1. Because he considered them “immature” (iunosheskie), Khodasevich did not include 1 Molodost and Shchastlivyi domik in his Sobranie stikhov (Paris, 1927) (see Vladislav 1 Khodasevich, “Predislovie k Sobraniiu stikhov 1927 g.,” Sobranie stikhov, ed. N. Berberova 1 [Munich, 1961], p. 7. Hereafter, unless otherwise stated, all references to Khodasevich's 1 verse will be to the 1961 Munich edition). |

2. Evropeiskaia noch’ did not appear under separate cover but was included in the 1927; Paris edition of Khodasevich's Sobranie stikhov. 3. Khodasevich had difficulty adapting to the compromises of Soviet literary life (see Berberova, Nina, The Italics Are Mine, trans. Radley, Philippe [New York, 1969], pp.: 79–149 Google Scholar).

4. Veidle, V. V., “Poeziia Khodasevicha” Sovremennye zapiski, no. 34 (1928), p. 468.Google Scholar

5. See “Probochka” (The Cork) and “Khranilishche” (The Storehouse) in Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov, pp. 87 and 148.

6. Khodasevich's irony has traditionally been described as “bitter” or “malicious” (zloi) (see Iurii Ivask, “Poeziia ‘staroi’ emigratsii,” in Nikolai P. Poltoratzky, ed., Russian ‘ Emigré Literature: A Collection of Articles with English Resumis [Pittsburgh, 1972], p. 49Google Scholar). Zinaida Shakhovskaia, former editor of Russkaia mysl', writes in her memoirs that, while still in Russia, Khodasevich was nicknamed “formic acid” (murai/inyi spirt) (see Shakhovskaia, Zinaida, Otrazheniia [Paris, 1975], p. 184 Google Scholar).

7. See Hagglund, Roger M., “The Adamovič-XodasevičPolemics,” Slavic and East European Journal, 20, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 239–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. For varying degrees of “playful seriousness” and “serious play” in Khodasevich's work, see the following poems in Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov: “Ishchi menia” (Look for Me [1918], p. 40), Polden’ (Noon [1918], pp. 45-47), Vstrecha (The Encounter [1918], pp. 48-49), “Aniute” (To Aniuta [1918], p. 57), “Bez slov” (Without Words [1918], p. 59), Muzyka (Music [1920], pp. 63-64), and “Pokrova Maii potaennoi” (The Cloak of Hidden Maia[1922],p. 113).

9. Khodasevich wrote several verse narratives. Not, strictly speaking, poemy, they are also far from traditional lyrics. Each tells in blank verse and with a profusion of realistic detail an experience pivotal to the poet's life. See, for example, the following in Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov: Epizod (The Episode [1918], pp. 35-37), 2-go noiabria (The Second of November [1918], pp. 41-44), Polden', Vstrecha, Obes!iana (The Monkey [1919], pp. 50-52), Dom (The House [1919-20], pp. 53-55), and Muzyka. See also Khodasevich's parody of the ballad form in Dzhon Bottom (John Bottom [1926], pp. 167-76).

10. Veidle, “Poeziia Khodasevicha,” p. 456.

11. The significance of Pushkin for Khodasevich cannot be overstated. Several critics, including Andrei Belyi (in “Tiazhelaia lira i russkaia lirika,” Sovremennye zapiski, no. IS [1923], pp. 371-88), have compared Khodasevich to Pushkin, though perhaps not always for the right reasons. (The formal similarities are not as revealing as the differences in tone and mood.) Khodasevich wrote two monographs on Pushkin, Poeticheskoe khoziaistvo Pushkina (Leningrad, 1924) and O Pushkine (Berlin, 1937), and Pushkin seems to have been for him the very embodiment of a now disappearing Russia. This feeling for Pushkin is encountereS in Khodasevich's speech, “Koleblemyi trenozhnik” (The Shaken Tripod), delivered on February 14, 1921 to the Petersburg Writers’ Club (in Carl R. Proffer, ed., Modern Russian Poets on Poetry, trans. Alexander Golubov [Ann Arbor, 1974], pp. 60-70): “Moved back into the ‘smoke of centuries,’ Pushkin will arise in gigantic stature. National pride in him will flow into indestructible bronze forms—but that spontaneous closeness, that heart-felt tenderness with which we loved Pushkin will never be known to the coming generations. They will not be granted this joy… . The heightened interest in the words of the poet which was felt by many people during the past several years arose, perhaps, from a premonition, from an insistent need: partly to decipher Pushkin while it is not yet too late, while the tie with his time is not yet lost forever; and partly, it seems to me, it was suggested by the same premonition: we are agreeing to what call we should answer, how we should communicate with each other in the oncoming darkness.”

