Tatyana N. Krasavchenko, DSc in Philology, Chief Researcher, Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Nakhimovsky Avenue, 51/21, 117418, Russia. ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5479-7957
Here are clarified some cultural-philosophical meanings of the famous controversy of the 1920–1930s between Georgy Adamovich and Vladislav Khodasevich. They were writers who lived at the same time, in the same place, but belonged to different cultural eras. Khodasevich was modernist, neoclassist, traditionalist; for him, Pushkin was the founding figure in the canon of Russian literature and his works embodied “the indisputable artistic law”. Adamovich, with his shaky worldview, was a postmodernist in the tradition of Vasily Rozanov. He cultivated a categorical, “avant-garde” binary opposition Lermontov versus Pushkin and convinced the young literati of “Paris note” to abandon “the idea of aesthetic perfection” for the sake of aesthetics of “document”, which seemed to him more adequate to the hard emigrant fate, and this predetermined their failure in the creative sphere, later he himself admitted it. Behind the controversy of Adamovich–Khodasevich lay the aesthetic-philosophical confrontation between two approaches to understanding the nature of creativity. Position of Adamovich is the position of a person who has been thrown off the track by History. For him, literary, that is creative work, is a life-saving float – it doesn’t matter where it takes him, just not to drown. For Khodasevich, the artist rooted in Pushkin tradition, creative work is a gift, a mission, which allows to resist chaos and decay.
Russian émigré literature; literary canon; tradition; controversy; V. Khodasevich; G. Adamovich; “Paris note”; creative work as a gift and a mission.
07.05.2025
05.06.2025
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