Mapping Exile: Khodasevich’s ‘European Night’, 1922–1927

Abstract

Using Vladislav Khodasevich’s 1927 collection ‘European Night’ (‘Evropeiskaia noch’’) as a case study, this article argues for the notion of travel as a new approach to the field of émigré literature. Khodasevich’s poems in ‘European Night’, marked with the dates and place of composition, and implicitly iterative of the contours of a Europe with which his original émigré audience was intimately familiar, represent both an autobiographical narrative and a cartographic attempt to sketch a conceptual map of European exile. Using four visualizations of the coordinates of Khodasevich’s travel, composition, place, and publication to investigate the poet’s experience and literary output in Europe during these years, I argue that the force of geography on literary production (literature in space) was especially active between 1922 and 1927. This article therefore makes the case for an atlas of the Russian emigration.