“Life Backtracks into Death”: Boris Poplavsky’s “Magic Lantern”

On Friday, while presenting on five Russian Angeleno poets, I mentioned that, in his first years as an émigré in Constantinople, Vernon Duke founded a Poets’ Guild with Boris Poplavsky (1903-1935), a Moscow-born poet who is now widely recognized as one of the major talents of the First Wave of Russian emigration. Before his death from an overdose at the age of 32 exactly 86 years ago (accident, murder, or suicide? an open question), Poplavsky managed to publish a few chapters from his novel Apollon Bezobrazov and a single collection of poems, Flags (1931). Both his prose and his verse reflect the influence of European literary movements, from the Symbolism of Rimbaud to the Surrealism of Breton. Reviewing John Kopper’s translation of Apollon Bezobrazov, which was published in 2015, Bryan Karetnyk writes: “Boris Poplavsky was the enfant terrible of the Montparnassians, the set of young Russian émigré writers exiled in Paris in the interwar years. […] Chronicling the riotous adventures, affairs and amusements of a throng of penurious Russians, led by the titular Bezobrazov, Poplavsky’s novel exquisitely captures the zeitgeist of les années folles.” Karetnyk’s translation of the poet’s second novel, Homeward from Heaven, will be published by Columbia University Press in June 2022.

Poplavsky’s poems were no less apt to épater le bourgeois. They even repelled the aesthete Nabokov, whose 1931 review of Flags has been translated by Anastasia Tolstoy and included in Think, Write, Speak (2021): “Rarely, very rarely, does poetry waft through the poems of Poplavsky. […] To be frank, Poplavsky is a bad poet, his poetry an unbearable blend of Severyanin, Vertinsky, and Pasternak (the latter at his worst), on top of which it is seasoned with a kind of awful parochialism, as though the man were permanently living in the same little Estonian town where the book was printed, and printed very badly.” But as he looked back on the shattered world of Russian Paris two decades later, Nabokov changed his tune. In Speak, Memory he writes: “I met many other émigré Russian authors. I did not meet Poplavski who died young, a far violin among near balalaikas. His plangent tonalities I shall never forget, nor shall I ever forgive myself the ill-tempered review in which I attacked him for trivial faults in his unfledged verse.”

One of my favorite poems in Flags adds a surreal touch to a typical émigré scene — a smoke-filled room of the kind Pericles Stavrov describes in his “Café.” Here is my translation:

Magic Lantern

An evil smoker lets loose rings of days
that dangle powerlessly from the ceiling.
A soldier passing through? Digger of graves?
Or just a wastrel, drunken and freewheeling?

His thoughtless art entraps my lazy mind
and I light up — but in the thickening air
he disappears. All that he leaves behind
is just the pipe glowing above his chair.

A country of tobacco floats untethered
beneath an unassuming lampshade’s sun.
From time to time I’m endlessly lighthearted,
but then at times I simply come undone.

How nice to build a solid ground of haze —
a conquest that can bring no fame, no wealth.
Spring floats off into summer, floats and fades…
Incautiously, life backtracks into death.

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Волшебный фонарь

Колечки дней пускает злой курильщик,
Свисает дым бессильно с потолка:
Он может быть кутила иль могильщик
Или солдат заезжего полка.

Искусство безрассудное пленяет
Мой ленный ум, и я давай курить,
Но вдруг он в воздухе густом линяет.
И ан на кресле трубка лишь горит.

Плывет, плывет табачная страна
Под солнцем небольшого абажура.
Я счастлив без конца по временам,
По временам кряхтя себя пожурю.

Приятно строить дымовую твердь.
Бесславное завоеванье это.
Весна плывет, весна сползает в лето.
Жизнь пятится неосторожно в смерть.

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