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Derzhavin: A 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 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 commonplace in their focus as Derzhavin’s odes were grand, this biography was in a sense a rediscovery of a lost and idyllic era, a period when it was possible to aspire to the pinnacles of artistic achievement while still occupying a central role in Russian society.
Khodasevich writes with humor, intelligence, and understanding, and his work stands as a monument to the last three centuries of Russian history, lending keen insight into Russia’s past as well as its present and future.
“Khodasevich’s light narrative touch (as translated by Brintlinger) lends a novelistic quality to the biography, making it a genuine tour de force. All students and scholars – of history, literature, poetry, biography – will find something of interest here.”— Choice
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 commonplace in their focus as Derzhavin’s odes were grand, this biography was in a sense a rediscovery of a lost and idyllic era, a period when it was possible to aspire to the pinnacles of artistic achievement while still occupying a central role in Russian society.
Khodasevich writes with humor, intelligence, and understanding, and his work stands as a monument to the last three centuries of Russian history, lending keen insight into Russia’s past as well as its present and future.
“Khodasevich’s light narrative touch (as translated by Brintlinger) lends a novelistic quality to the biography, making it a genuine tour de force. All students and scholars – of history, literature, poetry, biography – will find something of interest here.”— Choice
281 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1988
About the author
Vladislav Khodasevich
46 books24 followersVladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich (Russian: Владислав Фелицианович Ходасевич; May 28, 1886 – June 14, 1939) was an influential Russian poet and literary critic who presided over the Berlin circle of Russian emigre litterateurs.
Khodasevich was born in Moscow into a family of Felitsian Khodasevich, a Polish nobleman, and Sofiia Iakovlevna (née Brafman), a Jewish woman who converted to Christianity. His cousin Nadia Khodasevich married Fernand Leger. He left the Moscow University after understanding that poetry was his true vocation. Khodasevich's first collections of poems, Youth (1907) and A Happy Little House (1914), were subsequently discarded by him as immature.
In the year 1917, Khodasevich gained wider renown by writing a superb short piece The Way of Corn, a reflection on the biblical image of wheat as a plant that cannot live if it does not first die. This poem is eponymous with Khodasevich's best known collection of verse, first published in 1920 and revised in 1922.
Patronized by Maxim Gorky, Khodasevich and his wife Nina Berberova (herself a distinguished littérateur, 1901–1993) left Russia for Gorky's villa in Sorrento, Italy. Later they moved to Berlin, where they took up with Andrei Bely. Khodasevich's complicated relationship with this maverick genius ended with a scandalous rupture, followed by the latter's return to Moscow. In his memoirs, Bely presented an unforgettable, expressionistic, and very partial portrayal of Khodasevich.
During his first years in Berlin, Khodasevich wrote his two last and most metaphysical collections of verse, Heavy Lyre (1923) and European Night (1927). The former contained the most important rendition of Orpheus theme in the Russian poetry, the esoteric Ballad. Khodasevich didn't align himself with any of the aesthetic movements of the day, claiming Pushkin to be his only model. He even penned several scholarly articles exploring the master-stroke of the great Russian poet.
In the mid-1920s, Khodasevich switched his literary activities from poetry to criticism. He joined Mark Aldanov and Alexander Kerensky as the co-editor of the Berlin periodical Days, in which he would publish his penetrating analyses of the contemporary Soviet literature. He also indulged in a prolonged controversy with the Parisian emigre pundits, such as Georgy Adamovich and Georgy Ivanov, on various issues of literary theory. As an influential critic, Khodasevich did his best to encourage the career of Vladimir Nabokov, who would always cherish his memory.
Despite a physical infirmity that gradually took hold of him, Khodasevich worked relentlessly during the last decade of his life. Most notably, he wrote an important biography of Gavrila Derzhavin (translated into English and published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2007) in 1931, which he attempted to style in the language of Pushkin's epoch. Several weeks before Khodasevich's death his brilliant book of memoirs, Necropolis, was published. Although severely partisan, the book is invaluable for its ingenious characterizations of Maxim Gorky, Andrei Bely, and Mikhail Gershenzon.
Khodasevich was born in Moscow into a family of Felitsian Khodasevich, a Polish nobleman, and Sofiia Iakovlevna (née Brafman), a Jewish woman who converted to Christianity. His cousin Nadia Khodasevich married Fernand Leger. He left the Moscow University after understanding that poetry was his true vocation. Khodasevich's first collections of poems, Youth (1907) and A Happy Little House (1914), were subsequently discarded by him as immature.
