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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2022
With its central image of the old masturbator in the Berlin “underground” restroom, Khodasevich's poem “Under the Ground” (1923) both shocked and fascinated its readers. Khodasevich's intervention into two taboo themes in turn-of-the-century European culture—masturbation and public restrooms—is primarily self-reflexive, indicating his anxieties about the ambiguous place and status of a modernist poet and exploring the norms of poetic representation. The essay proposes to read “Under the Ground” as a site of contested and mutually commenting meanings among concerns about taboo sites of urban modernity, a self-reflexive vision of autoerotism, and aesthetic modernism with an emphasis on the shock effect. In analyzing Khodasevich's radicalization of his modernist poetics through the re-appropriation of these taboo themes, I also examine how current theorizations in the developing subfields of sexuality and urban studies that deal with masturbation and restrooms can contribute to the ongoing research on modernist authorship as understood through the figure of the poet-flâneur.
This article was implemented in the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE-University St. Petersburg).
1 Khodasevich, Vladislav, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow, 1997), 1:264–65Google Scholar (hereafter, SS); and translation, slightly amended: Bethea, David M., Khodasevich: His Life and Art (Princeton, 1983), 292–93Google Scholar. All other translations from Russian are mine, unless otherwise noted.
2 V. Sirin (Vladimir Nabokov), “Vladislav Khodasevich. Sobranie stihkov,” in Vladimir Nabokov, Sobranie sochinenii russkogo perioda v piati tomakh (St. Petersburg, 1999), 2:651–52.
3 Etkind, Aleksandr, Tolkovanie puteshestvii: Rossiia i Amerika v travelogakh i intertekstakh (Moscow, 2001), 711Google Scholar.
4 Bogomolov, Nikolai, “Zhizn΄ i poeziia Vladislava Khodasevicha,” in Khodasevich, Vladislav, Stikhotvoreniia (Leningrad, 1989), 45Google Scholar.
5 See Dolinin, Aleksandr and Bogdanov, Konstantin, “Aleksandr Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestvii,” Novaia Russkaia Kniga 1, no. 12 (2002): 85Google Scholar.
6 This is how Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy defined the location of Khodasevich’s poem, in commenting on a recent translation of Nabokov’s review; see Nabokov, Vladimir, Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor, eds. Boyd, Brian and Tolstoy, Anastasia (New York, 2019), 494Google Scholar.
7 In one case, the euphemistic retelling of Khodasevich’s poem has strained the language in a catachrestic way: “Khodasevich’s ‘Under the Ground’ tells the story of an old man who relieves his impulse” (rasskaz o starike, oblegchaiushchem svoi poryv). Galcheva, Tania, “Krizis molchaniia v poezii Vladislava Khodasevicha i v proze Georgiia Ivanova,” Slavia Orientalis 44, no. 4 (1995): 509Google Scholar. For a characteristically euphemistic interpretation of the poem, one can see Iurii Kolker’s comment in the two-volume émigré edition of Khodasevich: “In this poem, Khodasevich, for the first time in Russian poetry and with his inherent tact, sheds light on one of the painful questions of the modern age (novogo vremeni).” Khodasevich, Vladislav, Sobranie stikhov v dvukh tomakh, ed. Kolker, Iurii (Paris, 1983), 2:376Google Scholar. Khodasevich was not the first to deal with the theme of masturbation in Russian modernist poetry. See, for instance, Ivan Ignat΄ev’s poem “Onan,” in Ivan Ignat΄ev, Eshafot: Ego-futury (St. Petersburg, 1914), 10, and Aleksandr Tiniakov’s poem “Onanu” (To Onan) (1906), Aleksandr Tiniakov (Odinokii), Stikhotvoreniia (Tomsk, 1998), 203. According to Tiniakov, he let Khodasevich know about his poem in 1907 (ibid., 318). However, Khodasevich’s relocating this theme in the modern urban setting of a public under the ground restroom indeed seems to set a precedent in Russian poetry.
8 Sanyal, Debarati, The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (Baltimore, 2006), 25Google Scholar.
9 On the intersectional research of masturbation and restrooms, see, inter alia, Bennett, Paula and Rosario, Vernon A., eds., Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Laqueur, Thomas W., Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York, 2003)Google Scholar; Gershenson, Olga and Penner, Barbara, eds., Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender (Philadelphia, 2009)Google Scholar; Molotch, Harvey and Norén, Laura, eds., Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York, 2010)Google Scholar; and Cavanagh, Sheila L., Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality and the Hygienic Imagination (Toronto, 2010)Google Scholar.
