Derzhavin

The book of the outstanding domestic poet and prose writer Vladislav Felicianovich Khodasevich (1886-1939) includes his biographical novel «Derzhavin» (1931), the article «Derzhavin» (1916), written for the centenary of the death of Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816), in which Khodasevich recontextualizes the work of his great predecessor, as well as the article-mystification «The Life of Vasily Travnikov» (1936), which features a typical biography of a poet of the Derzhavin era, who, however, never existed. The mystification was carried out so successfully that many contemporaries perceived Vasily Travnikov as a real, albeit forgotten poet. One of the tasks of this publication is to recreate the image of a prominent poet and statesman at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries and to show how representatives of the Silver Age, a hundred years after Derzhavin's death, were able to perceive his work, seeing in it, among other things, beginnings that were previously not understood and not demanded by the Golden Age of Russian literature. In this regard, the book also includes materials about Derzhavin from word masters - contemporaries of Khodasevich: Yu. I. Aikhenvald, B.A. Sadovsky, D.P. Svyatopolsky-Mirsky, B.A. Griftsov.