boris poplavskii's art of life and death

Boris Poplavskii's Art of Life and DeathAuthor(s): Leonid LivakReviewed work(s):Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2001), pp. 118-141Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40247290 .Accessed: 02/10/2012 06:00

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toComparative Literature Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=psup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40247290?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

Boris Poplavskii's Art of Life and Death

LEONID LIVAK

II s'agit d'écrire un ouvrage sur l'éléphant. L'Anglais part pour l'Afrique et en rapporte un gros mémoire bourré de descriptions. L'Allemand descend en lui-même pour y trouver l'idée de

l'éléphant, l'Ur-éléphant. Le Français écrit, au café du Jardin d'Acclimatation, un brillant article sur l'éléphant, où l'on remarque des allusions fines Le Russe apporte un livre: L'Éléphant existe- t-ill Quand au surréalisme, il mènerait à l'extrême limite la tendance russe: l'éléphant n'existe pas: tout est éléphant.

- Albert Thibaudet, Réflexions sur la littérature. Du surréalisme

Deliberate esthetic organization of behavior among writers and poets has

always been an international phenomenon. The nineteenth-century Ro- mantics throughout Europe were privy to the mythologization of one's life through its conflation with art. They passed this practice on to vari- ous artistic avant-gardes - symbolist, futurist, dadaist, surrealist - which

aspired to merge the antitheses of art and life into a unity, whereby art turned into "real life" and "life" into art, and no separation existed between the "man" and the "poet." Reflecting on the construction and "reading" of life as an artistic text, Paul Ricoeur wrote:

In the same way that interlocution is overcome in writing, inter- action is overcome in numerous situations in which we treat action as a fixed text. . . . Action itself, action as meaningful, may become an object of science through a kind of object i vat ion similar to the fixation which occurs in writing. . . . This objectivation is made possible by some inner traits of the action which are similar to the structure of a speech-act and which make doing a kind of utterance. ... As the fixation by writing is made possible by a dialectic of intentional exteriorization immanent to the speech-

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 38, No. 2, 2001. Copyright © 2001 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

118

BORIS POPLAVSKII'S ART OF LIFE AND DEATH 1 19

act itself, a similar dialectic within the process of transaction pre- pares the detachment of the meaning of the action from the event of the action.1

Ricoeur's insight into the hermeneutics of meaningfully oriented behavior has been supported by Iurii Lotman's studies of the "poetics of everyday behavior" in Russian culture. Lotman introduced the semiotic concept of a "code of conduct" (povedencheskii kod) to describe the mythologization of one's life through the creation of a "text of life" in which each action

acquired esthetic connotations, becoming a significant cultural event.2

The phenomenon of esthetic self-stylization in everyday life has drawn the attention of students of Russian culture because the fusion of life and art figured prominently in the careers of many Russian literati who followed "the Russian tradition of turning ideas into practice."13 This tradition was rooted in the ideal model of the "Russian writer" as a spiritual apostle, created at the turn of the eighteenth century under the in- fluence of religious literature. In this model, the writer is a charismatic

apostle of Truth who does not abide by social authority and is uncompromising and intransigent to artistic vanity and material temptations. Con-

sequently, he or she is an ascetically destitute "unrecognized genius" and a persecuted martyr resembling saints and Christ himself.4 Most Russian writers faced the pressure of this model which encouraged the creation of their self-stylized "texts of life."

The esthetic organization of behavior reached its acme in Russia due to the ideology of "life-creation" (zhiznetvorchestvo) in the artistic

theory and praxis of the Symbolists and Decadents.5 Lidiia Ginzburg described life-creation as "deliberate construction of artistic images and

esthetically organized plots in life."6 Recent studies of deliberate esthetic

organization of behavior have shown an essential continuity between modernist esthetics born in the fin de siècle Russia and Soviet culture of the 1920s and 1930s. Irina Gutkin has traced the transformations of the

conception of life-creation from symbolism to futurism to Stalinism, re-

vealing the continuous development of the idea.7 However, confined to the Russian soil, these studies fail to situate

the Russian experience of life-creation with regard to similar develop- ments in Western Europe, namely the dadaist and surrealist poetics of

everyday behavior. Such international perspective is possible because Soviet literature was only a branch of the post-revolutionary Russian literature. Russian émigré literature, whose center was in Paris, came in direct contact with French literary life in the inter-war period. This clash

1 20 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

of literary traditions proved fruitful in more than one way, grafting French artistic praxis on Russian esthetic concepts and adding new dimensions to the Russian experience of deliberate esthetic organization of behavior. The practice of life-creation among Russian expatriate artists took on new meaning, becoming a vehicle for redefining one's artistic identity in a culturally alien atmosphere. The present article will explore the vicissitudes of the esthetics of life-creation in Russian émigré literature on the example of the poet and writer Boris Poplavskii (1903-1935).

* * *

Born in Moscow and equally fluent in Russian and French, Poplavskii was introduced to the literature and lifestyle of the Russian avant-garde by his older sister, the decadent poet NataPia Poplavskaia. At the age of twelve Boris already experimented with drugs and wrote poetry through competitiveness and imitation.8 His early poems relate drug experiences, betraying the conflation of life and art. For the Russian Symbolists and Decadents, the Christian notion of incarnation provided the paradigm of the esthetic process: by making the spiritual material, incarnation united the domains of the everyday and the "beyond." They saw art as a force capable of creating life and "life" as an object of artistic creation or as a creative act; only life created by art - life as a product of the incarnation of the spirit - was "real." Attempts at an aesthetic organization of

personal life, including drug use, had far-reaching mystical implications. Imitating symbolist models, Poplavskii treated his drug sessions as life- creating events of mystical nature:

. . .MbI XOflMJÏM C TOÔOM KOKaMHMTbCfl B UepKBM, yjibiÔajiMCb mkoh pacnMCHbie i\na3a, riepea HaMM othvl to ropejiH, to MepKJiw, A 6braa.no, BM^eHMM npopiaeT nojioca.

We used to sniff cocaine in church, The painted eyes of icons were smiling, Lights before us flared up and faded away, And at times a series of visions would pass.

The poet's young age afforded him the esthetic flexibility unavail- able to his older peers. By the time he left Russia in December 1920, Poplavskii had embraced not only the esthetics of Russian symbolism but also that of its archenemy - futurism. In 1919 he presented himself as

BORIS POPLAVSKII'S ART OF LIFE AND DEATH 1 2 1

"one of the hooligans from Maiakovskii's entourage." That year he wrote the poem "To Herbert Wells" ("Gerbertu Uellsu"), published in 1920 in the review Radio alongside Maiakovskii's drawings. The choice of the poem's addressee is reminiscent of futurism: Velimir Khlebnikov, a founder of Russian futurism, "appointed" H. G. Wells a "chairman of the globe." By its rhythmical pattern, industrial imagery, and iconoclastic ethos, the poem confirms Poplavskii's parti pris as Maiakovskii's epigone:

...A Mbi, Ha CTyneHHX CTOJieTHft CTOJinMBiiiHCb , PynopoM BCTaBHJiM Tpy6w $a6pn^Hbie M BbmyjiM MeflHbie rpoxoTOB 6mbhm

B cnMHy ôerymeM ÔMÔJieiïcKOM onpn^HMHe: Mbi 6y^eM IUBbipHTbCH BeKaMM KapTOHHblMM ! Mbi Ôora oTbimeM b pe$neKTop vmevil no Ty^aM npoJioacMM jntoporn noHTOHHbie M k CojiHuy CBe3eM Ha MOTope mojxevil

And we, having crowded the stairs of centuries, Raised the factory chimneys like a megaphone And blew out the copper tusks of dins In pursuit of the fleeing biblical oprichnina: We will be hurling around cardboard centuries! We will spot god with the reflector of ideas! We will pave the clouds with pontoon roads And bring people on a motor to the Sun.