10 Paula Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario, “Introduction: The Politics of Solitary Pleasures,” in Bennett and Rosario, eds., Solitary Pleasures, 2; and Laqueur, Solitary Sex, 76–80.
11 Bennett and Rosario, “Introduction,” 14; Laqueur, Solitary Sex, 71, 229. On the replication of such public discourse on masturbation in turn-of-the-century Russia, see Laura Engelstein, The Key to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Ithaca, 1992), 222, 226–29, 244–45.
12 Laqueur, Solitary Sex, 397–420; and Lawrence R. Schehr, “Fragments of a Poetics: Bonnetain and Roth,” in Bennett and Rosario, eds., Solitary Pleasures, 221–22.
13 Laqueur, Solitary Sex, 185–86.
14 Schehr, “Fragments of a Poetics,” 221.
15 Bennett and Rosario, “Introduction,” 14.
16 Schehr, “Fragments of a Poetics,” 221.
17 As Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex, 210, has observed, masturbation is “the sexuality of modern self” (emphasis added).
18 Ian Scott Todd, “Dirty Books: Modernism and the Toilet,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 58, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 191.
19 Andrew Brown-May and Peg Fraser, “Gender, Respectability, and Public Convenience in Melbourne, Australia, 1859–1902,” in Olga Gershenson and Barbara Penner, eds., Ladies and Gents, 76–77; see likewise Ruth Barcan, “Dirty Spaces: Separation, Concealment, and Shame in the Public Toilet,” in Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén, eds., Toilet, 25–28.
20 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Orlando, 2005), 70; quoted in Todd, “Dirty Books,” 191.
21 Gleb Struve, “Tikhii ad. O poezii Khodasevicha,” Za svobody! 59, no. 2391 (March 11, 1928): 6.
22 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (London, 1964), 12; and T. S. Eliot, “What Dante Means to Me,” in T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic, and Other Writings (New York, 1965), 126. Eliot here, of course, rephrases Baudelaire’s own definition of modernist art.
23 See Viacheslav Vs. Ivanov, “Bodler pered zerkalom,” Inostrannaia literatura 1 (January 1989), 139; and Pavel Uspenskii, “Pochemu V. Khodasevich perevodil v emigratsii ‘Stikhotvoreniia v proze’ Sh. Bodlera? (O roli perevodov v tvorcheskoi evoliutsii poeta),” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 93 (2016): 140–41.
24 See Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, trans. Howard Eiland, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass., 2006); T. S. Eliot, “Baudelaire,” in T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London, 1932), 381–92; Eliot, “What Dante Means to Me,” 125–35; Paul Valéry, “The Position of Baudelaire,” in Henri Peyre, ed., Baudelaire: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1962), 7–18; and Erich Auerbach, “The Aesthetic Dignity of the Fleurs du mal,” in Erich Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim, Catherine Garvin, and Erich Auerbach (Minneapolis, 1984), 201–49.
25 See Michael W. Jennings, “On the Banks of a New Lethe: Commodification and Experience in Walter Benjamin’s Late Work,” boundary 2 30, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 90–91; Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan (Stanford, 2000), 156–58; and Ulrich Baer, “Modernism and Trauma,” in Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, eds., Modernism: A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages (Amsterdam, 2007), 1:308. In Russian modernist poetry, Valerii Briusov initiated the appropriation of Baudelaire’s urban poetics, modifying love themes of “À une passante” (To a Passerby). Briusov’s Baudelairean urbanism was perceived, however, as a “decadent” departure from “proper” symbolism. Aleksandr Blok adopted this thematics, merging it with his myth of the Eternal Feminine; see Joan Delaney Grossman, Valery Bryusov and the Riddle of Russian Decadence (Berkeley, 1985), 207–8; Adrian Wanner, Baudelaire in Russia (Gainesville, 1996), 88; I. S. Prikhod΄ko, “Traditsii Bodlera v briusovskoi traktovke temy goroda,” Liricheskoe nachalo i ego funktsii v khudozhestvennom proizvedenii (Vladimir, 1989), 99–100; Gerald Pirog, “Melancholy Illuminations: Mourning Becomes Blok’s Stranger,” Russian Literature 50, no. 1 (July 2001): 107–10; and Stuart H. Goldberg, “Your Mistress or Mine? Briusov, Blok and the Boundaries of Poetic ‘Propriety,’” Slavic and East European Journal 60, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 661, 669.
