Sanctus Amor (1908) Нины Петровской как жизнетворческий манифест

Sanctus Amor is the only intravital storybook by Nina Petrovskaya, dedicated to Sergey Auslender. The title of the book, borrowed from the poem by Andrey Bely, initiates a literary polylogue addressed to several lovers of Petrovskaya: to Bely, as he once was her teacher of heavenly love; to Valery Bryusov, as he was Petrovskaya’s beloved one at the time of publication; to Auslender as the addressee of dedication and a new contender for being Petrovskaya’s favorite. Sanctus Amor represents the ideal of the Saintly Love, the manifesto which Petrovskaya followed rigorously in real life. Her letters to Bryusov and Vladislav Khodasevich reveal multiple congruences with the novels of Sanctus Amor, which demonstrate the inextricable character of life and literature in Petrovskaya’s worldview. The paper is devoted to the analysis of Sanctus Amor in the aspect of life-creating practices and its meaning in the literary dialogue with Auslender. Sanctus Amor is a complicated prescriptive symbolic message designed to proclaim its own, and to program another’s, concept of love.

Reduction of the Poetic Text in a Critical Essay by V. Nabokov Vladislav Khodasevich. Collected Verse.

The highlighting of Nabokov’s interpretational strategies in other literary texts is a relevant problem for Russian and European Nabokov studies. The goal of the article is to scrutinize the methods of reduction of a poetic text used by Nabokov in his early essay Vladislav Khodasevich. Collected Verse. The approach developed by receptive poetics allows author to describe Nabokov’s practices of reading and writing as an experience of creative game with literature of his contemporaries and predecessors. The narrative analysis is productive to characterize the point of view, to highlight the role of narrator in the structure of Nabokov's essay and his own literary work and the techniques for the transformation of Khodasevich’s poems into the prose. There are different methods of literary text reduction in Nabokov’s essay: creation of meta-plot not immanent in the original poems; selective sampling of literary contexts common for both authors; ignoring of artistic issue of ethics of beauty important for V. Khodasevich. For Nabokov, the reduction and transfer of his own techniques into the space of Khodasevich’s text is a way of approbation of patterns of artistic reality in texts of the poet, which conceptualizes the problem of boundaries of artistic talent, important for Nabokov himself.

Biographical features of Vladislav Khodasevich in Gulliver’s chronicle

The main source of information about Vladislav Khodasevich’s life is his memoirs, which he published as separate essays on the pages of émigré outlets. The article discusses several cases when biographical information appears in the chronicle of Soviet literature, which the critic published together with Nina Berberova in the newspaper “Vozrozhdenie” (1927 – 1939) under the common pseudonym Gulliver. In addition to documentary evidence of work on the chronicle, as well as the existence of an ideological community of pseudonymous notes and authorized publications, Khodasevich’s authorship can be established when biographical details of the chronicler’s life are interwoven in the notes. Until now, such cases have been considered as supporting material for the attribution of certain chronicle issues. The article highlights notes that are of independent value for studying both Khodasevich’s work and his biography, which allows us to significantly correct the traditional approach to such a material. The most interesting and voluminous examples from the entire corps of “Literary Chronicle” are used for research. The thematic scatter is quite large: from the reception of plans for 1935 on the redevelopment of Moscow streets to references to Khodasevich’s unpublished poetic legacy

The concept of personality of Vasily Shukshin in the biography novel by Aleksey Varlamov "Shukshin"

The article discusses the concept of personality of Vasily Shukshin in the biography novel by Aleksey Varlamov in the context of the tradition of this genre in Russian literature, formed in creative work of Boris Zaytsev, Vladislav Khodasevich, Nina Berberova etc. The aim of the study is to analyse the characteristic of the typological principles of the genre in the artistic world of the modern writer and literary critic Aleksey Varlamov. The subject of study is the representation of the conceptual components of Vasily Shukshin's personality in the biography novel genre. The main attention is paid to the theme of Vasily Shukshin's dramatic fate, the motives of the writer's opposition to that time's power. The author's version of the "reading" of Vasily Shukshin's personality, which is slightly different from the textbook one, is analysed. As a result of the study, the conclusions about the specifi cs of the development of the biography novel genre in the works of Aleksey Varlamov, about the author's method of artistic research of the writer's biography in the system of "code of fate" of a Russian, the main motives of his life.

‘EPISODES’ BY VLADISLAV KHODASEVICH

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.

Berberova, Nina Nikolaevna (БЕРБЕРОВА, НИНА НИКОЛАЕВНА) (1901–1993)

Nina Nikolaevna Berberova (1901–1993) was a prominent Russian émigré writer, journal editor, and memoirist. She was born to an Armenian father and Russian mother in St. Petersburg, and died in Philadelphia. Berberova left Russia in 1922 with her then-lover, Vladislav Khodasevich. The couple lived in various European cities during the 1920s as part of Maxim Gorky’s household, before settling in Paris in 1925. Berberova emigrated alone to the USA in 1950. There she held various jobs before joining the Slavic department at Yale in 1958. From 1963 until 1971 she taught at Princeton University, where she was prized as one of the last living links to Russian Silver Age culture. The incisive, understated style of Berberova’s short stories about émigré life in Paris has been compared to that of Turgenev and Chekhov. Many of these stories were published in émigré publications, for which she also wrote reviews and critical articles. In 1947, she helped found the émigré weekly Russian Thought [RusskaiaMysl’]. Berberova is also the author of several biographies, including one of the poet Aleksandr Blok and one about Tchaikovsky — notable for its frank discussion of the composer’s homosexuality. She is perhaps best known for her memoirs The Italics Are Mine (1969; first published in Russian as Kursivmoi in Munich in 1971). A source of controversy in the émigré community due to their candour, and accused of fabrication, the memoirs provide a vivid record of her generation, its leading figures, and their post-revolutionary fate.