This poem shows that Poplavskii fused symbolist and futurist esthetics. The image of a celestial road in his poem hearkens to Vladimir Solov'ev's and Nikolai Fedorov's ideas, inherited by the Symbolists. These

nineteenth-century philosophers believed in the creation of a real bridge (pontifex) between heaven and earth, and in the actual rebirth of mortal human nature, modeled on the resurrection of Christ. After the Bolshe- vik coup, those modernist theories that had projected the life of the future became the property of the entire Russian society possessed by revolutionary constructivist ethos in which space travel and immortality seemed possible. In Poplavskii's poem, the pontifex is technologically materialized as a futuristic pontoon road that changes the human condition. Such fusion was possible because Russian symbolism and futurism shared in the Utopian project of the reorganization of the world and man. Deliberate aesthetic organization of behavior was part of this project. In 1913, the futurist poet IPia Zdanevich proclaimed: "New life requires a

122 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

new community and a new way of propagation. . . . We have joined art to life. After the long isolation of the artist we have loudly summoned life and life has invaded art, it is time for art to invade life."14 The futurist avant-garde modified the symbolist notion of "life-creation" into "life- building" (zhiznestroenie), replacing symbolist religious mysticism with a technical (constructivist) approach to life, as reflected in Poplavskii's poem. Thus, arriving in Paris in May 1921, the eighteen year old poet was privy to both symbolist and futurist esthetics. Furthermore, in Paris, Il'ia Zdanevich became Poplavskii's artistic mentor.15

Due to his age, Poplavskii matured as artist only in exile. His artistic self-definition resulted from the confrontation of Soviet, older émigré and French letters. As an aspiring poet and painter, he joined two groups of younger Russian artists, "Gatarapak" and "Palata Poetov," which were inspired by the Soviet avant-garde in literature (futurism) and visual arts (constructivism), and by Parisian Dada. Viewing the Russian avant-garde as a Soviet phenomenon, these groups were politically pro-Soviet and hostile to mainstream émigré literature represented by older and more conservative writers, such as Zinaida Gippius, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Ivan Bunin, Boris Zaitsev, etc. But besides the outspoken bolchévisants IPia Zdanevich, Valentin Parnakh, and Sergei Romov, "Gatarapak" and "Palata poetov" included such future "émigré" literati as Boris Bozhnev, Aleksandr Ginger, Dovid Knut, and Sergei Sharshun. Both groups were in direct contact with Dada, which included most future Surrealists. Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Philippe Soupault, Tristan Tzara and other Dadaists collabo- rated with Russian exiles in joint artistic undertakings.16

In the spring of 1922, Poplavskii went to Berlin, which was then the center of Russian cultural life in exile. "In Paris, at first, I studied painting but became disappointed, started writing poetry, and went to Berlin where I spent some time, meeting Pasternak and Shklovskii, who encouraged me," wrote Poplavskii in a letter.17 His trip had among its objectives the popularization of Russian "left" art in Paris and the estab- lishment of closer ties with the pro-Soviet Russian avant-garde in Ber- lin, represented by Il'ia Erenburg, Boris Pasternak, Victor Shklovskii, and Vladimir Maiakovskii. Vadim Andreev recalled that "Poplavskii, who came to Berlin for a short stay . . . was the first to tell me about A. Gin- ger, B. Bozhnev, Iliazd (Il'ia Zdanevich), and that, besides Merezhkovskii, Bunin, and Gippius, Paris had its 'young* who opposed the fathers' both in art and politics."18 Upon his return to Paris in the fall of 1922, Poplavskii joined the new group "Cherez" which united "Palata poetov" and "Gatarapak," forging even closer ties to the French and Soviet avant-

BORIS POPLAVSKirS ART OF LIFE AND DEATH 1 23

garde as the Parisian satellite of Maiakovskii's Moscow-based Left Front ofArt(LEF).20

Poplavskii subscribed to the group's pro-Soviet politics and fused Russian and French avant-garde esthetics, combining the "trans-sense" (zaumnyi) language of futurism with the imagery and principles of se- mantic structuring in dadaist and surrealist poetry.21 At the same time, he behaved like a true avant-gardist hooligan, making scandals and pick- ing fights with the "bourgeois."22 "Left" political sympathies, dadaist and futurist schooling, and personal contacts with French avant-garde artists had prepared the poet to assimilate the theory and practice of surrealism.23 The emergence of two ideologically and esthetically opposed Rus- sian literatures left him with little choice but to keep aloof from émigré literary circles. Poplavskii's letters reveal the voluntary nature of his self- exclusion.24

Embracing French surrealism, Poplavskii found a firm esthetic ground on which to oppose the émigré literary discourse because, as the Soviet state grew hostile to avant-garde art after 1925, the Russian artistic "left" in Paris found itself in a precarious situation that led to the decomposi- tion of "Cherez."25 Poplavskii remained aloof from émigré literary life until all hope to publish his poetry in the "left" artistic circles was lost. In 1928 he began contributing to émigré periodicals, committing what both he and Zdanevich saw as an artistic and political compromise.26 The

poet withheld from publication many of his early poems and edited those he published to conceal their dadaist-futurist-surrealist esthetics, because mainstream émigré literati were unequivocally hostile to the Russian and French avant-garde as an expression of "Bolshevik mentality" in art.27

In coming to terms with his status as "émigré" writer, Poplavskii relied upon the artistic authority of surrealism which contrasted with the

growing esthetic conservatism of Soviet letters and the traditionally conservative older émigré literature. He built his "émigré" artistic identity by conflating the ideal model of the "Russian writer" and the model of a writer developed by the French avant-garde. The poet did not give up his

avant-garde esthetics, "recoding" it to fit the émigré artistic environment. His familiarity with Russian symbolism proved instrumental in this

recoding, since mainstream émigré literature accepted symbolism as part of the Russian literary tradition. Yet, the symbolist practice of estheti-

cally organized behavior and view of art as an all-transforming force were familiar to surrealism. Albert Thibaudet was not far from truth, calling French surrealism a "Russian approach" to life and art.28 The Russian artistic tradition of "turning ideas into practice" prepared Poplavskii to borrow similar models of behavior from the French avant-garde and pre-


pared his émigré audience to view such esthetically oriented behavior as "Russian."

* * *

Like Russian symbolism and futurism, French surrealism was preoccupied with the Utopian project of creating a new human being, whereby art was a means of changing the human condition. In the early 1920s, André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault "discovered" Arthur Rimbaud and the Count of Lautréamont. Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror combined anti-social ethos with exemplary "surrealist" images.29 Rimbaud described in Une saison en enfer an "illumination" that Breton saw as the goal of surrealism - the recuperation of "psychic force by means of a vertiginous descent into ourselves and the systematic illumination of hidden places."30 But their function as literary ancestors was not as im-

portant as their personal myths which provided a paradigm for the conflation of life and art. For Breton, who saw no value in literature if it was not supported by the writer's attitude to life, Rimbaud was a Surreal- ist by virtue of his lifestyle ("Manifeste du surréalisme" 38).

In the cultural mythology of the French avant-garde, Rimbaud and Lautréamont incarnated the ideal of artistic, social, and existential evasion. The poet could escape the "bourgeois" vanity of art through complete "silence," realize his anti-social stance by leaving society, and flee the reality conceived by positivist theory in dreams, the unconscious, drugs or death. According to their myths, Rimbaud rejected art (he "fell silent") and society (he left for Africa), while Lautréamont was thought to be the author of a sole text, died young and left no biographical trace. These founding myths of the post-war French avant-garde were supplemented by the more recent models of Jacques Vaché and Arthur Cravan. Meeting Vaché in 1916, Breton was fascinated by his anti-social and anti- artistic attitude. Vaché's virtue was "to have produced nothing" thanks to his contempt for art.31 Cravan rose to fame before the war thanks to his scandalous anti-art performances in Paris. The ambiguous circumstances of Cravan's and Vaché's deaths in 1919 perfected their "texts of life" and provided a model for the avant-garde "death style." Their self- effacement linked them to Rimbaud and Lautréamont, equating surrealism to a "surrealist adventure" that had to be "lived" as much as "written."

The dadaist-surrealist split of 1922-1923 had at its core the tension between the ethically valuable posture of "complete silence," which required one to stop writing fiction altogether in protest against "bourgeois" art, and the more artistically fulfilling "literary temptation," which allowed the artist to justify his creative activity by extra-artistic consid-

BORIS POPLAVSKIFS ART OF LIFE AND DEATH 125

erations. Surrealism proposed the latter (mild) version of artistic self' effacement, permitting creative activity that produced not "literature" but "psychological documents."32 This "documentary" view of art called for the abolition of all distinction between the literary and nonliterary; written poetry lost its "poetic monopoly" because life itself became poetry.