26 The arcades stand in the center of Benjamin’s unfinished The Arcades Project and its accompanying works, as it became a particularly concentrated symbol of the mercantile capitalism of the period, “a world in miniature,” in Michael W. Jennings’ words; see Michael W. Jennings, “Introduction,” in Walter Benjamin, Writer of Modern Life, 8. On Benjamin’s Arcades Projects, the most detailed research is Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
27 Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley, 2007), 60, 74.
28 Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London, 1994), 5.
29 Benjamin, Writer of Modern Life, 172, 175–77; see likewise Kevin Newmark, “Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter,” in Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, 1995), 238–39.
30 Benjamin, Writer of Modern Life, 149; Michael W. Jennings, “Introduction,” 15; Josephine Diamond, “Paris, Baudelaire and Benjamin: The Poetics of Urban Violence,” in Mary Ann Caws, ed., City Images: Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy and Film (New York, 1991), 172; and Kevin Newmark, “Baudelaire’s Other Passer-by,” L’Esprit Créateur 58, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 21.
31 See Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 2.
32 Benjamin, Writer of Modern Life, 45, 67–70; Brand, Spectator and the City, 6; Tom Gunning, ‘‘From Kaleidoscope to X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin and Traffic in Souls (1913),’’ Wide Angle 19, no. 4 (October 1997): 28; and David Frisby, “The Flâneur in Social Theory,” in Keith Tester, ed., The Flâneur (New York, 1994), 86.
33 Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering,” New German Critique 39, Second Special Issue on Walter Benjamin (Autumn 1986): 105.
34 See Benjamin, Writer of Modern Life, 79–85, 186–88.
35 Similarly, Khodasevich’s poet-flâneur easily designates various urban types as they enter the subterranean restroom (“Schoolchildren, soldiers, a workman / in a blue shirt drop by”), while the masturbator refuses to conform to any established typology.
36 See the last quatrain of “Seven Old Men”: “Vainly my reason reached to clutch the helm; / The giddy tempest baffled every grasp, / And my soul danced in circles like a hull / Dismasted, on a monstrous shoreless sea!” Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, trans. James McGowan (Oxford, 1993), 181. On the significance of Poe’s story for Baudelaire’s subsequent elaboration of the concept flâneur in his key essay “The Painter of Modern Life” and in his poetry, in particular in “Seven Old Men,” see Baudelaire, Painter of Modern Life, 7; Edward S. Cutler, Recovering the New: Transatlantic Roots of Modernism (Hanover, 2003), 106–7; and Patrizia Lombardo, Cities, Words and Images: From Poe to Scorsese (New York, 2003), 62–63.
37 See Khodasevich, SS, 4:366.
38 See Pavel Uspenskii, “Travma emigratsii: Fizicheskaia ushcherbnost΄ v ‘Evropeiskoi nochi’ V. Khodasevicha,” in Lea Pild, ed., Aleksandr Blok i russkaia literatura Serebrianogo veka, Blokovskii Sbornik, 19, Acta slavica estonica 7 (Tartu, 2015): 192, 201.
39 See, for instance, Victor Shklovskii’s anti-capitalist correlation of the widespread gay prostitution in the 1920s with the deteriorating Weimar socio-economic situation: “in the dark public toilets of Berlin, men indulge in mutual onanism (zanimaiutsia drug s drugom onanizmom). They are suffering from a devalued currency and hunger; their country is perishing.” Victor Shklovskii, Zoo, or Letters Not about Love, ed. and trans. Richard Sheldon (Ithaca, 1971), 136. Probably influenced by Khodasevich’s “Under the Ground,” this description was a part of the “Postscript” written after Shklovskii returned to Russia in 1923, which was inserted in the second edition of A Sentimental Journey (Leningrad, 1924), 185–86; see Shklovskii, Zoo, or Letters Not about Love, 161. It seems that “mutual onanism” was not rare in the Weimar era. Thus, in 1935, Nazi legislators added “mutual masturbation” to the Federal Criminal Code against homosexual relationships; see Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (Los Angeles, 2000), 83.
