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July 01, 2019

Khodasevich and Vodolazkin

Khodasevich and Vodolazkin
Vladislav Khodasevich
Translated by Sarah Vitali (Columbia University Press, 2019) $14.95

The Russian poet Vladislav Khodasevich’s collection of short memoirs of his author-friends of a hundred years ago is completely captivating. Straight off, he neatly recounts the literary history of the Symbolist movement: “All that was required of each person entering the order (and Symbolism was, in a certain sense, an order) was a ceaseless burning, a ceaseless flow of activity – it made no difference what the burning and activity were for.” He offers sharp characterizations of the men and women (“Muni wasn’t lazy, but he didn’t know how to work.” He makes astute commentary on their writings and occasionally theirs on his: “I went to him [Muni] with all of my new poetry… In the best cases, having read them, he would declare that ‘they weren’t all that bad.’ But, far more often, he would pull a bored, weary face and moan: ‘Lord, what drivel!’ Or, ‘What have I ever done to you? Why should you read me something like that?’” 

These portraits he wrote from 1924 to 1938 of the self-tortured and Soviet-tortured writers feel fresh and are somehow ever-entertaining. Besides Bely and Blok and a half-dozen others, there is Khodasevich’s particularly illuminating account of his friend and colleague Maxim Gorky: “I have seen quite a few writers take pride in the fact that Gorky cried while listening to their works. This was really nothing to be proud of: I can’t recall a work that didn’t make him cry – complete and utter trash being the sole exception... Gorky was not ashamed to cry over his own works, either: the second half of every short story he ever read to me was invariably inundated with weeping, sobbing, and the wiping of fogged-up glasses.”

Khodasevich (1886-1939) scarcely mentions his own life and successful career as a poet, except as they intersect with the lives of his 10 primary subjects. Among the amusing though unusually suicidal cast of characters, he knows the gossip and puts himself forward to separate the truths from falsehoods and to testify, always in particular detail, his eye-witnessed experiences or the testimony he says he received on good account.

Being a highly regarded poet in Russia, the USSR, and in exile, Khodasevich would have been well-served by an equally engaging account by one of his contemporaries. This is the 1939 book’s first appearance in English, and Sarah Vitali’s translation reads as smooth as butter and is consistent in its voice, with no obvious anachronisms. I recommend, however, skipping the dense, dull introduction by David Bethea and jumping straight into the clear and lively stream of Khodasevich’s reminiscences.

Eugene Vodolazkin
Translated by Lisa C. Hayden (OneWorld, $26.95)

This is the medieval scholar Vodolazkin’s first novel, published in Russia in 2009, though it’s the third that has appeared in English. Laurus (2012, in English in 2015), the story of a 15th-century Russian holy man, is, at least for the first half, as wild and intense as Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. The Aviator (in Russian in 2016, in English 2018), my favorite, soars and dips like a stunt plane, as the hero wakes up in 1999 after being frozen for 66 years.

Because of his compelling interest in questions of time and memory, Vodolazkin reminds me of the great Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, but Borges, sensing his limits, kept his stories short. Vodolazkin has more stamina, but also shows us it’s difficult to sustain flights of fancy for 400 pages. Like Borges, he strictly limits himself to one impossibility per tale.

In Solovyov and Larionov, the young Russian historian Solovyov is searching in the early 1990s for the answer to the question of how a White Army hero, General Larionov, managed to survive the Reds’ prosecution after his capture, going on to live a humble but long life in a communal Soviet apartment.

There must be documents to explain the mystery… Yes! There seems to be a long-lost memoir. This quest for first-hand testimony is an academic’s fantasy; the earnest Solovyov has romantic and amusing adventures that steer him towards discoveries about his subject that have seemed impenetrable to other scholars. Along the way, we learn of Solovyov’s humble beginnings in a railroad hamlet and of his awakenings to love. In the midst of his treasure hunt in Yalta, Solovyov (or it is Vodolazkin?) narrates General Larionov’s experiences in 1920 as a beset leader forcing his army to retreat across Crimea.

The academic conference Solovyov attends, “General Larionov as Text,” is a happy farce, and would have amused Chekhov (whose ghost seems to hover over the proceedings): “Snoring became audible in the hall when Tarabukin paused. The sounds were muted, like distant thunder, but that did not make them less apparent… It truly was Baikalova snoring. The corresponding member had fallen asleep quickly and easily while squinting at the texts that had been distributed, and now the microphone that hung over her head was broadcasting her snoring for the whole audience. This was first-class snoring, with a rumble on the inhale and a whistle on the exhale.”

As the novel unfolds, Vodolazkin doesn’t shy from grand and dramatic coincidences, fateful love, war scenes, or profound philosophical and religious reflections. Solovyov’s mentor argues that “history, when compared with the individual, appeared as something derivative and… ancillary. To him, history looked like a frame – sometimes meager, sometimes sumptuous – where the individual placed his portrait.”

Vodolazkin’s novels are operatic in scale and ambition, and, because of those heroic individuals he has created and historically framed, he often enough achieves the wonderful.

 

 

Tags: historyemigrationmemoirliteraturekhodasevich

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Healers, Tsars and Gangs

Reviews of Eugene Vodolazkin's Laurus, Stephen Meyer's The New Tsar, and Svetlana Stephenson's Gangs of Russia.

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