In 1931 Poplavskii wrote: "All I want is to express myself. To write one talced' mystical book, like Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror, and to Assommer' the critics by leaving, becoming a soldier or a worker, doing away with the doubling of real and described life . . . protecting myself by contempt and silence."33 It is telling that he mixes the myths of Rimbaud and Lautréamont in one model. The ideal of "complete silence" is visible in his articles, which proclaim that "art does not exist and is

unnecessary," that the artist must scorn "literature" and be "a genius who dies unknown."34 He wrote in a letter to Zdanevich: "Literature must be a slightly disguised fact of life . . . while life must become a literary event, i. e. material for the realization of the most charming inventions."35 It has become a commonplace to call Poplavskii "Russian Rimbaud."36 Yet, themes or images hearkening to Rimbaud's art are scarce in his poetry.37 He admired the French poet as a visionary and a model for lifestyle. Quot- ing Rimbaud in the epigraph to Chapter 6 of his novel Apollo the Ugly (Apollon Bezobrazov, 1927-1932), which describes the life of the Russian

avant-garde in Paris, he picks a passage that deals with lifestyle, rather than art: "Oisive jeunesse/A tout asservie,/Par délicatesse/J'ai perdu ma vie."38

Joining mainstream émigré literature, Poplavskii discovered that, despite their ideological divergence, the circle of younger literati around the critic and poet Georgii Adamovich - known as the "Paris school" of Russian émigré letters - had much in common with surrealism.39 These

literati, many of whom had been associated with the Russian avant-garde in Paris (Sharshun, Knut, Ginger, Bozhnev), shared with French surrealism a focus on psychological self-study and an orientation toward literature as the "human document," a term they borrowed from the Naturalists. For them, the "human document" was a "responsible literary form" that

conveyed the artist's personal experience only; the goal was to "photo- graph rather than create."40 The "human document" relied on artistic conventions seen by the "Paris school" adepts as faithful to reality. In that it was akin to surrealist writings which represented documentary records of their creators' psyche and targeted the effect of "truthfulness."

This affinity permitted Poplavskii to adapt his avant-garde school-

ing to émigré esthetic expectations, as illustrated by Apollo the Ugly. In


1928, he informed Zdanevich that his novel was "an attempt to justify Our life,"41 that is, the life of the Russian artistic "left" in Paris. Indeed, the novel is so permeated with images, motifs, and allusions hearkening to surrealist writings that Zdanevich cited Apollo as proof of Poplavskii's "anti-émigré" nature.42 At the same time, however, émigré critics traced

Apollo to the "Paris school" esthetics.43 Such seemingly incompatible conclusions were in fact logical. Just like Poplavskii's earlier poetry, which reconciled symbolism and futurism, Apollo combined the esthetics of Russian symbolism, integrated in the "Paris school" program, and that of surrealism.44 The same conflation of surrealist and symbolist poetics is evident in Flags (Flagi, 1931), the only collection of his poems to appear before Poplavskii's death.

Commenting on Poplavskii's poetry written after 1928, Vladislav Khodasevich saw in it signs of the poet's growing indifference to literary expression. He suggested that Poplavskii truly expressed himself outside literature: "[His poetry] reveals the unimportance of the question 'How to write?' with respect to the question 'How to live?' . . . and the danger of turning from the subject of literary activity, a poet, into its object - an

interesting personality that expresses itself in life. ... He may have con-

sciously provoked this danger."45 Echoing Khodasevich's opinion, Adamovich considered Poplavskii "characteristic" of his time in that he strove to "efface the boundary between art and a personal document, between literature and a diary."46 But this effacement was valued not only in the "Paris school" esthetics. Blurring the distinctions between literature and life, Poplavskii steeped his "text of life" in the "modern mythology" hailed by Louis Aragon as the surrealist science of life.47

* * *

Christian mysticism became an important part of the image Poplavskii forged for himself after 1928. A manifestly anti-Soviet marker, Chris- tianity was also the cornerstone of the ideal model of the "Russian writer" brought by Russian artists into exile. Interested in Christian mysticism from the beginning of his artistic career, Poplavskii turned it into a de-

pository for the surrealist mysticism he espoused before 1928 and now translated in Christian terms acceptable for the émigré reader. Seeing the goal of surrealism in reaching that point where the real and the imagi- nary ceased to be contradictory, Breton drew on the esoteric and her- metic tradition.48 His refusal of positivism and religion as oppressive dog- mas and his debt to the esoteric tradition and occult philosophy made the opposition of esoteric and materialistic thought the dialectic tension


of surrealism. Poplavskii translated surrealist mysticism and anti-positivism into Christian mysticism, since his view of Christianity, shaped by symbolist attitudes, was far from conventional.49 Like the Surrealists, he

rejected positivism, adhered to the belief in the revelatory nature of dreams and hallucinatory states, and publicly proclaimed that younger émigré writers should learn from their "'brother' Surrealists" the ways of affirm-

ing their mysticism.50 Poplavskii's diary testifies to the overwhelming preoccupation with

religion, but it is impossible to tell how many of these entries describe

drug induced states as religious experience. Ménégaldo has pointed out several passages that obviously refer to drug use.51 In them, "meditation," "prayer," and "joy" are accompanied by "visions," "dreams," and "voices." When the poet does not "pray" he suffers from physical discomfort: "I did not pray. I was very upset. At night I had cramps."52 Drug induced states can be mistaken for religious ecstasy and Poplavskii reconciled "insatiable

hunger for mystical experience (any kind of mysticism) with drug expert ence (any kind of drugs)" (Karlinksy 329). This combination was familiar to French Surrealists, who reconciled pro-Soviet politics with a

mystical desire to transcend into "absolute reality" and used drugs to reach "illumination."53

Dreams preserved for Poplavskii their surrealist function as a myste- rious rite. In his diary of 1928-1935, the words "prayer" and "dream" are

interchangeable: "On croit que je dors, je prie;" "Zavalivaius' molit'sia

(spat*)"54 ["They think I am sleeping, I am praying;" "I am lying down to

pray (to sleep)"]. After Nikolai Tatishchev, the executor of Poplavskii's archive, published parts of this diary, Nikolai Berdiaev wrote: "The theme of Poplavskii's diary is religious but he did not have religious experience, he conducted religious experiments."55 A devout Christian, Tatishchev

supported the poet's self- interpretation as a Christian mystic, publishing mostly the passages related to his "affair with God." This was easy to do since Poplavskii edited his diary for a posthumous publication. "I am afraid that Tatishchev is not quite right, taking absolutely seriously what for

Poplavskii could be only a pose or a literary device," wrote Gaito

Gazdanov, "Poplavskii took extraordinary freedom with his poetic and

'metaphysical' material, which included his 'affair with God' and his 'an-

gelic accessories,' as he put it."56 Adamovich echoed Gazdanov's opinion: "Recollecting my meetings and conversations with Poplavskii, I have an impression that he was much more eclectic."57

The publication of Poplavskii's diary supported his image of a Chris- tian mystic and justified his imitation of Christ.58 In the early 1930s, the

poet was surrounded by young émigrés who worshipped him as a spiritual


guide. Tatishchev was among his "disciples;" he followed Poplavskii like an apostle and wrote down the poet's random observations in a separate notebook which he later published. Emmanuil Rais, another "disciple" who noted down Poplavskii's words, provided a good summary of the poet's personal mythology:

He was incomparable He did not live like everybody else. We worked, putting up with crude labor . . . and with the tyranny of conservative journal bureaucrats. . . . Poplavskii did not want to

put up with anyone or anything. He was uncompromising and pure, he lived in destitution, often went hungry but did not give up. He lived the way a genius must live.59

Rais' description draws on the ideal model of the "Russian writer" as a spiritual apostle. This cultural myth of the Russian intelligentsia was alive and well in the inter-war Paris, as testified by the scandal around Vladimir Nabokov's novel The Gift (Dar, 1932-1937), which attacked the "martyrdom" of the nineteenth-century writer and critic N. G. Chernyshevskii. The indignant editors of Sovremennye zapiski, the review which serialized The Gift, censored the Chernyshevskii chapter. The use of the paradigm of the "Russian writer" in the émigré critical discourse is

exemplified in Georgii Fedotov's view of the French poet Charles Péguy, whom Fedotov identified to the "righteous men of the Russian intelligentsia":

We, Russians, readily recognize in this representative of France's most noble traditions the already bygone righteous men of the Russian intelligentsia. Full absence of literariness, even of literary self-definition, complete unity of life and art, writing as socio-religious service, unconditional self-sacrifice to the idea, and sacred poverty assumed as a form of vocation made Péguy more than a teacher of social justice. . . . His spirit is that of an ascetic devotee and Christ's knight. We would like to make this spirit ours and to bequeath it to the Russian youth.60

