[1][2] His grandfather Jacob Brafman was famous as a Jewish convert to Russian Orthodoxy who authored The Book of the Kahal (1869), a polemical forerunner of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In the year 1917, Khodasevich gained wider renown by writing a superb short piece The Way of Corn, a reflection on the biblical image of wheat as a plant that cannot live if it does not first die.

He joined Mark Aldanov and Alexander Kerensky as the co-editor of the Berlin periodical Days, in which he would publish his penetrating analyses of the contemporary Soviet literature.

Most notably, he wrote an important biography of Gavrila Derzhavin (translated into English and published by University of Wisconsin Press in 2007) in 1931, which he attempted to style in the language of Pushkin's epoch.

Although severely partisan, the book is invaluable for its ingenious and detailed characterizations of Maxim Gorky, Andrei Bely, and Mikhail Gershenzon.