the surrealist compromise of boris poplavsky

The Surrealist Compromiseof Boris Poplavsky

LEONID LIVLEONID LIVLEONID LIVLEONID LIVLEONID LIV AKAKAKAKAK

The artistic legacy of Boris Poplavsky (1903–35) remains one of the most obscure pagesof the story of Russian literature in exile. Until today, Poplavsky’s poetic collection Flags(Flagi, 1931) has been regarded as representative of his early, surrealist writings.1 But theterm “surrealism,” as used by most students of his art, is problematic, for it denotes anyartistic exploration of dreams, shocking images, and the unconscious.2 In my study, “surre-alism” refers to the artistic program of André Breton’s group—the original and only mean-ing of the term familiar to Poplavsky. Furthermore, the recent discovery of Poplavsky’spoems in the archives of Il’ia Zdanevich and Nikolai Tatishchev shows that Flags is simplythe first published collection of Poplavsky as an “émigré” poet. Although he had not pub-lished before joining émigré literary life in 1928, outside émigré circles he had made twoabortive attempts with his collections The Gramophone on the North Pole (Grammofon nasevernom poliuse) and The Dirigible of Unknown Destination (Dirizhabl’ neizvestnogonapravleniia).3 These newly found poems challenge the accepted view of Poplavsky’s ar-tistic evolution.

Defining surrealism with no relation to the program of Breton’s group, Simon Karlinskysuggested that, after the publication of his “surrealist” collection Flags, Poplavsky gave upsurrealism “out of deference to the Parisian school of fashionable existential angoisse thatbecame dominant in the émigré literature at that time.”4 In this article, I will contest thiscommon view of Poplavsky’s poetic trajectory. I will argue that, against the backdrop

All translations from Russian and French are my own unless specified otherwise. I am grateful to Irene Masing-Delic and my anonymous readers for their comments on the earlier version of this article.

1See Elizabeth Beaujour, Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the “First” Emigration (Ithaca, 1989),140; Aleksey Gibson, Russian Poetry and Criticism in Paris From 1920 to 1940 (The Hague, 1990), 115–40;Simon Karlinsky, “Surrealism in Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry: Churilin, Zabolotskii, Poplavskii,” SlavicReview 26 (December 1967): 612–16; and Iurii Terapiano, Vstrechi (New York, 1953), 114.

2See Liudmila Foster, “K voprosu o siurrealizme v russkoi literature,” in American Contributions to the SeventhInternational Congress of Slavists, vol. 2 , ed. Victor Terras (The Hague, 1973), 199–201.

3Régis Gayraud, “Iz arkhiva Il’i Zdanevicha. Perepiska s bratom,” Minuvshee 5 (1988): 152; and “Tvoia druzhbako mne — odno iz samykh tsennykh iavlenii moei zhizni,” in Poplavskii, Pokushenie s negodnymi sredstvami(Moscow, 1997), 15–16.

4Karlinsky, “Surrealism in Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry,” 616.

The Russian Review 60 (January 2001): 89–108Copyright 2001 The Russian Review

90 Leonid Livak

of Poplavsky’s pre-1928 poetry, Flags represent, in fact, a movement away from surreal-ism. Since most of the poems he published in 1928–30 reappeared in Flags, I will tracePoplavsky’s artistic transformation within this collection. However, I contend that Poplavskydid not entirely abandon his avant-garde aesthetics but instead adapted them to émigréartistic expectations and forged an original type of literary discourse that opens some of histexts to different readings. This adaptation is especially evident in his novel Apollo theUgly (Apollon Bezobrazov, 1931), an analysis of which is part of the present study.

THE SURREALIST BEFORE THE SURREALIST BEFORE THE SURREALIST BEFORE THE SURREALIST BEFORE THE SURREALIST BEFORE TEMPTTEMPTTEMPTTEMPTTEMPTAAAAATIONTIONTIONTIONTION