40 See Nina Berberova, “Chetyre pis΄ma V. I. Ivanova k V. F. Khodasevichu,” Novyi zhurnal 62 (December 1960): 286–87. On the “vertical” axis of the Symbolist Weltanschauung, occurring predominantly in Khodasevich’s pre-émigré book The Heavy Lyre (1922), see Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Andrei Bely: The Major Symbolist Fiction (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 42, 94.
41 Khodasevich, SS, 4:483.
42 It seems that Nina Berberova was the first to draw the line connecting Khodasevich and Baudelaire (and Mallarmé) in their respective “struggles” against major literary schools of their times—romanticism and symbolism. In her unpublished October 27, 1986, letter to Michael Kreps, she writes: “Russian symbolism was Russian romanticism, the last ‘Christian’ trend in European cultural history. . .. I would very much like you to pay attention to [Khodasevich’s] struggle against Romanticism—this, as he himself understood, was his ‘role,’ his ‘life’ and ‘literary’ task. . ..You remember that he loved and translated Baudelaire. He felt in both of them [Baudelaire and Mallarmé] their struggle against Romanticism, and they, indeed, destroyed it (Romanticism).” Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Nina Berberova Papers, GEN MSS 182, Box 12, folder 323.
43 Wladimir Weidle, “A Double-Edged Ars Poetica,” Carl R. Proffer, trans., Russian Literature Triquarterly 2 (Winter 1972): 339.
44 Khodasevich, SS, 1:250.
45 “[T]he shiver running over my skin” is a paraphrase of the expression “drozh΄ po kozhe” (goose pimples). Khodasevich’s psychosomatic definition of his preferable creative state echoes Baudelaire’s elaboration of his shock-driven poetics in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life”: “I am prepared to . . . assert that inspiration has something in common with a convulsion, and that every sublime thought is accompanied by a more or less violent nervous shock which has its repercussions in the very core of the brain,” Baudelaire, Painter of Modern Life, 8.
46 In the analysis of this poem, I have refrained from discussing how skillfully Khodasevich embodies its disruptive subject-matter into its sound instrumentation and rhythmic patterning; this has been persuasively examined in Bethea’s Khodasevich, 281; and Michael Wachtel’s “Vladislav Khodasevich as Innovator,” in Living through Literature: Essays in Memory of Omry Ronen, eds. Julie Hansen, Karen Evans-Romaine, and Herbert Eagle (Uppsala, 2019), 70–73.
47 Khodasevich, SS, 1:440.
48 See Bethea, Khodasevich, 281; Wachtel, “Vladislav Khodasevich as Innovator,” 72; and Weidle, “A Double-Edged Ars Poetica,” 340.
49 Orpheus was the image prevalent in Khodasevich’s pre-émigré poetry and central in his “Ballad” (1921), marking the highest point of Khodasevich’s self-identification with the values of theurgic symbolism—which Ivanov could not fail to recognize and appreciate; see Bogomolov, “Zhizn΄ i poeziia Vladislava Khodasevicha,” 19, 25, 33.
50 Benjamin, Writer of Modern Life, 98; Rob Shields, “Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin’s Notes on flânerie,” in Keith Tester, ed., The Flâneur (New York, 1994), 63. See, for instance, the poem “Skvoz΄ nenastnyi zimnii denek” (Through a rainy winter day): “I followed them for a long time, / And they came to the railway station” (Я за ними долго шагал, / И пришли они на вокзал), Khodasevich, SS, 1:28. In another poem, “Berlinskoe” (Berlin poem), mentioned by Struve, the convalescent observer-poet, looking through a café window and discerning a distorted reflection of his head, echoes Poe’s convalescent narrator, meeting with his alter-ego in “The Man of the Crowd.” See, likewise, Jason Brooks, “Peering and the Poem: The Poetics of Voyeurism and Exile in Khodasevich’s ‘Okna vo dvor,’” Slavic and East European Journal 55, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 245–63.