In similar language, émigré observers testify to the impression of exaggerated poverty in Poplavskii's appearance.61 However, his apparent destitution did not spring from a lack of financial means. Refusing gainful employment "on principle,"62 he roomed and boarded at his parents' apartment (when he felt like it) and was an ardent book collector: after his death, his library contained more than 2,000 volumes.63 Both his bib-


liophile passion and his fancy for drugs required money.64 Furthermore, the poet owned a collection of works by Russian and French avant-garde painters, who became famous during his lifetime. But this collection was sold only after his death to sponsor the publication of his poetry.65 Poplavskii's conspicuous penury seems to be a pose of poverty. He culti- vated destitution as a virtue, writing in his diary that saints must be dirty and shabby. Imitating them, he came closer to the image of Christ, literally implementing the ideal model of the "Russian writer."66

But the paradigm of the "Russian writer" was, in Poplavskii's case, superimposed upon the French paradigm of the avant-garde poet. The filter of "Christian sanctity" concealed the code of conduct prescribed by the French avant-garde. For instance, Poplavskii's "principled" refusal of

gainful employment is echoed in his second novel, Homeward from Heaven (Domoi s nebes, 1935), whose hero Oleg boasts that he has lived to the age of thirty without working because he values freedom too much.67 Oleg supports his attitude with Rimbaud's (misquoted) words: "Je ne travaillerai

jamais."68 Oleg's unsuccessful one-day career as a newspaper boy is pure parody: it underscores his contempt of work and makes Oleg the bearer of prosaic (journalistic) writing - the opposite of poetry. Oleg's evoca- tion of the "ancestor" of surrealism is not accidental. The ethics of surrealism were formed in opposition to "bourgeois" values. "I am tired of

hearing about the moral value of work," wrote Breton, "The event re-

vealing the meaning of life cannot be attained at the price of work"69 Surre- alists were to live off society by their wits. "Go and marry a rich woman," was Breton's advice to his friends - he married the daughter of a banker

(Josephson 120-21, 126). Aragon also denounced the value of work.

Describing a friend-Surrealist, he wrote: "He is looking for a position but does not want to work: an advice to everybody."70 Consequently, Breton and Aragon quit their medical studies; Paul Eluard and Jacques Rigaut worked but pretended to be idlers.71

Poplavskii tailored his appearance, seen by his émigré admirers as that of a Christian ascetic, by means of direct borrowing from the French

avant-garde. He never took off his dark glasses in public. Some explained this by an eye malady, others by mannerism. But the poet alluded to the answer in Homeward from Heaven, After a chance meeting with Apollo the Ugly, Oleg says: "It has been a long time. . . . With a monocle, in

shabby pants My soul of 1925" (Domoi s nebes 265). The line "With a monocle, in shabby pants" opened Poplavskii's then unpublished poem "S monoklem, s bakhromoiu na shtanakh" and referred to a common at- tribute in the appearance of Parisian avant-gardists. Breton wore dark-

green glasses, which he alternated with a monocle; Joyce also wore dark


glasses; Tzara, Éluard, Péret, and Sharshun wore monocles. Breton wrote in 1924: "We would like to be judged by our appearance alone. They are saying everywhere that I wear glasses. You will not believe me if I tell you why. I do this to commemorate a grammar example: 'Noses have been made to wear glasses; thus I have glasses."72 Poplavskii's glasses were motivated by a similar desire to surprise.

Another trait of Poplavskii's image was his passion for weight lifting and boxing, seen by émigrés as the "humiliation of flesh" and "some- thing akin to the chains worn by religious ascetics."73 When Poplavskii did not claim to "take pleasure in his indifference to literature," he mod- estly presented himself as a "poet and boxer."74 Original in the milieu of Russian literati, the image of a "poet and boxer" was familiar in the French

avant-garde due to the legendary persona of Arthur Cravan, who was an amateur boxer. To convey his contempt for art, Cravan periodically published on wrap paper from a butcher's store his poetic leaflet Maintenant and distributed it from a vegetable cart. The issue of March- April 1915 contained the text "Arthur Cravan. Poète et Boxeur."75 Expressing contempt for "traditional" art, the combination of poetry and boxing was a standard signifier of the "anti-artistic" attitude among the Dadaists and Surrealists. Aragon's friend Jacques Baron, "a poet better known as a boxer," went by the nickname "Baron le boxeur" (Le Paysan de Paris 24)* Soupault created a semi-parodie model of the typical avant-gardist in his novel En Joue! (1925), emphasizing the same combination. His Julien writes poetry "without giving it more importance than it merits" because he has no literary ambition and prefers boxing and weight lifting to art.76

The dadaist-surrealist attitude underlay Poplavskii's anti-artistic proclamations, which he tailored to the esthetics of the "Paris school." Poplavskii was published by major émigré reviews and surrounded by a group of worshipping "disciples." But driven by the French avant-garde's ideal of artistic and existential self-effacement, he wanted to be remem- bered as an "unknown genius," calling himself in his diary an "unknown soldier of Russian literature" (Neizdannoe 114). In the early 1930s, he integrated the concept of an "unknown genius" into the program of the "Paris school," whose denunciation of literary fiction for the sake of "human documents" echoed the surrealist view of literature as a psychological record. The "Paris school's" refusal of such attributes of imaginative literature as "skill" and "talent" led to the cult of artistic failure which coincided with the avant-gardist ideal of self-effacement in art and life. The self-description of younger émigré literati associated with the "Paris school" as an "unnoticed generation" and a "generation of failures"77 came from this cult. For his émigré peers, Poplavskii embodied the ideal of

BORIS POPLAVSKII'S ART OF LIFE AND DEATH 131

artistic self-effacement, becoming the functional equivalent of Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Cravan, and Vaché.78

Poplavskii's death in 1935 triggered the interpretative mechanism of the "text of life" he had prepared. His death strikingly resembled the deaths of several artists associated with the French avant-garde, first and foremost those of Vaché and Cravan. It seems that the cultural para- digms present in Poplavskii's lifestyle and literary esthetics had much to do with his premature death, which many of his contemporaries construed as suicide.

* * *

Suicide was a leitmotif of the surrealist thought, exploited along with other figures of evasion from "bourgeois" art and reality conceived

by the positivist theory. The first issue of La Révolution surréaliste en- dowed dream and suicide with the same transcendental function: "It seems that killing oneself is like dreaming. It is not a moral question we are

asking: is suicide a solution?"79 Responses to this questionnaire confirmed the theoretical equivalency of dream and suicide in the surrealist thought. For René Crevel, who killed himself in 1935, those rejecting "reality" for the "sensation of truth" saw suicide as a means of transcendence more effective than dreams. Antonin Artaud (after several suicide attempts) insisted that his "appetite not to be" placed him in a state of "suicide in

progress" whose goal was not death but the flight to the "other side of existence."80 Jacques Rigaut, who killed himself in 1929, viewed suicide as a "vocation" and the most efficient means of transcendence.81 The first issue of the surrealist review Le Disque vert was almost entirely de- voted to suicide. In it, Crevel elaborated his theory of "provisional sui-

cides," evocative of Rigaut's "vocation" and Artaud's "suicide in

progress,"82 whereby the cult of self-destruction was as important as its actual realization.

Breton saw Arthur Cravan and Jacques Vaché as "ancestors" of surrealism by virtue of both life- and deathstyle. In 1919, Vaché and his two friends were found dead, officially from an accidental opium overdose. But according to his myth, Vaché committed suicide and, in the last

"joke," took his unwitting friends along. The interpretation of his death constituted one of the founding myths of Dada and surrealism - suicide as an ultimate avant-gardist act that is both a way of esthetic self-asser- tion and a means of social and metaphysical transcendence. "His death was admirable in that it could pass for an accident," wrote Breton (Les Pas perdus 24). In the same year, Cravan disappeared on a boat prom-


enade, and it was never clear whether it was a suicide or an accident. The ambiguity of their demise perfected their myths, providing an alibi against an artistic pose and furnishing a model for the avant-gardist deaths ty le.