In the year 1917, Khodasevich gained wider renown by writing a superb short piece The Way of Corn, a reflection on the biblical image of wheat as a plant that cannot live if it does not first die. This poem is eponymous with Khodasevich's best known collection of verse, first published in 1920 and revised in 1922.
Patronized by Maxim Gorky, Khodasevich and his wife Nina Berberova (herself a distinguished littérateur, 1901–1993) left Russia for Gorky's villa in Sorrento, Italy. Later they moved to Berlin, where they took up with Andrei Bely. Khodasevich's complicated relationship with this maverick genius ended with a scandalous rupture, followed by the latter's return to Moscow. In his memoirs, Bely presented an unforgettable, expressionistic, and very partial portrayal of Khodasevich.
During his first years in Berlin, Khodasevich wrote his two last and most metaphysical collections of verse, Heavy Lyre (1923) and European Night (1927). The former contained the most important rendition of Orpheus theme in the Russian poetry, the esoteric Ballad. Khodasevich didn't align himself with any of the aesthetic movements of the day, claiming Pushkin to be his only model. He even penned several scholarly articles exploring the master-stroke of the great Russian poet.
In the mid-1920s, Khodasevich switched his literary activities from poetry to criticism. He joined Mark Aldanov and Alexander Kerensky as the co-editor of the Berlin periodical Days, in which he would publish his penetrating analyses of the contemporary Soviet literature. He also indulged in a prolonged controversy with the Parisian emigre pundits, such as Georgy Adamovich and Georgy Ivanov, on various issues of literary theory. As an influential critic, Khodasevich did his best to encourage the career of Vladimir Nabokov, who would always cherish his memory.
Despite a physical infirmity that gradually took hold of him, Khodasevich worked relentlessly during the last decade of his life. Most notably, he wrote an important biography of Gavrila Derzhavin (translated into English and published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2007) in 1931, which he attempted to style in the language of Pushkin's epoch. Several weeks before Khodasevich's death his brilliant book of memoirs, Necropolis, was published. Although severely partisan, the book is invaluable for its ingenious characterizations of Maxim Gorky, Andrei Bely, and Mikhail Gershenzon.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 15, 2026
This biography is notable for the number of its narrative moods, the diversity of genres it here and there evokes. Over 258 pages, Khodasevich sounds like a teller of picaresque tall tales; a minimalist-absurdist-nihilist fabulist; a theorist of poetic form; a graceless annalist, a chronicler-monk of some stylistically primitive but eventful, war-torn era.
It’s the last genre, the narrative style of Chapter 3, which caused me to put the book aside for a few 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. The rebellion, when told this way, even reduced to Derzhavin’s role in it, becomes tedious; it’s important to note that Russians refer to the rebellion as the Pugachevshchina, the suffix referring more to a state of the social mind than to a specific event. As Pushkin pointed out in his History of the Pugachev Revolt, Pugachev wasn't even always involved:
Pugachev’s depredations are about as easy to keep in mind as all the barbarian forays in Gibbon. The 40 pages of that chapter seemed like 200.
Derzhavin performed heroically during the rebellion, but he was young, uncrafty, and maladroit at positioning himself advantageously among other soldiers and civil servants, most of whom were distinguished by cowardice and pointless infighting during the rebellion, but who knew how to claim credit and wrangle imperial gratitude after it had ended. Derzhavin left the army and entered civilian service, where he embarked on a career whose description was my favorite part. Khodasevich writes that Derzhavin’s colleagues in the Imperial bureaucracy “were the ancestors of those who were destined to appear in the works of Gogol in fifty years” — that is, they were buffoonish, lazy, servile, foppish, endlessly corrupt; and completely hilarious. They flattered fulsomely and bowed down low to the Empress, but created little imitations of Empire in their backwater fiefdoms. Derzhavin’s superior as governor of the Olonets province, the Vice-regent Tutolmin, installed a royal throne in his office, and trailed an entourage of sponging fops whose “dandified carriages would dash along the streets of Petrozavodsk, even though it was possible to cross the entire city on foot, from one end to another, in a quarter of an hour.”
