Nina Berberova and Vladislav Khodasevich

Nina Berberova is one of the most important and eminent figures in the history of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry. She was a black-eyed beauty, literary critic, possessor of uncommon intellect and riotous imagination. She is the author of "Tchaikovsky: The Story of a Lonely Life", "Borodin", "Without a Sunset", "Aleksandr Blok: A Life", "The Easing of Fate", "The Italics Are Mine", and "Lyudi i lozhi" ("People and Lodges"). Her memoirs have also preserved many details − sometimes far-fetched, sometimes not − about the most famous representatives of the Russian emigration, such as Maxim Gorky, Ivan Bunin, Marina Tsvetaeva, Georgy Ivanov and Zinaida Gippius.

Vladislav Khodasevich was a critic, translator, historian, thinker and literary man. He communicated extensively with Andrei Bely, lived in Maxim Gorky’s family, and wrote feuilletons about Soviet literature. He was invited to work for the newspapers Russkiye Vedomosti, Utro Rossii and Novaya Zhizn. In 1925, Vladislav Khodasevich and Nina Berberova moved to Paris. As a critic, Vladislav Khodasevich engaged in polemics with Georgy Ivanov and Georgy Adamovich, particularly on the tasks of emigration literature, the purpose of poetry and its crisis. Together with Nina Berberova, he wrote reviews of Soviet literature under the signature ‘Gulliver’ and spoke highly of the work of Vladimir Nabokov, who later became his friend. The difficulties of the move did not bring the couple of Nina Berberova and Vladislav Khodasevich together, but rather drove them apart from each other. During our meeting on 9 February, we will find out how the love story of these two prominent twentieth-century writers ended.

They met in November 1921 at a literary evening in Petrograd. Nina Berberova listened with undisguised enthusiasm to the poetry of the already famous Vladislav Khodasevich, and approaching him afterwards to express her admiration, she blushed and was embarrassed. The poet, seeing her embarrassment, signed her a book, the cover of which she immediately kissed with a sweet childlike spontaneity.

Nina Shcherbak is Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology and Cultural Linguistics at St Petersburg University, Master of Arts (the United Kingdom), a writer and screenwriter. She is also a scriptwriter for science television shows, author of fifteen monographs, and books on linguistics, literature, language philosophy, and English literature.

The lecture will be held as part of the events to mark the 300th anniversary of St Petersburg University, the oldest university in Russia.

The meeting will be held online in Russian with simultaneous interpreting into Spanish.

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