‘EPISODES’ BY VLADISLAV KHODASEVICH
https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2018-1-149-179
Abstract
The article analyses 12 texts authored by V. Khodasevich: the poet was planning to publish them separately under the working title of The Blank Verse [Belie stikhi]. Written in an almost uninterrupted sequence, these poems are more than a cycle united by similarities in the genre and meter, but a kind of super-text that describes several episodes of post-revolutionary history, revealing their symbolic meaning as it does so. The plot develops from one poem to another, defined by the lyrical freedom and relative independence of its elements on the one hand, and by the main recurrent topics and images on the other. The article combines a biographical approach and poetic and genre-related analyses to classify Khodasevich’s works as ‘lyrical-epic novellas’ and reveal their genre-specific and metaphorical potential as well as establish their tentative context, namely, links to A. Blok’s Free Thoughts [Volnie mysli] and A. Akhmatova’s Requiem.
Keywords
V. Khodasevich,
A. Blok,
A. Akhmatova,
episodes,
metric leitmotif,
genre unity,
a cycle,
lyrical-epic poem
About the Author
O. Fedotov
Moscow Institute of Open Education
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Oleg Ivanovich Fedotov, doctor of Philology, Professor, methodologist of the Centre for Pedagogic Excellence, leading research fellow
Academic interests include Silver Age poetry, Russian émigré literature, metapoetics. Author of several articles on the aforementioned topics.
References
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Review
For citations:
Fedotov O. ‘EPISODES’ BY VLADISLAV KHODASEVICH. Voprosy literatury. 2018;(1):149-179. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.31425/0042-8795-2018-1-149-179
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