Into this entered Derzhavin, earnest, sincere, “honest to the point of pedantry,” and utterly characterized, professionally and poetically, by absolute belief in the pretention to enlightened rule that Catherine the Great at first sowed about herself. He struggled mightily but went nowhere, still believing that Catherine was an inspirational source of law and order whose will had been subverted by corrupt middlemen who hijacked and distorted her contact with the people. Derzhavin’s persistent faith in Catherine (it would sour later) reminded me of something Nadezhda Mandelstam said in one of her memoirs, that during the 1930’s many of the arrested would insist that a mistake had been made, that Stalin had to be told of the atrocities being committed by his underlings. These people would not believe that Stalin could be involved, just as Derzhavin would not admit the fact Catherine was not his ally in his struggles against official corruption. You see a similar dynamic at work in contemporary Russia: people loathe the oligarchs - with reason of course - but look uncritically to Putin to make things right by taking over the oligarch's stolen industries and throwing them in jail. The private grandee is the villain, the Czar pure and saving.
Derzhavin would rise very high, get very rich, but his public career was mostly a story of thwarted energy and wasted hopes. As an honest man in a world of knaves, his honesty was of course taken for knavery. His reputation was bad, even though he was good. At one point he was indicted and put on trial for corruption. This section of the book is full of tales of outrageous imposture and grotesque schemes that Khodasevich’s deadpan tone make a joy to read. The absurdity of it all made me understand what grotesque wonders can be worked by a labyrinthine bureaucracy staffed by the naturally servile and the reflexively corrupt. I thought of Yuri Tynyanov’s Lieutenant Kije, in which a paperwork error creates an officer in Catherine’s army whose nonexistence doesn't keep him from being arrested and exiled to Siberia; eventually redeemed; married; piled with honors and awards; and given a pompous funeral on his death.
At first I curious about the seeming lack of direct poetic criticism, but then I realized that most of Khodasevich’s ideas went way over my head as an American reading this in translation, with no knowledge of Derzhavin or of pre-Pushkin Russian literature. For instance, Khodasevich makes connections between the agricultural and climatic conditions of Derzhavin’s retirement estate and the imagery of the poems Derzhavin wrote there; but he makes these connections fairly obliquely, by embedding lines and epithets from those poems in his descriptions of the estate. Clever and subtle, but thank god for footnotes, because without them I wouldn’t have had a clue.
The pre-Pugachev account of Derzhavin’s military life was a rollicking picaresque yarn complete with wolf attacks, comical duels, tarts in village inns, and a swindling ferryman who Derzhavin chases down with a bayoneted musket; the years of civil service were a Gogolian fantasia; and the criticism was subtle and poetic and occasionally shocking - did you know that the spark of Derzhavin’s poetic ambition was his discovery of Frederick the Great’s poetry? Yes, Frederick’s tortuous attempts at French verse, the bane of Voltaire's visits to Potsdam, some of the worst poetry ever written, one of the the biggest jokes in literary history, was a revelation, the first sponsor and starting-point of Derzhavin’s genius.
It’s the last genre, the narrative style of Chapter 3, which caused me to put the book aside for a few 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. The rebellion, when told this way, even reduced to Derzhavin’s role in it, becomes tedious; it’s important to note that Russians refer to the rebellion as the Pugachevshchina, the suffix referring more to a state of the social mind than to a specific event. As Pushkin pointed out in his History of the Pugachev Revolt, Pugachev wasn't even always involved:
Pugachev was fleeing, but his flight seemed like an invasion. Never had his victories been more horrifying; never had the rebellion raged with greater force. The insurrection spread from village to village, from province to province. Only two or three villains had to appear on the scene, and the whole region revolted. Various bands of plunderers and rioters were formed, each having its own Pugachev…
Pugachev’s depredations are about as easy to keep in mind as all the barbarian forays in Gibbon. The 40 pages of that chapter seemed like 200.
