The Grain’s Way: An episode of Vladislav Khodasevich’s “rehabilitation” in the Soviet Union (Leonid Chertkov and the Concise Literary Encyclopedia)

DOI:

https://www.doi.org/10.22455/2541-8297-2018-9-67-78
Issue:

2018 №9
Author: Edward Waysband
About the author:

Edward Waysband, PhD., research associate, HSE Interdisciplinary Fundamental Research Center, St. Petersburg, Russia.

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Abstract:

Conceived in a short-lived post-Stalin period of the Khrushchev Thaw (ottepel’), the Concise Literary Encyclopedia (1962–1978) represented its characteristic ambivalent attempt to combine Soviet class ideology with Western humanistic values. The Encyclopedia was instrumental in bringing back to the Soviet readership many names of Russian Modernist and émigré literati whose works and even names were previously censored. The article deals with circumstances of the publication of Leonid Chertkov’s article on Vladislav Khodasevich in the Encyclopedia. Chertkov’s 1975 letter to Nina Berberova, which is preserved in her archive in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, provides first-hand evidence of painful compromises that authors and “liberal” editors of the Encyclopedia were obliged to make in order, as it were, to save from oblivion writers whose literary canonization was hindered in the Soviet Union due to ideological reasons.
Keywords: V. Khodasevich, N. Berberova, L. Chertkov, Concise Literary Encyclopedia.
For citation:

Waysband Edward. The Grain’s Way: An episode of Vladislav Khodasevich’s “rehabilitation” in the Soviet Union (Leonid Chertkov and the Concise Literary Encyclopedia). Literary fact, 2018, no. 9, pp. 67–78.
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