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

title poem, Khodasevich breaks away from this youth, claiming his new poetic beginning
as the discovery of the true way of the grain.
In an attempt to understand this break with his past more fully, I will now turn
briefly to Khodasevich's early period. After first providing some background information
on his mystical relationship with the poet Muni, I will discuss the connections between
the first two editions of Путем зерна and Khodasevich's early work and biography.
Muni
Khodasevich met Muni in the end of 1905, and within a year they were virtually
inseparable. Muni served as a witness to Khodasevich’s divorce from his first wife,
Marina Ryndina; Khodasevich was practically a member of Muni’s extended Briusovian
family (Muni married Briusov's younger sister Lidia in 1909). Khodasevich later would
write of Muni as one the most important and dearest people in his life. 40
In his 1926 memoir of Muni, Khodasevich remembers their years together (1905-
14) as a time infused with symbolism: В горячем, предгрозовом воздухе тех лет было
трудно дышать, нам все представлялось двусмысленным и двузначащим,
очертания предметов казались шаткими…Каждое событие, сверх своего явного
смысла, еще обретало второй, который надобно было расшифровать…Таким
образом, жили мы в двух мирах. 41
Khodasevich recognizes their own agency in
creating this double world: «Символический быт», который мы создали, то есть
более позднем стихотворении Ходасевич полемизирует со своей декадентской молодостью.
Khodasevich, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 1, 280.
40 “Он [Андрей Белый] один из самых важных людей в моей духовной биографии и один из самых
дорогих мне людей вообще. Он—да поэт С.В. Киссин (Муни), умерший в 1916 г.” John Malmstad,
"A. Belyi i P.N. Zaitsev: Perepiska," in Minuvsheе: Istoricheskii al'manakh 13 (Moscow-St. Petersburg:
Atheneum-Feniks, 1993), 218.
41 Khodasevich, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, vol. 4, 69.
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