Translator’s Acknowledgments
Introduction, by David Bethea
Foreword
1. The Death of Renate
2. Bryusov
3. Andrei Bely
4. Muni
5. Gumilyov and Blok
6. Gershenzon
7. Sologub
8. Esenin
9. Gorky
Translator’s Notes
Index of Names
Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939) was a major figure in
twentieth-century Russian poetry as well as an accomplished critic
and translator. Born into a Polish Catholic noble family in Moscow,
he spent his later life in Berlin and Paris.
Sarah Vitali is a translator and PhD candidate in Slavic languages
and literatures at Harvard University.
Khodasevich’s crystalline, mordant prose is skilfully handled by
Sarah Vitali, who has done justice to the text and supplemented it
with a wealth of endnotes that illuminate its more allusive and
evasive moments. The edition also benefits from a stylish
introduction by David Bethea, which strikes perfectly a balance of
engaging readability and in-depth critical insight.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Completely captivating. . . . These portraits he wrote from 1924 to
1938 of the self-tortured and Soviet-tortured writers feel fresh
and are somehow ever-entertaining.
*Russian Life*
Vitali adds excellent translator's notes and a most useful
explanatory list of everyone named in the volume. Required reading
for students of Russian literature, scholars of comparative
literature and memoir writing, and anyone interested in learning
about literature and literary life in Russia. . . Essential.
*Choice*
Necropolis initiates us into the inner circle of the seminal
figures of Russian Symbolism with uncanny tenderness, equanimity,
and brutality. The intensity of reading Vladislav Khodasevich’s
memoir makes the mind stagger around the charnel ground of the
Symbolist poets and writers.
*Amy Hosig, poet*
An incisive set of memoirs of the leading lights of Russian
Symbolism and its aftermath. This is a stylish, inventive
translation of a key text.
*Robert P. Hughes, University of California, Berkeley*
In Necropolis, the émigré poet Vladislav Khodasevich looks back—now
wistfully, now bitterly—on the major writers and movements of
Russian culture in the pre- and immediate postrevolutionary years.
In Sarah Vitali’s splendid translation, this masterpiece of memoir
literature is finally accessible to the Anglophone reader.
*Michael Wachtel, Princeton University*
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