51 Significantly, the cycle “U moria” (By the Sea), which was included in “European Night” and which contains its tutorial image: “He is twisting his hands / Under black European night” (Под европейской ночью черной / Заламывает руки он), Khodasevich, SS, 1:254, was initially called “Cain” who appears there as the poet’s alter ego. On Poe’s and Baudelaire’s employment of the images of the obsessive wanderers Cain and the Wandering Jew (another self-reflexive image of “European Night”) in their flâneur works, see Steven Fink, “Who Is Poe’s ‘Man of the Crowd’?” Poe Studies 44, no. 1 (2011): 17–38; and Brand, Spectator and the City, 86.
52 Khodasevich, SS, 1:454.
53 See Frederick S. Frank and Anthony Magistrale, eds., The Poe Encyclopedia (Westport, 1997), 219; Dawn B. Sova, Edgar Allan Poe, A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work (New York, 2001), 148; and Brett Bowles, “Poetic Practice and Historical Paradigm: Charles Baudelaire’s Anti-Semitism,” PMLA 115, no. 2 (March 2000): 202.
54 On the dynamics of relations between the narrator and the man of the crowd, see Brand, Spectator and the City, 84–88.
55 See Vladislav Khodasevich, Kamer-fur΄erskii zhurnal, ed. Ol΄ga Demidova (Moscow, 2002), 33–35, 473.
56 See Alexander Dolinin, “The Stepmother of Russian Cities: Berlin of the 1920’s through the Eyes of Russian Writers,” in Gennady Barabtarlo, ed., Cold Fusion: Aspects of the German Cultural Presence in Russia (New York, 2000), 238; and Vadim Andreev, Istoriia odnogo puteshestviia (Moscow, 1974), 247.
57 See the map of nighttime Weimar Berlin in Gordon, Voluptuous Panic, 257–59.
58 Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (Chicago, 1970), 27–28, 49.
59 On the linkage between masturbation and homosexuality in the European cultural imagination, see Laqueur, Solitary Sex, 254–67.
60 See Andrei Belyi, “‘Tiazhelaia lira’ i russkaia lirika,” Sovremennye zapiski 15, no. 2 (1923): 374–88; and Nikolai Bogomolov, Russkaia literatura pervoi treti XX veka: Portrety, problemy, razyskaniia (Tomsk, 1999), 359–73.
61 See, respectively, “I lazily walk through the halls, / Sick of truths and beauties”; “Yes, it is not a panther / that chased me to a Parisian attic. / And there is no Virgil accompanying me. / There is only loneliness / in the frame of the truth-telling mirror.” Khodasevich, SS, 1:268, 277. Characteristically, in the first case, Khodasevich disparagingly calls a museum a “Repository” (Khranilishche), as if by its very retitling depriving it of its traditional high cultural status.
62 Khodasevich, SS, 1:404–405.
63 Valerii Briusov, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh (Moscow, 1973), 1:35. Indeed, this dream-like world became liable to sexual interpretations. Making the poem an object of ridicule, Vladimir Solov΄ev points out, with feigned indignity, the indecency of its imagery: the crescent moon (mesiats), rises naked before the feminine full moon (luna, feminine in Russian). Vladimir Solov΄ev, “Eshche o simvolistakh,” Vestnik Evropy 10 (October, 1895): 847–51; see likewise Grossman, Valery Bryusov and the Riddle of Russian Decadence, 43.
64 Khodasevich, SS, 1:223.
65 See A. Leslie Wilson, ed. German Romantic Criticism, trans. Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (New York, 1982), 126.
66 Khodasevich, SS, 1:241. Iaroslava Ananko has likewise pointed out to the self-referential character of “mechtoi” (“by his wild dream”), which is used in Khodasevich’s pre-émigré poetry to designate subliminal aspirations of his poetry; Iaroslava Ananko, Kanikuly Kaina: Poetika promezhutka v berlinskikh stikhakh V. F. Khodasevicha (Moscow, 2020), 263.
67 Ibid., 198. Roman Gul΄ referred to this poem as one of the prominent examples of Khodasevich’s “poetry of narcissism” in his eponymous article; Roman Gul΄, Odvukon΄: Sovetskaia i emigrantskaia literatura (New York, 1973), 128.
