Khodasevich derzhavin biography

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.
Russian poet, soldier, and statesman Gavriil Derzhavin (1743–1816) lived during an epoch of momentous change in Russia—imperial expansion, peasant revolts, war.
Russian poet, soldier, and statesman Gavriil Derzhavin (1743–1816) lived during an epoch of momentous change in Russia–imperial expansion, peasant revolts, war.

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Derzhavin: A Biography

March 19, 2009

This biography is astonishing for the sheer number of its narrative moods, the diversity of genres it here and there evokes. Over the course of 258 pages, Khodasevich sounds like an 18th century teller of picaresque tall tales; a “postmodern” minimalist absurdist nihilist fabulist; a theorist of the evolution of poetic form; a graceless annalist, a chronicler-monk, of some stylistically primitive but war-torn pre-modern era. It’s the last guise, taking over narration for the whole of Chapter 3, which caused me to put the book aside for six weeks. Khodasevich narrates Derzhavin’s involvement, as a young army officer, in the suppression of the Pugachev rebellion with the faux-naïve, This Happened Then That Happened style devoid of the sweeping summaries that are the fast-forward button of sophisticated historical writing. If this is a clever literary joke, it’s not funny. The problem with that kind of narration is that the rebellion, even when redacted to Derzhavin’s role in it, was so long-lasting, so geographically diffuse and generally anti

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Derzhavin: A Biography (Publications of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies) - Hardcover

Derzhavin (Hardcover)

Vladislav Khodasevich

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Hardcover. Condition: new. Hardcover. 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 com

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Derzhavin
A Biography
Vladislav Khodasevich
Translated and with an introduction by Angela Brintlinger

A Publication of the Wisconsin Center for Pushkin Studies
General Editors: David M. Bethea and Alexander Dolinin

"Khodasevich, himself a major poet and brilliant literary historian and critic, created a work that demonstrates in a real sense what it must have felt like to see the boisterous eighteenth-century Russian world through Derzhavin's eyes."–David M. Bethea, University of WisconsinMadison, series editor

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 oeuv