was all the more unbearable for Khodasevich because he was leaving Russia as a recognized poet, and recognition came to him late, just on the eve of his departure. He left at the zenith of his glory, firmly hoping to return, but a year later he realized that there would be nowhere to return (this feeling is best formulated by Marina Tsvetaeva: “...is it possible to return to a house that has been razed?”). However, even before leaving he wrote:

And I take my Russia with me in a travel bag