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

heart. His frenzied tone and hatred for all things tender and happy recall Pereyaslavtsev's
self-hatred, or more accurately, hatred of Bol'shakov. He buried Bol'shakov along with
his stupid passion, with his love (Я похоронил его с его глупой восторженностью, с
его любовью (125)). Like Pereyaslavtsev, Khodasevich's persona takes pleasure only in
the violent ends of others—others as remote and exotic as American settlers and Carmen.
Khodasevich published "За окном…" in "Утро России" in February 1916,
shortly before Muni's suicide. He chose to republish it in the second edition of
Счастливый домик (1921) rather than the earlier first edition of Путем зерна (1919-
20). This decision suggests that Khodasevich associated the Pereyaslavtsev voice with
his youthful, more decadent poetry and biography. The poem is irresponsible, and, in
light of Muni's suicide, cruel. Still he feels it is significant enough to add to his second
book. The symbolist experiments with двойничество and жизнетворчество are too
important to ignore. By 1919, when he wrote "Рыбак," Khodasevich realized the danger
of these experiments. He returns to the original self—to the voice of Bol'shakov, the
"true" side of the double—and relieves the fisherman/Bol'shakov/Muni of his
psychological struggle and thus his responsibility. The final darkness in Khodasevich's
poem is thus bleaker than in Muni's skazka—it is entirely hopeless, inevitable, fatal.
Khodasevich excised "Рыбак" from the 1927 edition of Путем зерна, severing
ties to Muni, to his previous book, and to his youthful symbolist experiments. He
gradually turned to an entirely different form of двойничество—a potentially positive
form. Instead of escaping outside of himself to create a new identity, he struggled with
the split between body and soul within himself. While the first edition of Путем зерна
seems more heavily weighted towards frustration with this split ("В заботах каждого
44