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…