Derzhavin performed heroically during the rebellion, but he was young, uncrafty, and maladroit at positioning himself advantageously among other soldiers and civil servants, most of whom were distinguished by cowardice and pointless infighting during the rebellion, but who knew how to claim credit and wrangle imperial gratitude after it had ended. Derzhavin left the army and entered civilian service, where he embarked on a career whose description was my favorite part. Khodasevich writes that Derzhavin’s colleagues in the Imperial bureaucracy “were the ancestors of those who were destined to appear in the works of Gogol in fifty years” — that is, they were buffoonish, lazy, servile, foppish, endlessly corrupt; and completely hilarious. They flattered fulsomely and bowed down low to the Empress, but created little imitations of Empire in their backwater fiefdoms. Derzhavin’s superior as governor of the Olonets province, the Vice-regent Tutolmin, installed a royal throne in his office, and trailed an entourage of sponging fops whose “dandified carriages would dash along the streets of Petrozavodsk, even though it was possible to cross the entire city on foot, from one end to another, in a quarter of an hour.”
Into this entered Derzhavin, earnest, sincere, “honest to the point of pedantry,” and utterly characterized, professionally and poetically, by absolute belief in the pretention to enlightened rule that Catherine the Great at first sowed about herself. He struggled mightily but went nowhere, still believing that Catherine was an inspirational source of law and order whose will had been subverted by corrupt middlemen who hijacked and distorted her contact with the people. Derzhavin’s persistent faith in Catherine (it would sour later) reminded me of something Nadezhda Mandelstam said in one of her memoirs, that during the 1930’s many of the arrested would insist that a mistake had been made, that Stalin had to be told of the atrocities being committed by his underlings. These people would not believe that Stalin could be involved, just as Derzhavin would not admit the fact Catherine was not his ally in his struggles against official corruption. You see a similar dynamic at work in contemporary Russia: people loathe the oligarchs - with reason of course - but look uncritically to Putin to make things right by taking over the oligarch's stolen industries and throwing them in jail. The private grandee is the villain, the Czar pure and saving.
Derzhavin would rise very high, get very rich, but his public career was mostly a story of thwarted energy and wasted hopes. As an honest man in a world of knaves, his honesty was of course taken for knavery. His reputation was bad, even though he was good. At one point he was indicted and put on trial for corruption. This section of the book is full of tales of outrageous imposture and grotesque schemes that Khodasevich’s deadpan tone make a joy to read. The absurdity of it all made me understand what grotesque wonders can be worked by a labyrinthine bureaucracy staffed by the naturally servile and the reflexively corrupt. I thought of Yuri Tynyanov’s Lieutenant Kije, in which a paperwork error creates an officer in Catherine’s army whose nonexistence doesn't keep him from being arrested and exiled to Siberia; eventually redeemed; married; piled with honors and awards; and given a pompous funeral on his death.
At first I curious about the seeming lack of direct poetic criticism, but then I realized that most of Khodasevich’s ideas went way over my head as an American reading this in translation, with no knowledge of Derzhavin or of pre-Pushkin Russian literature. For instance, Khodasevich makes connections between the agricultural and climatic conditions of Derzhavin’s retirement estate and the imagery of the poems Derzhavin wrote there; but he makes these connections fairly obliquely, by embedding lines and epithets from those poems in his descriptions of the estate. Clever and subtle, but thank god for footnotes, because without them I wouldn’t have had a clue.
The pre-Pugachev account of Derzhavin’s military life was a rollicking picaresque yarn complete with wolf attacks, comical duels, tarts in village inns, and a swindling ferryman who Derzhavin chases down with a bayoneted musket; the years of civil service were a Gogolian fantasia; and the criticism was subtle and poetic and occasionally shocking - did you know that the spark of Derzhavin’s poetic ambition was his discovery of Frederick the Great’s poetry? Yes, Frederick’s tortuous attempts at French verse, the bane of Voltaire's visits to Potsdam, some of the worst poetry ever written, one of the the biggest jokes in literary history, was a revelation, the first sponsor and starting-point of Derzhavin’s genius.
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January 4, 2022В этой небольшой изящной книге Ходасевич рассказывает биографию знаменитого русского поэта второй половины XVIII века. Казалось бы, кому нужен этот Державин после того, как ты уже рассказал на уроке отрывок из какой-нибудь его оды. Оказывается, у него была потрясающе интересная жизнь. Родившийся в семье обедневших дворян, он начал службу простым рядовым в гвардии, а закончил карьеру членом Сената и прославленным на всю страну поэтом. Книга написана прекрасным языком, чувствуется большая любовь автора к русскому слову. Давно я не читала книг, где приходилось бы смотреть иные термины в словаре. Конечно, для некоторых читателей это может быть и недостатком, но я была приятно удивлена.
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