‘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.