12. Hughes, Robert, “Khodasevich: irony and dislocation: A poet in exile” Tri- Quarterly, 27 (Spring 1973): 64.Google Scholar

13. Irony is a salient feature in Khodasevich's three mature collections. But what is often a bright, matinal irony in the poems, such as “Aniute,” of Putem zerna, develops gradually through Tiazhelaia lira, a book whose poems generally show a more trenchant, angular variety of irony, until the desperate, bitter, and hence “nocturnal” irony of the poems, such as “An Mariechen,” of the last collection. Sorrentinskie fotografii is unique because, while located in Evropeiskaia noch', it seems to briefly retrieve the mood of Putem zerna.

14. Notes to Sorrentinskie fotografii, in Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov, p. 221. In the first line, “Saarow” is an obvious error in the 1961 edition and should read, as indicated, “Sorrento.” The Tsetlins are Mikhail Osipovich and Mar'ia Samoilovna, who had a literary and political salon in Paris. Mikhail Tsetlin was a minor emigre poet and critic (see Berberova, The Italics Are Mine, p. 584).

15. Though Khodasevich himself often records the praise of others in notes, he praises his own work only one other time, referring to “Zvezdy” (The Stars) as “very good verses” (ochen’ khoroshie stikhi), in his notes to “Zvezdy” (Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov, p. 221).

16. Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov, pp. 160-61, 162, 164-65, 167-76. There are times in these poems when Khodasevich combines light, jocular rhymes with exceptionally flat or even grotesque content.

17. The mature Khodasevich, like Mallarme in “Les Fenêtres,” loves to work with surfaces—windows, polished floors, mirrors, anything which reflects. As with concepts of largeness and smallness, it often happens in his poetry that the irony of existence is best revealed by contrasting concepts of depth, both spatially and emotionally, with what passes lightly over a surface (see “Ishchi menia” in Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov, p. 40).

18. Khodasevich's mature poetry is associated with three different locales. Putem serna was written primarily in Moscow between 1914 and 1920; Tiazhelaia lira primarily in Petrograd between 1920 and June 22, 1922, the date of the poet's emigration; and Evropeiskaia noch’ in various European cities, including Venice, Berlin, and Paris, between 1922 and 1927.

19. Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov, pp. 150-51. The plain translations of Khodasevich's Russian which follow the text are mine.

20. Note that Khodasevich manages to tangle the branches ( “vetvi” ) in the knots of Correspondences ( “sootwtfstvii” ) and the living ( “zWvet” ) and growing ( “nwtet” ) in the inextricable ( “nercwtorsWmo” ) weaving.

21. See Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov, pp. 45-47, 48-49. T. S. Eliot explores the meaning of history and develops a similar concept of “pure time” in Four Quartets: “The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the past, but of its presence… . This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional” (see “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Eliot, T. S., Selected Essays [New York, 1950], p. 4 Google Scholar).

22. For Khodasevich's views on Soviet art and letters, see his “Dekol'tirovannaia loshad',” Vozroshdenie, September 1, 1927; “O formalizme i formalistakh,” Vozroshdenie, March 10, 1927; “O Sovetskoi literature,” Vozroshdenie, May 20, 1938; and “Proletarskie poety,” Sovremennye zapiski, no. 26 (1925), pp. 444-55.

23. Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov, p. 152. I have translated polupodval as “basement flat.” Actually, it is a humble dwelling, perhaps one room, located partly below ground. From within the inhabitants can see the feet of passers-by through the windows. The towels are probably not simple ones, but decorative ones reserved for this occasion, and serve here in ritual allusion to the vynos (bearing-out) of Christ's plashchanitsa (shroud). Polotentse and plashchanitsa have the same etymology: the former taking the more prosaic Russian form and the latter the more elevated Old Church Slavic form.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., p. 1S3.

26. Ibid., p. 1S4.

27. Ibid.

28. Though born to Russified Polish parents and raised a Catholic, Khodasevich in some ways felt closer to the traditions of Russian Orthodoxy than to those of the Church of Rome. One reason was his Russian nurse (see Khodasevich, V, “Mladenchestvo” Vozdushnye puti, 4 [1965]: 100–119 Google Scholar, and “Ne mater'iu, no tul'skoiu krest'iankoi,” in Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov, pp. 66-67).

29. Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov, p. 154. Dennitsa (Morning Star), as Nina Berberova has told me, may belong to a symbolic system combining the Virgin Mary and Lucifer. This would account for the curious transition from the Easter procession's promise of new life to the fall of Russia's guardian angel. The link between the Morning Star and Lucifer is made, for example, in V. Dal', Tolkovyi slovar1 shivogo velikorusskago iasyka, 4th ed., vol. 1 (St. Petersburg-Moscow, 1912), p. 1059Google Scholar. The ostroverkhaia gora prepares us for the poem's climactic image, the angel atop the vos'migrannoe ostrie (eight-faceted point).

30. Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov, p. 155.

31. Ibid., pp. 155-56. Cf. Pamiatniki arkhitektury Leningrada, N. N. Belekhov, gen. ed. (Leningrad, 1958), pp. 21, 24, 32. These lines clearly refer to the angel on the Peter and Paul Cathedral—not, for example, to another famous angel on the Alexandrine Column— because the figure is gilded, thus “golden-winged,” and it stands on the cathedral's faceted spire (the Alexandrine Column, on the other hand, is round). It is “huge” because it is the tallest (122.5 meters) landmark in central Petersburg, and it is “ominous, fiery and brooding” because it looms over a place known for its dark history and because it bears witness to the cataclysmic November of 1917. I am grateful to Jane Miller of Middlebury College and to Professor John Malmstad of Columbia University for pointing me in the direction of the angel on the Peter and Paul Cathedral. Thanks are due as well to Nina Berberova for corroborating this interpretation. Note how Khodasevich has removed even the angel's grammatical agency through the use of passive constructions: otrazhen, oprokinut, and otrashalsia.

32. Of all the media available to modern man, the photograph is perhaps by nature the most impersonal and the most open to irony. See, for example, Sontag, Susan, On Photography (New York, 1977), p. 1977 Google Scholar: “Photography has powers that no other image-system has ever enjoyed because, unlike earlier ones, it is not dependent on an image maker. However carefully the photographer intervenes in setting up and guiding the image-making process, the process itself remains an optical-chemical (or electronic) one, the workings of which are automatic, the machinery for which will inevitably be modified to provide still more detailed and, therefore, more useful maps of the real. The mechanical genesis of these images, and the literalness of the powers they confer, amounts to a new relationship between image and reality. And if photography could also be said to restore the most primitive relationship —the partial identity of image and object—the potency of the image is now experienced in a different way. The primitive notion of the efficacy of images presumes that images possess the qualities of real things, but our inclination is to attribute to real things the qualities of an image” (emphasis added).

33. Khodasevich, Sobranie stikhov, p. 156. Note that the “vision” (viden'e) hidden by memory in the poem's opening and rooted in the tradition of a once vigorous culture is now likened to and contained in the “dream” (snovidenie).