Khodasevich: His Life And Art

by David M. Bethea

This critical biography of Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939), David M. Bethea introduces to the Western reader the life and art of a literary figure described by Vladimir Nabokov as the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century.

Originally published in 1983.

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Genres: Biography

408 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1983

Reviews

[Eric Byrd]

Amazing. How many revised dissertations are this sagacious? Bethea pulls it all off: a well-narrated biography within a richly textured milieu portrait within a broad and sensitive overview of modernist poetics. Bethea knows Anglo-American modernism like the back of his hand, so he's an ideal medium of Khodasevich for English-language readers, always ready with parallels between the different traditions. And it's one of the best accounts of the Russian 'Silver Age' (1900-1917) that I've ever read, the more so for being a biography of Khodasevich, a great poet who gradually turned away from the "mystagogues" (Nabokov's dismissive word) of Symbolist poetics who dominated the era...the Acmeist troika of Gumilev-Ahkmatova-Mandelstam was more or less born hostile to Symbolism; Khodasevich, however, began to write in the Symbolist atmosphere, and then proceeded to outgrow it, piercing the Theosophist murk with shafts of prosy irony...the arc of his development is roughly analogous to that of Yeats.