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Speaker(s): Luke Parker

Coming to maturity on the eve of the First World War, the Russian poet Vladislav Khodasevich (1886-1939) went, with the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922, from celebrated author to persona non grata. Following a period of febrile artistic activity in the dire circumstances of revolutionary Petrograd (St. Petersburg), Khodasevich left Russia for first Berlin and then Paris, his home in permanent exile from 1925. His final two collections The Heavy Lyre (1922) and European Night (1927) are testament to a remarkable struggle to keep the Russian literary tradition alive in the midst of historical and biographical cataclysm.

In this workshop, we will trace his movement between the three Russian, German, and French literary capitals during the nineteen-twenties. Reading a dozen of his most representative poems will enable us to see this poet, an ironic Symbolist and ardent traditionalist, as a little-known representative of European modernism. His response to a period of extraordinary political and artistic turbulence is paradoxically representative of his generation, and allows a new perspective on his better-known contemporaries Maxim Gorky and Vladimir Nabokov. This research forms part of my dissertation project on Russian writers in Berlin and Paris after the First World War, a short section of which will be circulated with the poems beforehand.

Luke Parker is a Ph.D. candidate in the Slavic department at ������ý, completing his dissertation entitled “Une Saison en Europe: Metropolis and Parody in the Russian First Wave Emigration (1920-1940).” As a Humanities + Design Research Fellow this year, he is writing a final chapter using the tools of digital humanities to analyze Vladimir Nabokov’s physical and conceptual movement between Berlin and Paris in the nineteen-thirties.