Boris Julianowitsch Poplawski

Boris Julianowitsch Poplawski

Boris Yulianovich Poplawski ( Russian Борис Юлианович Поплавский ; born May 25 ^{. Jul} / 7. June  1903 ^greg. In Moscow ; † 9. October 1935 in Paris ) was a Russian writer who for the younger generation of the first Russian emigration is counted.

Life

Poplawski came from the old Polish-Lithuanian nobility. His father studied at the Moscow Conservatory of Music, but then became a businessman. His mother, who came from the Baltic aristocracy, was a trained violinist. He had three siblings, and the parents employed French nannies to give the children a bilingual education. Boris Poplawski attended a Moscow high school, in which, in addition to Russian, French was the language of instruction.

The family emigrated to Istanbul during the Russian Civil War . In 1921 she moved to Paris. In 1922 Poplawski lived in Berlin for several months , where he met Boris Pasternak and Wiktor Schklowski . He earned his living in Berlin by drawing portraits.

On his return to Paris he studied at the philological faculty of the Sorbonne . But he was subsequently unable to gain a foothold in the world of work, he lived in extremely modest financial circumstances and increasingly suffered from depression. He found circles experimenting with drugs. He died of a heroin overdose just 32 years old . But there is also the version that he committed suicide.

He was first buried in Ivry, and in 1948 he was reburied in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois near Paris.

The Russian literary historian Alexander Goldstein takes the view that Poplawski survived the excessive drug use at the time. According to Goldstein, an unknown admirer of the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini with a Slavic accent, whom he mentioned in his notes, is Poplawski.

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Much of Poplawski's work deals with death and the longing for death as a leitmotif. The literary criticism sees him under the influence not only of the French and Russian symbolists , but also of surrealism . He was also coined by James Joyce .

In 1919 he appeared for the first time with his own poems in Yalta , where the family had withdrawn to await the civil war. He saw himself under the influence of the symbolists Arthur Rimbaud , Guillaume Apollinaire and Alexander Blok . In the 1920s he approached the futurists .

In 1928 the magazine " Volja Rossii ", which appeared in Prague and was close to the Social Revolutionaries , published his first poems. Later he published mainly in " Tschisla ", the editing of which promoted the young authors of the Russki Montparnasse in Paris. Poplawski also made a name for himself as an art critic, with particular attention paid to the painters Marc Chagall , Michail Larionow and Abraham Mintchine , who had also emigrated .

During his lifetime, only the volume of poetry "Flags" ( Flagi , 1931) was published as a separate edition . The metaphysical novel "Apoll Besobrasow", which was settled in the Parisian emigration, was published in 1932 in excerpts. He also published articles on boxing under this pseudonym. His second novel “Domoj s nebes” (Home from Heaven) was published posthumously from 1936 to 1938 in the Paris exile magazine “Krug” ( circle ).

The literary critic Dmitri Svyatopolk-Mirski praised him as the first Russian writer in exile whose work was not shaped by nostalgia for Russia, but dealt with the present abroad. In contrast, Vladimir Nabokov criticized his poems as an “unbearable mishmash” by Igor Severjanin and Boris Pasternak , “only worse than the latter”.

After his death, he was recognized in the Russian exile press as an important experimental poet, and commendable obituaries were written by Vladislav Khodassevich and Dmitri Mereschkowski . Nabokov called it a "distant violin among nearby balalaikas". In 1938, Poplawski's friends published excerpts from his diaries (1928–1935).

In the Soviet Union, the censorship did not allow the publication of Poplawski's poems until 1989, during perestroika . Along with Gajto Gasdanov, he is the only author of the " unnoticed generation" ( незамеченное пококение ), the younger generation of Russian emigrants living in Paris, whose work also received strong attention in post-Soviet Russia.

literature

Works by Poplawski

• Under the star flag , poems. Translated from the Russian by Alexander Nitzberg, Grupello Verlag 1998.
• Apollo Besobrasov . Translated from the Russian by Olga Radetzkaja, Guggolz Verlag 2019.

About Poplawski

• Alexander Goldstein: Poplawski's Secret Life. Assumptions about the life and disappearance of an emigrated poet, in: Lettre International , 116 (2017), pp. 21–24 (translation: Regine Kühn).
• Helène Menegaldo: L'univers imaginaire de B. Poplavski (1903-1935). [Dissertation]. Paris 1981.
• Olga Radetzkaja: Embarkation in the poor paradise . Epilogue to the translation of the novel Apoll Besobrasow , pp. 187–296, Berlin 2019
• Dmitrij Tokarev: Meždu Indiej i Gegelem: tvorčestvo Borisa Poplavskogo v comparative perspective. Moscow 1991.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Gleb Struve: Russkaja literatura v izgnanii. New York 1956, p. 445.
2. ↑ Biographical information, unless otherwise stated, according to Literaturnaja Enciklopedija Russkogo Zarubež'ja 1918–1940. Moscow 1997, p. 320.
3. ↑ Alexander Goldstein: Poplawski's Secret Life. Conjectures about the life and disappearance of an emigrated poet. In: Lettre International . 116, 2017, p. 23.
4. ↑ Vol'fgang Kazak : Leksikon russkoj literatury XX veka. Moscow 1996, p. 326.
5. ^ Gleb Struve: Russkaja literatura v izgnanii. New York 1956, p. 208.
6. ↑ Evrazija. 7.1929.
7. ^ Rul , March 11, 1931.
8. ↑ Vladimir Nabokov: Sobranie socinenij amerikanskogo perioda v pjati tomach. T. 5, St. Petersburg 1998, p. 564.
9. ↑ Vladimir Varšavskij: Nezamečennoe pokolenie. New York 1956.
10. ↑ E. Menegal'do, Proza Borisa Poplavskogo ili novel, In: Gajto Gazdanov i "niezamečennoe" pokolenie. Pisatel 'na peresečenii tradicij i kul'tur. So. Tat'jana Krasavčenko, Marija Vasel'eva. Moscow 2005, p. 148.