Suicide was a good way of self-effacement, provided it was "com- pletely gratuitous": Jacques Rigaut claimed that the most important thing in his first aborted suicide attempt was his decision to die and not death itself ("Jacques Rigaut" 57). He developed both aspects of Vaché's death style as an "accident" and a "joke" in which the suicide finds himself company. Rigaut based his "modern mythology" on the reputation of a suicidal dandy. He had organized dadaist demonstrations side by side with Sergei Sharshun and participated in the meetings of "Palata poetov" and "Cherez" attended by Poplavskii. His death in 1929 was found surprising because it left no doubts as to its nature. "His death recalls that of another initiator of Dada: Jacques Vaché. ... I am surprised that Rigaut did not die exactly like Vaché, i. e. making it unclear whether this was a suicide He must have understood that such accidents no longer fooled anyone," wrote a French critic.83

As early as 1923, Rigaut's suicidal "vocation" became a "literary fact." The protagonist of Jacques Cocteau's novel Le Grand écart followed the recipe of "accidental suicide," trying to die by simulating a drug overdose. In the same year, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle published his story "La Valise Vide" in which he made fun of Rigaut's suicide on the installment plan. The story's protagonist Gonzague used suicide to cover up his artistic inadequacy. But Rigaut's death forced Drieu, who killed himself a de- cade later, to reconsider the avant-garde deathstyle. In 1931, he published the novel Le Feu Follet. The novel dealt with the life of an avant-gardist who preferred the "sincerity" of suicide to the "lie" of literature.

The "cortège de suicides" (Aragon 88) in the milieu of former Dadaists and Surrealists continued after Rigaut's death. In 1933, Julien Torma disappeared during a mountain promenade. Like Rigaut, Torma took part in Dada and shared the self-effacing attitude that marked the myths of Vaché and Cravan. His disappearance was construed as an "accidental suicide." In 1935, René Crevel killed himself shortly before Poplavskii's death. Notwithstanding the differences in circumstances, the deaths of Rigaut, Torma, and Crevel were interpreted similarly. Informed by the paradigm of the Vaché-Cravan suicidal model, these events were "read" as attempts to live up to the ideal of self-effacement in art and life and as ultimate proofs of artistic "sincerity."84 Suicide provided a con- crete mode of action for those who strove to implement literally the ideal of artistic and existential renunciation. "You are all poets," wrote Rigaut,

BORIS POPLAVSKirS ART OF LIFE AND DEATH 133

"as for me, I am on death's side."85 Although Rigaut continued writing until his death, he stopped publishing after 1923, arguing that he had no literary ambition and was more interested in boxing.86 Torma also insisted that literature was of no interest to him. After 1926 he "fell silent," led a nomadic life, and his trajectory was unknown except for one place where he took pains to be remarked - Charleville, the birthplace of Arthur Rimbaud.

Poplavskii wrote in his diary in March 1929: "We differ from the old Decadents . . . because we die joyfully, regarding death as the highest achievement. . . . The new slogan is - perishing. The emigration will achieve its highest, eternal note only by perishing, dying, disappearing" (Neizdannoe 96). Outside the context of the French avant-garde, this

entry was interpreted as a variation on the Russian fin de siècle decadent tradition. But its reiteration in Poplavskii's 1930 article allows to classify his "joyful" necrophilia as derivative of the dadaist-surrealist suicidal myth. Negating the necessity of art, Poplavskii argued that imaginative literature must be replaced by a "psychoanalytic record," whereas life must consist of dying; he specified that "death" meant the writer's self-effacement as a "genius who died unknown" ("O misticheskoi atmosfere molodoi

literatury v emigratsii" 309, 311). Ironically, this statement was pro- nounced by the most famous poet in younger émigré letters. Poplavskii's artistic ideal, as articulated in this article, evokes, on one hand, the surrealist view of literature as a means of psychological self-study and, on the other, Artaud's "continuous suicide," Rigaut's "vocation," and CreveFs

"provisional suicide," equally ambiguous in their mythologizing necro-

philia. The "Paris school" considered the topic of physical and spiritual

death as the most significant and fruitful among literary subjects.88 The

affinity of Poplavskii's esthetisizing necrophilia with that of the French

avant-garde could be translated in émigré terms. Poplavskii presented his program of avant-gardistic self-effacement as an immediate result of the existential solitude, isolation, and uprootedness of an exile. But the difference between Poplavskii's necrophiliac program and the esthetic

toying with the topic of death among the "Paris school" literati became clear when Poplavskii literally implemented, down to minute details, the model deathstyle of the French avant-garde mythology.

Poplavskii's "accidental suicide" happened on October 8, 1935. On the morning of October 9, he was discovered dead in the company of

Sergei Yarko, who died several hours later. The police investigation at- tributed their deaths to an accidental drug overdose, as in the case of

Jacques Vaché.89 However, Poplavskii's self-created "text" precluded the


interpretation of his death as natural. His death was thus construed as suicide among émigré literati who wanted to see the poet's demise as an outcome of his esthetic and philosophical program.90 The suicide version was further confirmed by the publication of Poplavskii's 1935 diary, where he described his "physical thirst for death" (cf. Artaud's "appetite not to be") and how he anticipated his imminent demise with final prepara- tions - "finishing and liquidating" old diaries and "cleaning up everything" (Neizdannoe 114, 117).

Poplavskii's death bore uncanny resemblance to that of Vaché not

only in its form of a group "accidental suicide" but due to its announce- ment in advance. According to his legend, Vaché said shortly before his death: "I will die when I want to ... but I will die with somebody. Dying alone is too boring I would prefer one of my best friends."91 Poplavskii also prepared the public opinion, informing his "disciples" of the imminent "ascension." Rais relates their dialogue several weeks before the event: the "teacher" hinted that he had made a "serious decision" but could not share it because Rais was "too weak for this" and had to wait until "everything was known" (302-03). A similar premonitory conver- sation Poplavskii held with Tatishchev less than a month before his death.92

The nature of the rumors that circulated after Poplavskii's death is clear from the comments of his contemporaries. Khodasevich wrote: "Some of his friends, well informed about his life and attitude, told me that it was not an accident, that Poplavskii died willingly. It may also be true that someone else's despair found in him too deep a response and he let himself be killed" ("O smerti Poplavskogo" 3). Thus, Poplavskii prepared his audience for a double interpretation of his death. One could "read" this incident as an avant-gardistic "accidental suicide" or as the self-sacrifice of a "Russian writer" who died for someone else like Christ, whom he so obviously emulated.93 In both cases, his death served as a textual marker or, in Lotman's words, a sign of the tragic "Fifth act" that

logically concluded the development of the poet's "text of life," informing its elements with cultural and esthetic significance, especially since

Poplavskii's émigré audience was privy to esthetically motivated interpretations of suicide.94

Émigré interpretations of Poplavskii's death as a "Christian" suicide drew on two cultural models. On one hand, the deaths of Christ and saints had been described as suicides thanks to the presence of intent in their striving for redemptive martyrdom.95 Committing suicide for someone else, the poet died "like a saint." On the other hand, his suicide was informed by the model of the "Russian writer" in which the author's readi- ness to die guaranteed his or her righteousness and "truthfulness" in life


and art (Lotman, "Literaturnaia biografïia" 370). The possibility of such "reading" had been confirmed five years before Poplavskii's death, in the wake of Vladimir Maiakovskii's suicide in 1930. Poplavskii deathsyle, just like his lifestyle and art, combined Russian émigré, French and Soviet cultural legacies.

Émigré commentators denigrated Maiakovskii for the incompatibility of his "Soviet" esthetics and behavior with those of the "Russian writer." In his obituary, Khodasevich argued that Maiakovskii was driven by ideo-

logical and artistic opportunism and financial concerns which attested to his "spiritual emptiness."96 In response, Roman Jakobson produced his version of Maiakovskii's death. The poet was a martyr whose spiritual suffering hearkened to the fate of other Russian poets: from Pushkin to Blok, who had died "after long spiritual agony and unbearable physical torment," to Khlebnikov who had perished after "severe privations and inhuman suffering." Although Blok and Khlebnikov had not been persecuted and died of ailments, Jakobson saw them as martyrs. Including Maiakovskii into this list of martyrs, he traced their common fate to Christ's suffering and to the Russian literary tradition in which poets "perished" rather than died (9-10).97 Maiakovskii had walked the Rus- sian "poetic Golgotha" and died like an apostle, crowned with a "thorny wreath of revolution," in a "redemptive sacrifice for the future universal resurrection" (15, 20, 31-32).98

These mutually exclusive interpretations of Maiakovskii's death were

supplemented by Breton whose logic followed the surrealist suicidal myth. According to Breton, Maiakovskii had committed suicide because he was an avant-garde artist. Like the Surrealists, he had lived in the state of "theoretical" suicide in which the decision to die was more important than its realization. "Living or dying does not require courage: one needs

courage to face calmly the respective violence of both contradictory drives," wrote Breton - "A thinking man, i. e. an honest man, chooses between them every second and it seems normal to me that his hand, figuratively or literally, does not abandon a revolver."99