68 Bennett and Rosario, “Introduction,” 10.
69 Bethea, Khodasevich, 293–94.
70 See Khodasevich, SS, 2:256–58.
71 On Khodasevich’s hybrid, Russian-Polish-Jewish identity and his critique of essentialist tendencies in contemporary Russian literature, see Edward Waysband, “Vladislav Khodasevich’s ‘On Your New, Joyous Path’ (1914–1915): The Russian Literary Empire Interferes in Polish-Jewish Relations,” Slavic and East European Journal 52, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 246–54; and “Between Essentialism and Constructivism: Maksim Gor΄kii and Vladislav Khodasevich on Russian Neo-Peasant Poetry,” Slavic and East European Journal 62, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 672–80.
72 Alexander Kira, The Bathroom (New York, 1976), 193.
73 Todd, “Dirty Books,” 209.
74 Benjamin, Writer of Modern Life, 36; Martina Lauster, “Walter Benjamin’s Myth of the ‘Flâneur,’” The Modern Language Review 102, no. 1 (January 2007): 140–42.
75 Rainer Nägele, “The Poetic Ground Laid Bare (Benjamin Reading Baudelaire),” in David S. Ferris, ed., Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions (Stanford, 1996), 122; and Sanyal, Violence of Modernity, 20–21.
76 Chris Jenks, “Watching Your Step: The History and Practice of the Flâneur,” in Chris Jenks, ed., Visual Culture (New York, 1995), 146; and Rob Shields, “Fancy Footwork,” 65.
77 On the treatment of the surface culture of Weimar Berlin by Russian émigré literature, see Luke Parker, “The Shop Window Quality of Things: 1920s Weimar Surface Culture in Nabokov’s Korol΄, dama, valet,” Slavic Review 77, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 390–416.
78 Significantly, his masturbation is also defined through the double-refracted device of metonymy: it is not his elbow itself but “the frayed elbow of his jacket” that “is somehow thrashing convulsively.”
79 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 818–37; Bennett and Rosario, “Introduction,” 11; and Heather Love, “Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” Criticism 52, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 236.
80 Classen, Howes, and Synnott, Aroma, 5.
81 Characteristically, another subversive poem from “European Night,” “Khranilische” (see p. 23), also undermines flâneur’s visual preferences, now associated with his museum sightseeing, in favor of “modern” visceral experience: “No! enough! Eyelids are heavy / in front of the procession of Madonnas, / And so gratifying is that in the pharmacy / there is sour pyramidon.” Khodasevich, SS, 1:268.
82 See the discussion of “perverts who were on friendly terms with delinquents and akin to madmen” in Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978), 40–44; see likewise Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (New York, 1993), 102.
83 See Olga Matich, Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle (Madison, 2005), 30; and Leonid Livak, In Search of Russian Modernism (Baltimore, 2018), 14.
84 Raymond J. Clark, Catabasis: Vergil and the Wisdom-tradition (Grüner, 1979), 15, on Orpheus’s catabasis; see ibid., 99.
85 See Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Horace Gregory (New York, 1958), 272, 297.
86 The change of stereotyped gender roles between the pushy old woman and the old man, chased away, makes the latter likewise an ironic variant of the gender ambivalent, blind Tiresias from Homer’s Odyssey (this identification is supported likewise by Khodasevich’s subversion of the visual representation). In general, the situation in which the woman, and not a man, “violates” the traditionally segregated male-female spatial borderlines in restrooms is quite exceptional and further undermines the self-integrity of two main male protagonists—now in terms of their gender vulnerability.
87 Maksim Gor΄kii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii: Pis΄ma v dvadtsati chetyrekh tomakh (Moscow, 2009), 14:621.
88 With assumed indignation, Roman Gul΄, for his part, consciously flattened the meaning of “Under the Ground” as being “harshly autoerotic” (grubo autoeroticheskoe po soderzhaniiu); Gul΄, Odvukon΄, 128.
89 Ian Scott Todd has made a suggestion that Peter Walsh’s indignation about the modern omnipresence of the restroom expresses Virginia Woolf’s own indignation about Ulysses’s scatology; Todd, “Dirty Books,” 201.
90 Gor΄kii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 14:246.
91 It seems that Iurii Kolker’s terming masturbation “one of the painful questions of modern times” (see note 7 above) reiterates such a vision.
