Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich

Born May 16 (28), 1886, in Moscow; died June 14, 1939, in Paris. Russian poet and critic.

Khodasevich, the son of an artist, began publishing his works in 1905. A traditionalist and an adherent of classical verse form. he wrote poetry that was decadent in content, for example, the collections Youth (1908) and A Happy Little House (1914). His hostility to the October Revolution of 1917 and his later tendency toward misanthropy and nihilism were reflected in motifs of underground life and flight from reality in the collections The Way of Grain (1920) and The Heavy Lyre (1922).

In 1922, Khodasevich went abroad, and in 1925 he became associated with White émigrés and published anti-Soviet articles. He criticized the bourgeois civilization of the West in certain poems, for example, “European Night.” The following works of literary scholarship by Khodasevich have retained their importance: Pushkin’s Poetical Assets (1924), Derzhavin (1931), and On Pushkin (1937).