Poplavskii could have regarded the repercussions of Maiakovskii's death as a rehearsal of his own "Fifth act." He prepared his audience for the "reading" of his liking, casting himself in the role of a Christ-like

poet-martyr for the émigrés and of an avant-gardist for those familiar with the surrealist science of life and death. His immediate audience and "fellow-traveler," Sergei Yarko, was a Russian artist and Montparnasse Bohemian who had a previous suicide attempt and publicly announced his intention to kill himself. He was certainly familiar with French avant-

garde mythology and used suicide announcements, like Vaché and Rigaut, as an artistic and existential "alibi."100 The rumor had it that Yarko was


afraid to die alone.101 Thus, in a self-sacrificial gesture, Poplavskii "accompanied" his friend. But there is yet another possibility. Following Vaché's example, the suicide's company had to die unwittingly. Both artists were versed enough in surrealist mythology to emulate Vaché's "accidental suicide." Indeed, Poplavskii invited two other younger émigré artists to the drug session on October 8 - Lidiia Chervinskaia and Vasilii Ianovskii. Inviting Chervinskaia on the eve of the event, he said to her: "Our fates are tied forever." Both literati were spared by their decision not to come.102

Prefacing, some fifty years later, his "premonitory" novel En Joue! Philippe Soupault confessed that he recognized in its protagonist Julien the ghosts of his friends Jacques Rigaut, Drieu la Rochelle, and René Crevel who had committed suicide (13). This recognition sent shivers down the author's spine. Creating a semi-parodic model of Julien the avant-gardist "who bet his life on death," Soupault predicted down to the details future suicides among Dadaists and Surrealists. The fact that he anticipated these suicides testifies to the elaboration and importance of suicide in the cultural mythology of the post-war French avant-garde. Boris Poplavskii, whose literary oeuvre, life, and death in exile were marked by the creative conflation of Russian, Soviet and French literary traditions, rightly belongs among the ghosts which haunted Soupault. The deliberate esthetic organization of Boris Poplavskii's behavior not only exemplifies the vicissitudes of the Russian modernist tradition of life-creation under the circumstances of émigré literary life, but presents a case of study in the mechanisms of the artistic self-definition of a writer in exile.

Davidson College

NOTES All translations from the French and Russian are my own.

1. "The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text," Interpretive Social Science, ed. P. Rabinow and W. Sullivan (Berkeley: U of California P, 1979) 80- 81.

2. "The Poetics of Everyday Behavior in Eighteenth-Century Russian Culture," The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, ed. A. D. Nakhimovsky and A. S. Nakhimovsky (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 67-94; "The Decembrist in Daily Life (Everyday Behavior as a Historical-Psychological Category)," in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History 95-149; "Literaturnaia biografiia v istoriko-kul'tumom kontekste (K tipologicheskomu sootnosheniiu teksta i lichnosti avtora)," in his hbrannye stat'i v trekh tomakh, 3 vols. (Tallin: Aleksandra, 1992) 1: 365-76.

3. Olga Matich, "The Symbolist Meaning of Love: Theory and Practice," Creating life. The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, eds. I. Paperno and ]. D. Grossman (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994) 29.


4. Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks. Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (Cam- bridge: Harvard UP, 1991) 120; Gregory Freidin, A Coat of Many Colors. Osip Mandelstam and his Mythologies of Self-Presentation (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987) x; Lotman, "Literatumaia biografiia v istoriko-kul'tumom kontekste" 369-70, 374; Lotman, "Russkaia literatura poslepetrovskoi epokhi i khristianskaia traditsiia," lu. M. Lotman i tartussko-moskovskaia semioticheskaia shkola, ed. A. Koshelev (Moscow: Gnozis, 1994) 365-67, 369.

5. Zara G. Mints, "Poniatie teksta i simvolistskaia estetika," Materialy vsesoiuznogo simpoziuma po vtorichnym modeliruiushchim sistemam 1 (Tartu: U of Tartu P, 1974) 5: 134_41; Vladislav Khodasevich, "Konets Renaty," in his NekropoV (Paris: YMCA P, 1976) 7-9.

6. On Psychological Prose (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991) 20. 7. "The Legacy of the Symbolist Aesthetic Utopia: From Futurism to Socialist Real-

ism," Creating Life. The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism 167-96. 8. Simon Karlinsky, "In Search of Poplavsky: a Collage," The Bitter Air of Exile: Rus-

sian Writers in the West 1922-1972, eds. S. Karlinsky and A. Appel Jr. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1977)320.

9. Irina Paperno, "The Meaning of Art: Symbolist Theories, Creating life. The Aes- thetic Utopia of Russian Modernism 22-23.

10. "Vot proshlo, navsegda ia uekhal na iug," in his Neizdannoe (Moscow: Khristianskoe izdatel'stvo, 1996) 355.

11. Leonid Chertkov, "Debiut Borisa Poplavskogo," Kontitent 47 (1986) 377. 12. "Truba marsian," in his Tvoreniia (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1987) 604. 13. "Gerbertu Uellsu," in his Neizdannoe 363. 14. "Why Are We Painting Ourselves" (cited in John Bowlt, Russian art of the Avant-

Garde: Theory and Criticism. 1902-1934 [New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988] 8). 15. In the dedication to the poem "Pokushenie s negodnymi sredstvami" (1926)

Poplavskii called himself Zdanevich's disciple (Pokushenie s negodnymi sredstvami [Mos- cow: Gileia, 1997] 86).

16. Cf. Michel Beyssac, La Vie culturelle de i émigration russe en France. Chronique 1920- 1930 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971) 18; Matthew Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1962) 132; 11'ia Zdanevich, "En

approchant Éluard," Carnets de Vîliazd Club 1 (1990): 35-76; Sergei Sharshun, "Moe uchastie vo frantsuzskom dadaisticheskom dvizhenii," Vozdushnye puù 5 (1967): 168-74.

17. Poplavskii, "Pis'ma Iu. P. Ivasku," Unozis 5-6 (1979): 207. 18. lstoriia odnogo puteshestviia (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel, 1974) 304. 19. Contrary to Hélène Ménégaldo's suggestion that Poplavskii lived in Berlin for

two years ("L'Univers imaginaire de Boris Poplavsky," Diss. Université de Paris X- Nanterre [1981] 37; "Chastnoe pis'mo Borisa Poplavskogo," in Poplavskii, Neizdannoe 38), the poet's visit was short, as attested by his father (Iulian Poplavskii, "Boris

Poplavskii," Nov' 8 [1935] 146) and by Vadim Andreev (Istoriia odnogo puteshestviia 304). Most probably, he spent in Berlin only the summer of 1922 and went back to Paris by the end of September, when artistic life in the capital was resuming after the

traditionally dead summer season. Viktor Mamchenko recalls meeting him at literary gatherings in January 1923 ("Pis'ma N. P. Smimovu," in Poplavskii, Neizdannoe 83-

84); Anatolii Iulius cites him among the participant of a joint Dada-"Cherez" venture in April 1923 ("Russkii literatumyi Parizh 20-kh godov," Sovremennik 13 [1966] 89-

90). 20. Sergei Romov, "Udarnaia khronika, Udar 4 (1923) 24; Zdanevich, "bn approchant

Éluard" 42. 21. His poetry of 1923-1927, recently discovered in the archives of Ilia Zdanevich

and Nikolai Tatishchev has been published in Pokushenie s negodnymi sredstvami and

Dadafoniia (Moscow: Gileia, 1999). 22. Nina Berberova, B. Poplavsku. V venke îz voska , bons roplavskn v otsenkakh i

vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, ed. L. Allen and O. Griz (St. Petersburg and Dùsseldorf:


Logos, 1993) 149; Roman Gui', "la unes Rossiu," Apologiia emigratsii, 2 vols. (New York: Most, 1984) 2: 133-34; Mamchenko 83-84.

23. Vladislav Sosinskii, "Konurka," Voprosy literatury 6 (1991) 176. 24. Cf. his letters to Sosinskii (Neizdannoe 246-47) and to Ivask ("Pis'ma Iu. P. Ivasku"

207). 25. Zdanevich, "Boris Poplavskii," Sintaksis 16 (1986) 168. 26. Cf. his letter to Zdanevich (Pokushenie s negodnymi sredstvami 94-95) and

Zdanevich's "Boris Poplavskii" 168. 27. Cf. Georgii Adamovich, "Literaturnye besedy," Zveno 109 (1925): 2; "Literaturnye

besedy," Zveno 4 (1927): 188-94; "Parizhskie vpechatleniia," Poslednie novosù 4767 (1934): 2; Aleksandr Iablonovskii, "Sverkh-realisty i sverkh-skandalisty," Vozxozhdenie 352 (1926): 2; Vladislav Khodasevich, "O formalizme i formalistakh," Vozrozhdenie 646 (1927): 2-3; "Letuchie listy," Vozrozhdenie 1864 (1930): 3; Mikhail Kostrov, "Louis Aragon," Vozrozhdenie 905 (1927): 3; Sizif (Adamovich), "Lenin, Trotskii i siurrealisty," Zveno 147 (1925): 4; Vladimir Veidle, "Zhivopis' siurrealistov," Zveno 224 (1927): 6-7; "O frantsuzskoi literature," Sovremennye zapiski 39 (1929): 491-502.