As a teenager, Poplavsky embraced both symbolist and futurist aesthetics. His early poemsimitate symbolist models, revealing a quest for mystical experience through drug use.5 In1919 he presented himself as a “hooligan from Mayakovsky’s entourage” and published hispoem “To Herbert Wells.”6 In its rhythmical pattern, industrial imagery, and iconoclasticethos, the poem confirms Poplavsky’s parti pris as Mayakovsky’s epigone.7 Equally fluentin Russian and French, Poplavsky arrived in Paris in May 1921. Combining his interest inreligious mysticism, spiritualism, and Alexander Blok’s poetry with futurist iconoclasm,he joined simultaneously the Theosophical Society and two groups of Russian artists,“Gatarapak” and “Palata poetov.”8 These groups included, among others, Boris Bozhnev,Aleksandr Ginger, Viktor Mamchenko, Valentin Parnakh, Sergei Sharshun, and Il’iaZdanevich, a veteran of Russian futurism who became Poplavsky’s artistic mentor.9

“Gatarapak” and “Palata poetov” were inspired by futurism and constructivism, andby Parisian Dada, which included most future surrealists. Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, PhilippeSoupault, Tristan Tzara, and other dadaists collaborated with Russian exiles in joint artisticundertakings.10 In the fall of 1922, Zdanevich organized a new association, “Cherez,” whichunited “Palata poetov” and “Gatarapak,” forging ever closer ties to the French and Sovietavant-garde.11 Poplavsky subscribed to the group’s pro-Soviet politics and its fusion ofRussian and French avant-garde aesthetics. “Left” political sympathies, dadaist and futur-ist schooling, and personal contacts with French avant-garde artists prepared Poplavsky toassimilate the theory and practice of Breton’s group after Dada’s demise in 1923.12 The

5See the poem “Vot proshlo, navsegda ia uekhal na iug” in Poplavskii, Neizdannoe (Moscow, 1996), 355.6Leonid Chertkov, “Debiut Borisa Poplavskogo,” Kontinent 47 (1986): 377.7A stanza from this poem reads: «А мы, на ступенях столетий столпившись, / Рупором вставили

трубы фабричные / И выдули медные грохотов бивни / В спину бегущей библейской опричнине»(Neizdannoe, 363).

8Poplavsky’s diary of 1921–22 is filled with references to Annie Besant, Jacob Boehme, Krishnamurti, theGospels, Theosophy, and Blok’s art (Neizdannoe, 124–35, 138–39).

9In the dedication to the poem “Pokushenie s negodnymi sredstvami” (1926) Poplavsky called himself Zdanevich’sdisciple (Pokushenie, 86).

10See Michel Beyssac, La Vie culturelle de l’émigration russe en France: Chronique 1920–1930 (Paris, 1971),18; Matthew Josephson, Life among the Surrealists (New York, 1962), 132; Il’ia Zdanevich, “En approchantÉluard,” Carnets de l’Iliazd Club 1 (1990): 35–76; and Sergei Sharshun, “Moe uchastie vo frantsuzskomdadaisticheskom dvizhenii,” Vozdushnye puti 5 (1967): 168–74.

11See Sergei Romov, “Udarnaia khronika,” Udar 4 (1923): 24; and Zdanevich, “En approchant Éluard,” 42.12Vladislav Sosinskii, “Konurka,” Voprosy literatury 6 (1991): 176.

The Surrealist Compromise of Boris Poplavsky 91

political polarization of Russian literature in Paris left him with little choice but to keepaloof from émigré circles. His letters reveal the voluntary nature of his self-exclusion fromémigré literary life.13 As the ranks of “left” Russian literati dwindled, Poplavsky had fewartistic outlets outside the surrealist group of André Breton.

Let us examine the precepts of French surrealism that now came to influence Poplavsky’spre-1928 poetry.14 Preoccupied with the creation of a new human being, the surrealistsviewed literature as the means of a psychological self-study for changing the human condi-tion. The dadaist-surrealist split of 1922–23 had at its core the tension between Dada’sethically valuable posture of “complete silence,” whereby one stopped writing in protestagainst bourgeois art, and surrealism’s milder version of artistic self-effacement, whichrejected “literature” in favor of “psychological documents.”15 Opposing the destructiveanarchy of Dada, surrealism did not ground its antiliterary stance in antitraditionalism. Itsdesignated ancestors ranged from Chateaubriand to Hugo. The style of Breton and Aragonwas often called “classical.” Desnos and Éluard wrote regular verses with the attributes oftraditional poetry, while experimenting with “automatic writing.”16

