The Politics of Childhood in Vladislav Khodasevich’s “Infancy”

In an original response to the autobiographical turn in the twentieth century, Vladislav Khodasevich’s autobiographical narrative “Infancy” (“Mladenchestvo,” 1933) enlists the early days of his life for literary self-legitimization; at the same time he both adopts and polemicizes with the Russian tradition of childhood depictions, which Andrew Wachtel insightfully analyzes in The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth. In his attempt to write a modernist émigré autobiography, Khodasevich opposes two trends: the émigré continuation of this Russian tradition, which maintained an essentialist vision of childhood as the affirmation of the creative validity of Russian gentry representatives, on one hand, and its Soviet modernist revisions, with more or less straightforward Soviet allegiances. Problematizing the essentialist vision of childhood through a nature-nurture dichotomy, Khodasevich’s autobiographical inscribing himself into Russian literary history downplays his familial Polish-Jewish background, while replacing it with imagined ties with Russian nationality and statehood that validates his Russian creativity.