28. "Réflexions sur la littérature. Du surréalisme," Nouvelle revue française 24 (1925) 38:341.

29. André Breton, "Manifeste du surréalisme," in his Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) 50.

30. Breton, "Second manifeste du surréalisme," in his Manifestes du surréalisme 86. 31. Breton, "Pour Dada," La Nouvelle revue française 15 (1920) 83: 210. 32. Louis Aragon, Traité du style (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) 188-89. 33. "Literaturnaia anketa. Chto vy dumaete o svoem tvorchestve," Chisla 5 (1931)

287. 34. "O misticheskoi atmosfere molodoi literatury v emieratsii," Chisla 2-3 (1930) 308-1 1. 35. Letter to Zdanevich (2/4/1928) in Pokushenie s negodnymi sredstvami 104. 36. Adamovich, "Pamiati Poplavskogo," Poslednie novosti 5320 (1935): 2; Petr Bitsilli,

"Iakor'. Antologiia zarubezhnoi poezii," Sovremennye zapiski 60 (1936) 463; Gaito Gazdanov, "O Poplavskom," Dal'nie berega (Moscow: Respublika, 1994), 287.

37. Ménégaldo, "L'Univers imaginaire" 103-04. 38. Apollon Bezobrazov, in his Domoi s nebes. Romany (St. Petersburg and Dùsseldorf:

Logos, 1993) 82. See also the epigraph from Lautréamont in Chapter 9. 39. Alfred Bern, "Zhizn' i poeziia," Mech 16 (1935): 6. 40. Iurii Fel'zen, "Sergei Sharshun. Put' pravyi," Chisla 10 ( 1934): 285; Vasilii Ianovskii,

Polia Eliseiskie (New York: Silver Age Publishing, 1983) 247, 277; Iurii Mandel'stam, "Smert' v kredit," Vozrozdenie 4035 (1936): 5.

41. Letter to Zdanevich (3/16/1928) in Pokushenie s negodnymi sredstvami 106. 42. "Boris Poplavskii" 165-66. 43. Adamovich, "Pamiati Poplavskogo" 2; Bern, "Pis'ma o literature. 'Chisla'," RuV

3244 (1931): 3; Gleb Struve, "Na vechere Terekrestka'," Rossiia i slavianstvo December 5-7 (1931): 4; Vladimir Varshavskii, "O proze mladshikh emigrantskikh pisatelei," Sovremennye zapiski 61 (1936) 411.

44. John M. Kopper, "Surrealism under Fire: The Prose of Boris Poplavskii," The Rus- sian Review 55 (1996): 245-64.

45. "Dva poeta," Vozrozhdenie 3984 (1936): 3. 46. "Literaturnye zametki," Poslednie novosti 5516 (1936): 3. 47. Le Paysan de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) 15-16. 48. Michel Carrouges, André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme (Paris:

Gallimard, 1967) 21-22, 26, 44. 49. Concurrently to his avant-garde activity, he was involved in a theosophical soci-

ety. In 1930 he wrote: "I am neither a church man nor an admirer of clergy" ("Pis'ma Iu. P. Ivasku" 209).

50. "O smerti i zhalosti v 'Chislakh'," Novaia gazeta 3 (1931): 3.


51. "L'Univers imaginaire" 72, 74. 52. The entry of March 6, 1921 (Neizdannoe 127). 53. Jean-Pierre Crespelle, La Vie quotidienne à Montparnasse à la Grande Epoque 1905-

1930 (Paris: Hachette, 1976): "Most of them took drugs 'to see,' but some, like Crevel, Malkin, Artaud, Rigaut, were addicts in need of a regular dose. Drugs were as common as cigarettes" (143). See also Jacqueline Chénieux, Surrealism (New York: Columbia UP, 1990) 61-62.

54. In his Neizdannoe 115, 117. 55. "Po povodu 'Dnevnikov' B. Poplavskogo," Sovremennye zapiski 68 (1939): 443. 56. "Krug. Al'manakh. Kniga tret'ia. Parizh, 1938," Sovremennye zapiski 68 (1939):

480. 57. "Literaturnye zametki," Poslednie novosti 6485 (1938): 3. 58. On June 30, 1933, he wrote about himself: "No one but the saints themselves

know the meaning of sanctity. . . . My God, only You know how boring are the days of sanctity. . . . Only the saints know how boring sanctity can be" (Neizdannoe 107-08).

59. E. Rais, "O Borise Poplavskom," DaVnie berega 298-99. 60. "Jean Maxence et Nadejda Gorodetzky. Charles Péguy. Textes suivis de débats au

Studio franco-russe. 'Cahiers de la Quinzaine'," Novyi Grad 1 (1931): 99-100. 61. Aleksandr Bakhrakh, "Po pamiati, po zapisiam . . . I," Novyi zhurnal 190-91 (1993):

336-37; Aleksandr Sedykh, "Monparnasskie teni," Boris Poplavskii v otsenkakh i vospominaniiakh sovremennikov 85-86.

62. Gul\ "la unes Rossiu," Apologiia emigratsii 135; Gleb Struve, Russkaia literatura v izgnanii (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1984) 314; Vladimir Veidle, "O tekh, kogo uzhe net," Novyi zhurnal 192-93 (1993) 377.

63. Iulian Poplavskii, "Boris Poplavskii 146. 64. Upon his death they found a note in his own handwriting about "well priced'

heroin and cocaine ("Deux réfugiés russes s'adonnaient aux stupéfiants," Le Petit Parisien, October 10 [1935]: 8; Sedykh, "Tragicheskaia smert' Borisa Poplavskogo," Poslednie novosti 5313 [1935]: 4; "Monparnasskie teni" 87).

65. "Stikhi Borisa Poplavskogo," Poslednie novosti 5425 (1936): 3. 66. On October 10, 1932, he wrote: I march with one foot on water (the left soul

drinks it), the right foot on fire (the right rubber shoe is warm), purposefully enhanc- ing, exaggerating destitution in my face (I don't shave) and in my dress (I like rags). I have defeated all desires and doubted the happiness of Jesus" (Neizdannoe 108).

67. "Domoi s nebes" in his Domoi s nebes. Romany (St. Petersburg and Dusseldorf: Logos, 1993) 277.

68. Domoi s nebes 329. Rimbaud s words actually refer to the Paris Commune and do not concern any anti-work ethic: "Je serai un travailleur: c'est l'idée qui me retient, quand les colères folles me poussent vers la bataille de Paris, - où tant de travailleurs meurent pourtant encore tandis qe je vous écris! Travailler maintenant, jamais, jamais; je suis en grève" (Letter to George Izambard in his Poésie. Une saison en enfer. Illumina- tions [Paris: Gallimard, 1994] 200).

69. Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) 68-69. Cf. Poplavskii's 1927 diary: "She reproached me: you are good for nothing. You don't want to work. I answered: Someone must live like this. I am justified in my own eyes by my dreams" ("Dnevnik T.," Novyi zhurnal 195 [1994]: 204).

70. Une vague de rêves (Paris: Seghers, 1990) 25. 71. Rigaut wrote: II y a d ailleurs bien d autres façons de voler. Il est honteux de

gagner de l'argent" ("Roman d'un jeune homme pauvre," in his Ecrits [Paris: Gallimard, 1997] 25).

72. Les Pas perdus (Paris: Gallimard, 1924) 76. 73. Ianovskii, Polia Eliseiskie 25. 74. Sedykh, "Monparnasskie teni" 85; Tatishchev, "Poet v izgnanii," Novyi zhurnal 15

(1947) 201; "O Poplavskom," Bons Poplavskii v otsenkakh i vospominaniiakh sovremenikov 92.


