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Necropolis (Paperback)
Vladislav Khodasevich; Translated by Sarah Vitali; Introduction by David M. Bethea
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R441
R356
Discovery Miles 3 560
Save R85 (19%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Necropolis is an unconventional literary memoir by Vladislav
Khodasevich, hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as "the greatest Russian
poet of our time." In each of the book's nine chapters, Khodasevich
memorializes a significant figure of Russia's literary Silver Age,
and in the process writes an insightful obituary of the era.
Written at various times throughout the 1920s and 1930s following
the deaths of its subjects, Necropolis is a literary graveyard in
which an entire movement, Russian Symbolism, is buried. Recalling
figures including Alexander Blok, Sergey Esenin, Fyodor Sologub,
and the socialist realist Maxim Gorky, Khodasevich tells the story
of how their lives and artworks intertwined, including a
notoriously tempestuous love triangle among Nina Petrovskaya,
Valery Bryusov, and Andrei Bely. He testifies to the seductive and
often devastating power of the Symbolist attempt to turn one's life
into a work of art and, ultimately, how one man was left with the
task of memorializing his fellow artists after their deaths.
Khodasevich's portraits deal with revolution, disillusionment,
emigration, suicide, the vocation of the poet, and the place of the
artist in society. One of the greatest memoirs in Russian
literature, Necropolis is a compelling work from an overlooked
writer whose gifts for observation and irony show the early
twentieth-century Russian literary scene in a new and more intimate
light.
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Necropolis (Hardcover)
Vladislav Khodasevich; Translated by Sarah Vitali; Introduction by David M. Bethea
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R773
R666
Discovery Miles 6 660
Save R107 (14%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Necropolis is an unconventional literary memoir by Vladislav
Khodasevich, hailed by Vladimir Nabokov as "the greatest Russian
poet of our time." In each of the book's nine chapters, Khodasevich
memorializes a significant figure of Russia's literary Silver Age,
and in the process writes an insightful obituary of the era.
Written at various times throughout the 1920s and 1930s following
the deaths of its subjects, Necropolis is a literary graveyard in
which an entire movement, Russian Symbolism, is buried. Recalling
figures including Alexander Blok, Sergey Esenin, Fyodor Sologub,
and the socialist realist Maxim Gorky, Khodasevich tells the story
of how their lives and artworks intertwined, including a
notoriously tempestuous love triangle among Nina Petrovskaya,
Valery Bryusov, and Andrei Bely. He testifies to the seductive and
often devastating power of the Symbolist attempt to turn one's life
into a work of art and, ultimately, how one man was left with the
task of memorializing his fellow artists after their deaths.
Khodasevich's portraits deal with revolution, disillusionment,
emigration, suicide, the vocation of the poet, and the place of the
artist in society. One of the greatest memoirs in Russian
literature, Necropolis is a compelling work from an overlooked
writer whose gifts for observation and irony show the early
twentieth-century Russian literary scene in a new and more intimate
light.
Russian poet, soldier, and statesman Gavriil Derzhavin (1743-1816)
lived during an epoch of momentous change in Russia - imperial
expansion, peasant revolts, war with Turkey, and struggle with
Napoleon - and he served three tsars, including Catherine the
Great. Here in its first English translation is the masterful
biography of Derzhavin by another acclaimed Russian man of letters,
Vladislav Khodasevich. Derzhavin occupied a position at the center
of Russian life, uniting civic service with poetic inspiration and
creating an oeuvre that at its essence celebrated the triumphs of
Russia and its rulers, particularly Catherine the Great. His
biographer Khodasevich, by contrast, left Russia in 1922, unable to
abide the increasingly repressive regime of the Soviets. For
Khodasevich, whose lyric poems were as commonplace in their focus
as Derzhavin's odes were grand, this biography was in a sense a
rediscovery of a lost and idyllic era, a period when it was
possible to aspire to the pinnacles of artistic achievement while
still occupying a central role in Russian society. Khodasevich
writes with humor, intelligence, and understanding, and his work
stands as a monument to the last three centuries of Russian
history, lending keen insight into Russia's past as well as its
present and future.
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