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The twilight of Russian literature: Vladislav Khodasevich and Gavriil Derzhavin.

Article Excerpt
The short twentieth century for the Russians (1917-1991) ended much the way it began, at least culturally. As the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian writers, artists, and others mined the Russian past searching for models to help understand and shape a brave new future, just as they had done in the years following the 1917 October Revolution. In both eras, cultural figures wrestled with the ways present and past interact, how the past had become newly relevant, or why the present could be understood only through reference to the past.

Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939) was one of many Russian thinkers to turn to the past in search of a hero. In his search across Russian history, Khodasevich found Gavriil Derzhavin (1743-1816), an eighteenth-century poet and statesman, and wrote his biography.

The Russian literary past weighed heavily on Khodasevich's poetic imagination. He believed that Russian culture was doomed to die along with the empire that had just collapsed. Already a poet of some reknown by the time he left Russia for Berlin and Paris in the 1920s, Khodasevich saw himself as a "lasting link" in a great chain of Russian poets that stretched back roughly a hundred years, to the Golden Age of Vasily Zhukovsky, Alexander Pushkin, and Mikhail Lermontov.

Some Russian emigres thrived in Europe and America, like Khodasevich's contemporary Vladimir Nabokov, who remained a part of the Russian community in Europe for some time, publishing novels and poems, but then made the leap to the United States and the English language and became one of the most interesting novelists of the twentieth century. In contrast, Khodasevich never breached the boundaries of the Russian diaspora, never interacted with the literary and cultural milieu of Germany and France. Instead, in exile from his native land and language, Khodasevich's poetic muse failed him, and as he grew silent, Khodasevich began to worry that he might not simply be one lasting link in the chain of Russian poetry, but the final link in that chain.

As a response to this poetic crisis, Khodasevich shifted from poetry to biography, choosing to resurrect Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin, whom he regarded as the founder of Russia's Golden Age of literature. The resulting biography, entitled simply Derzhavin, was published in Paris in 1931 and stands as Khodasevich's attempt to bring the figure of Derzhavin back to public attention and, more importantly, in so doing, to revive Russian literature itself.

Derzhavin was both an accomplished poet and a high-ranking civil servant during the reign of Catherine the Great, and it was the way he stitched these two careers together almost seamlessly that Khodasevich most admired about him. In a 1916 essay, a prelude of a sort to his biography project, Khodasevich looked around at the woeful state of Russia, and he longed for a new Derzhavin, a poet-cum-political advisor who could heal the split between civic and aesthetic duties.

In undertaking this biography of Derzhavin, Khodasevich was searching for a hero, a figure from the Russian literary past whose shining example would inspire and educate in the midst of what he described as the fading "twilight of Russian culture." Part of what Khodasevich emphasized in his study of Derzhavin was the latter's ability to use poetry as part of statecraft--as portrayed by Khodasevich, Derzhavin was not so much a man juggling two careers as one for whom there was no difference between poetry and politics. In this sense, Derzhavin managed to make politics poetic and to make poetry relevant in a way that must surely have appealed to an emigre poet trying to sort out the chaos of his post-revolutionary culture.

In his study of Derzhavin, Khodasevich was also drawn to Derzhavin's faith in both God and fate, a faith that Khodasevich did not share but certainly envied. These themes help structure Derzhavin, and it is these themes to which Khodasevich returned at the very end of the biography, from which the excerpt that follows is drawn. As we come to the end of the book, and of Derzhavin's life, the leisurely pace of daily...

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