75. Arthur Cravan, Oeuvres (Paris: Ivréa, 1992) 87-91. 76. En Joue! (Paris: Lachenal & Ritter, 1984) 19, 23-24, 202, 204. Among other

sources, Poplavskii's familiarity with this aspect of French avant-garde mythology may have come from his acquaintance Sergei Sharshun, who met Cravan in 1916. Cravan introduced Sharshun to what would become the "dadaist spirit" (Sharshun, "Moe uchastie vo frantsuzskom dadaisticheskom dvizhenii" 169).

77. Vladimir Varshavskii, Nezamechennoe pokolenie (New York: Chekhov, 1956) 165. 78. On Poplavskii's literary "failure" as a symbol of the "unnoticed generation" cf.

Berberova, "B. Poplavskii. 'V venke iz voska'" 150; Fel'zen, "Poplavskii," Dal'nie berega 295, 297; Varshavskii, "O Poplavskom i Nabokove," Opyty 4 (1955) 67.

79. "Enquête. Le suicide est-il une solution," La Révolution surréaliste 1 (1924): 2. 80. "Enquête. Le suicide est-il une solution," La Révolution surréaliste 2 (1925): 12-13. 81. "Jacques Rigaut," La Révolution surréaliste 12 (1929): 57. 82. "Mais si la mort n'était qu'un mot," Le Disque vert. Sur le suicide 1 (1925): 29-31. 83. Victor Crastre, "Sur le suicide de Jacques Rigaut," La Nouvelle revue française 35

(1930)203:253-55. 84. Victor Crastre, "Trois héros surréalistes. Jacques Vaché, Jacques Rigaut, René

Crevel," Gazette des lettres 39 (1947): 6-7; George Pomerand, "Trois suicides significatifs. Jacques Vaché, Jacques Rigaut, René Crevel," Psyché. Revue internationale des sciences de l'homme et de psychanalyse 20 (1948): 697-701.

85. In his Écrits posthumes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) 109. 86. Robert Desnos, "Jacques Rigaut," in Rigaut, Écrits 186; Soupault, Mémoires de

l'Oubli. 1914-1923 (Paris: Lachenal & Ritter, 1981) 199-202. 87. See Berdiaev, "Po povodu 'Dnevnikov' B. Poplavskogo" 441 88. Adamovich, "Zhizn' i 'zhizn"," Poslednie novosti 5124 (1935): 2; Georgii Fedotov,

"O smerti, kul'ture i <Chislakh'," Chisla 4 (1930-31): 143-45; Khodasevich, "Zhalost' i 'zhalost"," Vozrozhdenie 3599 (1935): 3-4.

89. The only surviving police record regarding their death can be found in the 1935 register of the Institut médico-légal in Paris. The results of the autopsy showed that both men had died of "poisoning." But in the section "Presumed cause of death" both have "cause unknown," whereas in neighboring cases the register gives precise indica- tions of death causes as suicide, accident, or murder (Préfecture de Police. Institut medico* légal. Corps déposés, October [Archives de la Police, Paris, 1935] 178).

90. Gazdanov, "Boris Poplavskii. Snezhnyi chas," Sovremennye zapiski 61 (1936): 466; L. Gomolitskii, Arion (Paris: n. p., 1939) 27; Khodasevich, "O smerti Poplavskogo," Vozrozhdenie 3788 (1935): 3-4; Anatolii Shteiger, Letter to Zinaida Shakhovskaia (11/ 5/1935) in Shakhovskaia, Otrazheniia (Paris: YMCA P, 1975) 95-96.

91. Breton, "Anthologie de l'humour noir" in A. Cravan, J. Rigaut, J. Vaché, Trois suicidés de la société (Paris: Eric Losfeld, 1974) 254.

92. He repeated almost word for word the presuicidal speech of the avant-garde dandy from Soupault's En Joue! "You know, all these books of ours are futile, I want to get rid of mine, I am looking for someone to take them" (Tatishchev, "Poet v izgnanii" 205). Cf. "Je te donne mes livres, tu peux faire d'eux tous ce que tu veux. ... Ils me dégoûtent tant. Quel poids dans ma vie!" (Enjoué! 96).

93. The only surviving page of his 1922 diary has the following entry: "Belief in my unlimited will-power gave me a crazy idea - to realize the Gospels. The first thirty years will be the years of education of the sacrificial lamb" (Neizdannoe 138). Whether this entry was made in 1922 or added later (the rest of this diary must have been destroyed), the age at which he died makes him only 7 months short of Christ's age at Golgotha.

94. Lotman, "The Poetics of Everyday Behavior" 86; Anne Nesbet, "Suicide as Liter- ary Fact in the 1920s," Slavic Review 50 (1991) 4: 827-35.

95. Lieberman, "Romanticism and the Culture of Suicide in Nineteenth-Century France," Comparative Studies in Society and History 33 (1991) 3: 611, 621; Paperno, Suicide as a Cultural Institution in Dostoevsky's Russia (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997) 7-8;


Thomas de Quincey, "On Suicide," in his Collected Writings (New York: Johnson Re- print Corporation, 1968) 398-99.

96. "O Maiakovskom," Vozrozhdenie 1787 (1930): 3-4. See also Adamovich et al. "Autour de Maïakovsky," Les Nouvelles littéraires, artistiques et scientifiques 404 (1930): 6; Andrei Levinson, "La poésie chez les Soviets: le suicide de Mayakovsky," Les Nouvelles littéraires, artistiques et scientifiques 398 (1930): 6.

97. "O pokolenii, rastrativshem svoikh poetov," Smert' Vladimira Maiakovskogo (The Hague: Mouton, 1975). Cf. the same argument in Nina Berberova's presentation of the fate of Poplavskii and other émigré poets who died very differently: "Stalin also did away with them. . . . With rare exceptions they are all dead. Poplavsky, Knut, Ladinsky, Smolensky . . . represent in the history of Russia a unique generation of deprived, bro- ken, silenced, stripped, homeless, destitute," the italics are mine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992) 268. The Russian text explicitly says that Poplavskii "perished" rather than "died." This detail is not in the English translation of Berberova's memoirs, as it was not addressed to a Russian audience: "rH6ejibnonjiaBCKoro-nMeHHorn6ejib,HecMepTbM, BepoflTHO/He caMoyôMMCTBo

" (Kursiv moi [Moscow: Soglasie, 1996] 315).

98. The emulation of Christ was indeed present in Maiakovskii's deathstyle. His suicide occurred on the first day of Orthodox Easter (April 14). The news of his death, his wake, and funeral occupied the entire Holy Week. This coincidence influenced the interpretation of his suicide. For instance, it is a subtext in Mikhail Bulgakov's novel Master and Margarita (Lazar Fleishman, "O gibeli Maiakovskogo kak 'literaturnom fakte'," Slavica Hierosolymitana 4 [1979]: 126-30).

99. "Liubovnaia lodka razbilas' o byt/La barque de l'amour s'est brisée contre la vie courante," Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 1 (1930): 19. 100. "Tragicheskaia smert' Borisa Poplavskogo," Poslednie novosti 5314 (1935): 3; "Tragicheskaia gibel' B. Poplavskogo," Vozrozhdenie 3782 (1935): 4. 101. See Mamchenko, "Pis'ma N. P. Smirnovu," 84. Poplavskii's parents suggested that he was murdered. They insisted that he had never used drugs before and that Yarko poisoned him. Apparently, they denied Poplavskii's drug use because the incident occurred in their apartment where the police found more drugs and they could have been prosecuted ('"C'était la première fois que mon fils prenait un stupéfiant', nous dit la mère de Maurice Poplasky," Paris Midi 2768 [1935] 5). His father added more pictur- esqueness to the story, inventing a letter in which Yarko had told his fiancée that he wanted to die, "taking" someone with him (Iulian Poplavskii 147). This version was developed by memoirists who claimed to have seen this letter in the French press (Irina Odoevtseva, Na beregakh Seny [Paris: La Presse libre, 1983] 152; Iurii Terapiano, Vstrechi [New York: Chekhov, 1953] 1 16-17). But no French newspaper published anything on Poplavskii's or Yarko 's deaths after announcing them on October 10. The November obituary in Les Nouvelles littéraires, artistiques et scientifiques (631: 3) still called their death an accident. Émigré newspapers closely followed the case but did not mention any letter to Yarko's fiancée. However, Yarko's mother told the police that he had written her a letter, informing her that he used drugs ("Tragicheskaia smert' Borisa Poplavskogo" 3). This letter was probably transformed into Yarko's confession to his fiancée. 102. Chervinskaia, Letter to A. Bogoslovskii (Poplavskii, Neizdannoe 80); Ianovskii, Polia Eliseiskie 30.

boris poplavskii's art of life and death

Documents