Surrealism inherited Tzara’s postulate, “Thought is made in the mouth,” affirming theprimacy of language over thought. Breton argued that the “emotive power” of the poeticimage depended on its absurdity created by the comparison of semantically remote ele-ments.17 Such an absurd image could be obtained through “automatic writing,” which con-sisted of writing down everything that came to mind as fast as possible and for extendedperiods of time. The fast pace of writing lifted the control of reason because “the speed ofthought did not surpass the speed of words.”18 Poplavsky viewed “automatic writing” as anartistic method akin to Joyce’s “stream of consciousness.” Breton opposed Joyce’s art tothe psychological authenticity of “automatic writing,” which, according to him, had noaesthetic value in the minds of its creators.19 But the product of Poplavsky’s artistic imagi-nation is similar to that of Breton’s “liberated consciousness”: the structural principle of theimage in his early poetry follows the surrealist technique of semantic contrast.

This semantic contrast can result from the juxtaposition of a noun and an adjective ora verb and an adverb, as in the poem “Stekliannaia deva” (“nevozmozhnoe drevo,”“bezvozvratnyi tovarishch,” “bezvozmezdno letaet”) evocative of Breton’s and Éluard’s

13See Poplavsky’s 1926 letter to Sosinskii (Neizdannoe, 246–47), and his 1930 “Pis’ma Iu. P. Ivasku,” Gnozis5–6 (1979): 207.

14For the purposes of my article, I will only briefly characterize surrealist poetics in Poplavsky’s early writings.For a detailed treatment of this subject see my “The Poetics of French Surrealism in Boris Poplavskii’s Poetry of1923–1927,” Slavic and East European Journal 44 (Summer 2000): 177–94.

15Louis Aragon, Traité du style (Paris, 1996), 188–89.16See Henri Béhar, Le Surréalisme (Paris, 1992), 386–87; and André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris,

1996), 37–38. Gibson, Russian Poetry, 117, and Hélène Ménégaldo, “L’Univers imaginaire de Boris Poplavsky”(Ph.D. diss., University of Paris X-Nanterre, 1981), 124, confused dadaist and surrealist attitudes by insisting thatPoplavsky’s poetry was not truly surrealist because his versification was traditional—with meter, rhyme, anddivision into stanzas.

17See Breton, Manifestes, 50.18Ibid., 33.19See ibid., 166; and Poplavskii, “Po povodu...” Chisla 4 (1930–31): 173.

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usages (“tous mes animaux sont obligatoires”; and “un château sans signification”).20 Similesand metaphors with semantically remote elements also produce a surrealist effect: “lunaprisela, kak soldat v nuzhde”; and “tsvelo nebes dvupoloe pal’to/sirenevye faldy molchamleli.”21 The violation of clichés is another way of building a surrealist image. Aragonreplaced the idiom “blond comme les blés” (“wheat blond”) with a series of comparisons,including blond as hysteria, blond as the sky, blond as fatigue, and blond as a kiss (“blondcomme le baiser”). The latter created another semantic shock by breaking the cliché “rougecomme le baiser.”22 In the phrase “letaet serdtse kak zelenyi zaiats,” Poplavsky superim-posed the stereotypical association of the noun “heart” with the verb “to jump” (“serdtseprygaet”) onto the idiom “zaiach’e serdtse,” which denotes fear or agitation (D, 59). Insteadof comparing the “jumping heart” to a jumping rabbit, he made the heart fly like a rabbitand painted his rabbit green.

Breaking mimetic and logical rules, surrealist texts strive to convince the reader thatthe author’s activity is “unconscious.” Authentic or simulated, these texts look as if dic-tated by the unconscious. But the semantic anomalies that create the effect of uncontrolleddiscourse are not arbitrary. Surrealist texts rely on the principle of the “extended meta-phor”—a series of metaphors connected syntactically (as part of one phrase or narrativestructure) and semantically (each expresses an aspect of the element represented by the firstmetaphor of the series).23 The extended metaphor constitutes a special code because theimages that compose it have meaning only in relation to the first metaphor of the series.Surrealist images can be explained in the context of preceding images. Surrealists wereaware of this technical side of literary “automatism.”24 In “automatic writing,” a word deter-mines a verbal sequence by formal similarity (phonetic parallelism, puns) or stereotypicalassociations (phonetic groups, quotes, clichés). “Automatic writing” associates the signifiersof incompatible signifieds, violates the mimetic representation of reality, and replaces thereferential function of language with its poetic function.

