31 min.
READINGS
[Character Study]
KILL YOUR DARLINGS
By Vladislav Khodasevich, from Necropolis, which will be published this month by Columbia University Press. In the book, Khodasevich (1886–1939), a Russian poet, profiles Symbolists who lived in Russia in the early twentieth century. Translated from the Russian by Sarah Vitali.
On the night of February 22, 1928, in a wretched little hotel in a wretched little neighborhood in Paris, Nina Ivanovna Petrovskaya turned on the gas and took her own life. When the newspapers reported her death, they called her a writer. Somehow, though, the appellation doesn’t quite suit her. To be frank, her writings were insignificant, both in quantity and in quality. She didn’t know how to—and, more importantly, certainly didn’t want to—“waste” what little talent she possessed on literature. She did, however, play a conspicuous…
