Necropolis

Vladislav Felicianovich Khodasevich (1886—1939) was not only a prominent and original poet but also left behind an original historical-literary and memoir legacy. In his memories, Khodasevich refuses the temptation to speculate, recreate, or aesthetically deform. He writes about what he saw and heard, meticulously trying to restore the fabric of the bygone era. And if occasionally an inaccuracy creeps into the narrative, it is nothing more than a rare uncharacteristic accident. At the same time, the memoirist does not shy away from generalizations, which almost always naturally arise from a fact or a series of facts. It is this striving for documentary accuracy that distinguishes Khodasevich's memoirs from the memoirs of some other contemporaneous poets. Another important quality is the consistency of judgments: when speaking about the same people in different essays, he never contradicted himself. This edition presents for the first time the book «Necropolis» published in 1939 during Vladislav Khodasevich's lifetime. The essays about V. Bryusov and A. Bely, A. Blok and N. Gumilev, M. Gorky and F. Sologub stand out for their authenticity and retain lasting significance…
The book is aimed at those studying Russian literature of the first half of the 20th century, writers, cultural scholars, and an interested circle of readers.