Iaroslava Ananko's book focuses on one of the most interesting and still understudied periods of Vladislav Khodasevich's literary career, when after having established himself as a major contemporary poetic voice with the publication of Grain's Way (1920) and The Heavy Lyre (1922), Khodasevich left Russia for Germany. There, and later in Italy and France, he wrote poems that would eventually constitute the cycle “European Night”—the last cycle in his Collected Poems (1927). Ananko concentrates only on a particular section of “European Night”—poems written in Germany, stating that they display a special thematic unity, though their subject matter permeates “European Night” as a whole. This focus on a particular segment of Khodasevich's poetry has its advantages and disadvantages. It allows Ananko to exhibit real skill in in-depth close reading of the chosen poems, highlighting their thematic and linguistic interconnectedness. It may, however, hinder seeing the forest for the trees, in particular in the case of the German-period poems’ porousness to poetic and extra-poetic processes in Khodasevich's overall literary career in the broader context of Russian and European modernism.
Ananko's main conceptual framework that underlines the singularity of the chosen poems draws on Iurii Tynianov's 1924 article “Promezhutok” and its titular image, which can be rendered as “interlude” or “interspace.” She proposes the concept “poetics of the ‘interlude,’” characterized by a self-critical attitude to various poetic conventions. In the first chapter, Ananko shows how Tynianov's notion of “interlude” sheds light on Khodasevich's German period, and, by extension, on the entire period of “European Night,” which she opposes to the “inertia” (another of Tynianov's terms) of Khodasevich's writing in Russia and in the 1930s. The second chapter deals with biblical Cain as the central “autopoetological figure” of the “interlude” (84). In this function, Cain replaced Khodasevich's former key poetic identification with Orpheus. Ananko claims likewise that Cain, with his semantics of wandering, betrayal, and rebellion, is “the main conceptual protagonist of ‘European Night,’” who organizes its “(meta)poetic narrative” (163). This underplays the thematic diversity of the cycle in favor of one, albeit important, field of reference. The third chapter deals with Khodasevich's identity ambiguities that correlate with the book's key themes. Khodasevich's Russian acculturation constituted a “betrayal” of the Polish culture of his family, thus contributing to his identification with Cain both in his life and poetry. In the fourth chapter, Ananko constructs an intricate interconnection between the Berlin interlude and its animal—mainly canine—projections. Here the book is at its best, closely following Khodasevich's thematizations and de-automatizations of various idioms.
Ananko's penetrating analysis of Khodasevich's imagery and linguistic games continues in the last two chapters of the book. Pointing at the concentration of electric imagery in the Berlin poems, she shows how Khodasevich adds nuance to the common modernist thematization of electricity as the predominant feature of the modern cityscape. She then presents a meticulous thematic and syntactic examination of the poems “Under the Ground” and “An Mariechen.” Basing her analysis of Khodasevich's imagery primarily on A. A. Hansen-Löve's fundamental research of the Russian early modernist system of motifs provides her with conceptual and interpretative tools for analyzing Khodasevich's profound dialogue with the Russian symbolist heritage despite the reconfigurations in his émigré poetry (A. A. Hansen-Löve, Der russische Symbolismus: System und Entfaltung der poetischen Motive [Vienna, 1989–2014]). Ananko's referencing of Hansen-Löve's research shows, however, its limited applicability to Khodasevich's mature poetry. Her book ends with the statement, variously anticipated throughout, that “European Night” is a “decisive auto-deconstruction of Russian modernism” (294). One may argue, however, that Khodasevich's implicit critiques of symbolism's metaphysical and “life-creative” aspirations, along with his acute reliving the challenges to and self-confirmation of poetic autonomy in post-war and post-revolutionary Europe, correspond to international high modernism's “overcoming” (Victor Zhirmunskii's term) excesses of early modernism in striving for a new, more down-to-earth modernist poetics. Such a view would suggest that the “defeat of modernism,” allegedly dramatized in “An Mariechen,” may be somewhat premature (292).
These reservations notwithstanding, Ananko's book provides a refreshing and stimulating analysis of a number of Khodasevich's poems and encourages further investigation of the qualities that warranted Nabokov's calling him “the greatest Russian poet of our time” (Vladimir Nabokov, “On Hodasevich,” in his Strong Opinions [New York, 1990], 223).
