THE BOOK OF POEMS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY ... - TopReferat

Open to all, having exhausted all their strength,
Become pregnant onerously and tediously,
And every year they give birth, without bringing their children to term.
In my country deformed children
Are born, condemned to death.
From their fathers I bring you these songs.
I came to you from a dead country.
The central images of "Путем зерна" are already found in this 1907 poem. In the third
stanza of "В моей стране" Khodasevich introduces the sower, seeds, and fathers' fields
which will appear again in 1917. In this country of Khodasevich's youth, however, there
is no cycle of seasons—no chance for rebirth after a period of death. Instead, the land
languishes in the permanent grayness of autumn. The sower uselessly plants lifeless
seeds—the product of his father's fields. Here a tradition of dry dust and despair is
carried on from one deformed generation to another, rather than the fertile tradition of the
poetic forebears of "Путем зерна." The fathers of "В моей стране" bring different,
decadent songs filled with images of decline, death and sexual perverseness.
Noting the poem's dedication to Muni, Andreeva has posited a polemical
relationship between "Путем зерна" and "В моей стране," but she limits her
interpretation to a discussion of Khodasevich and Muni. She claims that the central
images of "В моей стране" are adopted from Muni's poetry, and that Khodasevich
responds to Muni in "Путем зерна" by rejecting these images of death and barrenness. 38
The poem seems, however, not so much an answer to Muni as to Khodasevich's own
early poetry, and decadent, mystical youth. 39
In the book Путем зерна as well as in its
38 Kissin, Legkoe bremia, 311-13.
39 John Malmstad suggests this in his note to "В моей стране": Любопытно, что здесь в третьей строфе
впервые появляются в стихах Ходасевича образы повторены позднее в стихотворении "Путем
зерна" из его третьего, одноименного сборника, также посвященного Муни. Возможно, что в этом
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