The fate of Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939) is an eternal dispute between the Artist Khodasevich and Khodasevich the Man. An artist who either despises man’s earthly lot, then envies him, or tries to accept it for himself, is the central motif of the poet Khodasevich’s work, especially clearly expressed in his three most famous cycles: “The Path of Grain”, “Heavy Lyre” and "European Night", presented in this collection. Over the heads of many of his contemporaries-poets, the so-called radical innovators, Khodasevich breaks into the future of literature, in our era, attracting attention with a combination of rationality, classical verse forms of the Russian language with incredible expression and with the ironic “defamiliarization” so inherent in the poetic language of the 21st century. As Khodasevich’s contemporary and his eternal opponent, poet and critic Georgy Adamovich, noted: “It was impossible not to listen to these poems - although no one then guessed that soon readers would also listen to them.”