Vladislav Khodasevich in the Emigration: Literature and the Search for Identity

Abstract

Vladislav Khodasevich's literary activity in emigration (1922–39) may be described as a search for a new identity. Khodasevich's departure abroad induced a powerful self‐image crisis and resulted in the trauma of emigration, which silenced him as a poet. In his attempt to move past this creative crisis, he turned to the biographies of Gavrila Derzhavin and Aleksandr Pushkin. In writing the biographical narratives of the two great poets, Khodasevich projected episodes of his own biography onto the two classic writers and identified with them in his attempt to conquer his own creative crisis. Nevertheless, the trauma of emigration turned out to be the stronger element, and neither of his attempts to identify with the two classical authors was successful: having completed Derzhavin's biography, Khodasevich began to identify instead with the tragi‐comic poet Lebiadkin, a character from Dostoevsky's The Possessed, about whose verses Khodasevich wrote an article. Then, having finished several chapters of Pushkin's biography, he conceived of a literary mystification, which he completed several years later–“The Life of Vasilii Travnikov.” This mystification reflected Khodasevich's traumatic identity: Khodasevich attributed his own world view and several episodes from his own life to its main character. This article examines in detail the mechanisms Khodasevich used to search for a new identity in the emigration, a search that in Khodasevich's case was not crowned with success.