Russian Rhyming with Latin: A Neglected Poem by Vladislav Khodasevich

Abstract

The article opens with critical remarks on the highly valuable, but abounding in lacunae edition of The Complete Poetical Works of V. Khodasevich, published in 2009 by John Malmstad and Robert Hughes as the first volume of the Collected Works of the poet. It is regrettable that the rich manuscript collection held by The Russian State Archive of Literature and Arts (Moscow) has found but little use in the edition. As a result, many subsequently revised or discarded variants preserved in the manuscripts of the poems of 1900s and 1910s as well as a number of sketches still remain unpublished. Another lacuna is the poem In a Polish Church (1918): it was published by Malmstad and Hughes in the supplements to the second volume of their Ardis edition (1990), but strangely disappeared from The Collected Poetical Works. It is an eight-line piece which paints, as could be gathered from the rough notes, a burial service held for a killed soldier and is in itself a curious macaronic experiment, for in each of the two four-line rhyming verses, two lines are in Russian, while the remaining two — fragments of the funeral mass and the Gospels — are in Latin. This article offers a critical edition of these verses together with an attempt of a commentary.