92 As David Bethea has pointed out, “the walking stick that taps on the pavement seems an image of impotence and frustrated sexuality,” supporting a correspondence between two male characters of the poem; Bethea, Khodasevich, 294. Interestingly, this image likewise reinforces the inscription of Khodasevich’s poem into the flâneur tradition, as Poe’s narrator likewise launches in his quest after his man of the crowd, “seizing [his] hat and cane”; Edgar Allan Poe, The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe (Ware, 2004), 211.
93 In 1923, Gor΄kii declared Khodasevich to be “the best, in my view, poet of the modern Russia,” Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 70: Gor΄kii i sovetskie pisateli: Neizdannaia perepiska (Moscow, 1963), 563. On Gor΄kii’s and Khodasevich’s participation in editing Beseda, see Barry P. Scherr, “A Curtailed Colloquy: Gorky, Khodasevich and Beseda,” in Alexander Dolinin, Lazar Fleishman, and Leonid Livak, eds., Russian Literature and the West: A Tribute for David M. Bethea (Stanford, 2008), 2:129–46.
94 Significantly, while in the first years of his emigration Khodasevich tended to re-publish in Soviet Russia most of his poems that had appeared in émigré periodicals, this was not the case with “Under the Ground.”
95 We can find evidence of Khodasevich’s awareness of what sacrifices this work might demand in Zinaida Gippius’s January 27, 1927, letter to him, persuading him to accept this job despite all scruples; see Zinaida Gippius, Pis΄ma k Berberovoi i Khodasevichu, ed. Erika Freiberger Sheikholeslami (Ann Arbor, 1978), 75–76. Indeed, in his February 14, 1927 letter to his mother, even Gleb Struve, who highly appreciated Khodasevich’s poetry, termed the poet “unprincipled” (besprintsipnyi), referring to his ideological shifts from co-editing Beseda with Gor΄kii to the permanent position in Vozrozhdenie; Gleb Struve, “Rabota v gazete ‘Vozrozhdenie’ (1925–1927),” Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizheniia 145, no. 3 (1985): 215.
96 His literary adversaries in emigration did not lose opportunities to compromise Khodasevich’s solidified central position in émigré literary life by reminding the émigré public about Khodasevich’s former pro-Soviet affiliations. See, for instance, Georgii Ivanov’s 1930 article “K iubileiu V.F. Khodasevicha. Privet ot chitatelia” (On V.F. Khodasevich’s Anniversary. Greetings from a Reader), published under the pen-name “A. Kondrat΄ev,” Chisla 2–3 (1930), 313.
97 Nikolai Bogomolov, Sopriazhenie dalekovatykh: O Viacheslave Ivanove i Vladislave Khodaseviche (Moscow, 2011), 227–28.
98 Actually, he occasionally wrote such poetry during the first half of the 1920s as well. But, as Bogomolov has shown, Khodasevich’s very selection of particular poems written in these years for “European Night” was guided by their accord with the overall Baudelairean atmosphere of this cycle; ibid. 233.
99 In one of his first programmatic articles in Vozrozhdenie, “Besy” (The Devils) (Vozrozhdenie 678, April 11, 1927: 2–3), for instance, Khodasevich presents himself as a protector of traditional literary values, personified in Pushkin’s heritage, against the “devils” of both left-wing emigration and the Soviet Union, the ones who question Pushkin’s centrality for contemporary Russian literature. Identifying political and literary extremism of the Bolsheviks and “anti-Pushkin” avant-gardists, respectively, Khodasevich singles out Boris Pasternak as a prominent exemplar of these “devilish” tendencies. See also Roger Hagglund, “The Adamovič–Xodasevič Polemics,” Slavic and East European Journal 20, no. 3 (Autumn 1976): 241.
100 See Pavel Uspenskii, “Travma emigratsii,” 208.
101 Livak, In Search of Russian Modernism, 119–20; and Edward Waysband, “Putem zerna: Epizod ‘reabilitatsii’ V. Khodasevicha v Sovetskom Soiuze (L. Chertkov i Kratkaia literaturnaia entsiklopediia),” Literaturnyi fakt 9 (2018): 68–76.
102 For a critique of current excessive use of the models of trauma, which often “overlook[s] how texts—and people—actively context the particular violences of a given historical moment (rather than simply ‘bearing witness to them’),” see Sanyal, Violence of Modernity, 4, 6.
103 T. S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrews: Essays on Style and Order (London, 1928), ix; and North Michael, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 106.
104 Livak, In Search of Russian Modernism, 132.