Derzhavin: A Biography

Acknowledgments

I have now lived with Khodasevich and Derzhavin for over a decade and remain filled with admiration for both men.The opportunity to see this biography published in English provides more than just pleasure. It also provides me with the opportunity to thank the people who have shared my enjoyment and facilitated my work along the way. I first read Derzhavin while conducting research on my dissertation at the University of Wisconsin. David Bethea, Alexander Dolinin, Judith Kornblatt, Yuri Shcheglov, and Alfred Senn helped me define Khodasevich’s place within the early-twentieth-century biographical tradition. I returned to Khodasevich over the next few years in articles and lectures, presenting my work both in the United States and internationally.A special thank you goes to Sergei Fomichev andVladimir Koshelev for bringing my work on Khodasevich to the attention of a Russian-language audience. My first book benefited from the enthusiasm of Caryl Emerson,to whom I am immensely grateful.Caryl was supportive of this translation as well and I appreciate her efforts on my behalf. Over the years friends and colleagues have offered assistance and support,and I am pleased to acknowledge them here. David Bethea was there at the beginning , and we had a terrific time exploring the Khodasevich-Pushkin-Derzhavin connection in our collaborative work. I have continued to receive advice and assistance from David long after his commitment to serve as my dissertation adviser ended. Linguistic consultants on the project included Sergei Davydov, Galya Rylkova, andTatiana Smorodinskaya. Sara Dickinson helped enormously in eighteenth-century matters and gave the manuscript a thorough reading and critique. Graham Hettlinger and Ona Renner-Fahey shared their gifts as talented translators, both prosaic and poetic. Andrew Kahn invested much time and energy in carefully vetting the manuscript. I couldn’t have asked for a more xi Acknowledgments knowledgeable or detail-oriented reader, and I remain in his debt. Alexander Levitsky was also supportive of the project and generously offered up his translations of Derzhavin’s poetry, of which I have made liberal use. In January  I was thrilled to find myself at a Derzhavin conference during my trip to Saint Petersburg to choose illustrative material for the book. What a treat it was for me to announce its forthcoming publication to an international group of eighteenth-century scholars while standing in the very hall in Derzhavin’s house on the Fontanka where Beseda once met and Krylov once dozed! I want to thank Nina Petrovna Morozova, director of the Museum of Derzhavin and Russian Literary Culture of HisTime,for her warm reception.At the Pushkin House (Institute of Russian Literature of theAcademy of Sciences) my stalwart friends Sergei Fomichev and Svetlana Ipatova introduced me to all the right people, including the staff of the literary museum, which was very obliging in facilitating my search for illustrations. My heartfelt thanks to Larissa GeorgievnaAgamalyan, PetrVasilievich Bekedin, Elena Nikolaevna Monakhova, and Ekaterina Gerasimova. Khodasevich writes about the patronage system under which Derzhavin created his poetry. As a modern academic I, too, have benefited from patronage, though not in the form of diamond-encrusted snuffboxes (alas!). My research and reading of Khodasevich’s papers, housed at the Butler Library of Columbia University, was underwritten by the Ohio State Slavic Center.The intellectual leisure I needed to work on the translation was granted by the College of Humanities and the Slavic Department at Ohio State.The college and the department also provided funding to aid in publishing and illustrating this volume. Steve Salemson at the University of Wisconsin Press was a patient and enthusiastic editor, and I am grateful for his commitment to this book. GwenWalker, Matt Levin, and Adam Mehring also proved very helpful. Both Khodasevich and Derzhavin remained childless, and both searched for poetic “children” to whom they might pass their lyre, heirs to their legacies. My own efforts in this vein are incomparably more humble, as Khodasevich might say, if perhaps more personally rewarding.Work on this book began when my first child arrived and continued as we awaited the arrival of the second. If I were a bit less prosaic by nature, I might spin a metaphor of my husband as midwife . Be that as it may, I want to express my thanks to Steve Conn for his love, support, encouragement, and tolerance of my obsessive work habits.To Zachary and Olivia—my beloved, intelligent, and highly amusing children—I dedicate this translation. xii...