Poplavsky made use of the extended metaphor. For instance, the metaphor “eshchevalilsia bezzashchitnyi dozhd’” encodes the rules of the ensuing passage (G, 41). The verb“valit’sia” (to fall) is not used to describe rain but can describe falling snow or a falling man.The application of the adjective “defenseless” reinforces the association with a human body,which, by this logic, appears in the following verse: “kak padaet ubityi iz okna.” The author

20Poplavskii, Grammofon, 80 (cited from Pokushenie); Paul Éluard, Capitale de la douleur (Paris, 1997), 58;André Breton, Poisson soluble (Paris, 1996), 27. Further references to poems from Poplavsky’s collections will begiven, where appropriate, in the text according to the abbreviations G (for Grammofon), D (for Dirizhabl’), and F(for Flagi). Dirizhabl’ can be found in vol. 3 of Poplavskii, Sobranie Sochinenii, 3 vols. (Berkeley, 1980–81); andFlagi in vol. 1, ibid. Dirizhabl’ poems discussed here conform to their manuscript versions in Poplavskii, Dadafoniia(Moscow, 1999).

21Poplavskii, Dirizhabl’, 28, 29. Compare these, respectively, with “le soleil chien couchant” (Breton, Clairede terre [Paris, 1996], 63; and “la nuit est venue pareille à un saut de carpe à la surface d’une eau violette (Breton,Poisson, 38).

22Aragon, Le Paysan de Paris (Paris, 1996), 51.23Michael Riffaterre, “La Métaphore filée dans la poésie surréaliste,” in his La Production du texte (Paris,

1979), 217–34.24See Breton, Signe ascendant (Paris, 1968), 10; idem, Manifestes, 171; Éluard, “Premières vues anciennes,” in

his Oeuvres complètes, 2 vols. (Paris, 1968), 1:539; and idem, “Poésie involontaire,” in ibid. 2:1133–34.


uses another verb denoting the action of falling (“padat’”), which can be applied both toman and rain. The result of this derivation is a shocking incompatibility between the com-pared elements: rain and a murdered man. In another poem he writes: “Budut skakat’ godakak vorob’i nad kalom” (D, 46). The metaphor “jumping years” violates the linguisticcliché “gody letiat.” Although the next image is also shocking (instead of pecking on crumbs,sparrows replace flies feasting on excrement), the derivation is justified by the stereotypicalsemantic association of “jumping” and “flying” with a sparrow.

The efficiency of the extended metaphor consists of the linear interdependence of itselements: a modification in one image changes the entire sequence. Such modification isa common device of “surrealist mimesis.”25 Poplavsky replaces “fish” with “birds” in thephrase “the blue sea where fish are diving” to obtain the photographic negative of therealist mimesis created as much by the logic of language as by the author’s fantasy:

А в синем море где ныряют птицыГде я плыву утопленник готовКупался долго вечер краснолицыйСредь водорослей городских садов.26

The publication of dream accounts was customary in surrealist reviews. Dreamsprovoked the “uncontrolled succession of images” and, in the case of hypnotic dreams,permitted their immediate recording.27 Surrealist somnambulists spoke and wrote duringhypnotic sessions, rejecting as unimportant the question of authenticity: since humanthought drew on the unconscious, one could not be “insincere.”28 The number of refer-ences to dreaming in the poetry of Breton’s group far surpasses any other subject. Poplavskywas also obsessed with the role of the dream in creative activity, evoked in his poemsthrough the image of speaking or writing while asleep. But the recognition of allusions tothe artistic function of dreams and “automatic writing” requires familiarity with the systemof symbols shared by French surrealists. The signifiers with semantic connection to watersymbolize the unconscious. The most common are “water,” “stream,” “river,” “sea,” and, byextension, “fish,” “shell,” “ship,” and “submarine.” Submersion into water, the observationof water, and water travel are tropes for the exploration of the unconscious.29

Water and semantically related signifiers abound in Poplavsky’s poems. A poem inThe Gramophone starts with the line “netonushchaia zhizn’, au, au,” juxtaposing the ratio-nality (“unsinkability”) of the everyday to another reality that culminates in a parade ofinfernal creatures as the everyday disintegrates (G, 29). In “Zhizneopisanie pisaria,” a scribewrites while dreaming and bathing in a stream (D, 42). The poet leaves open the possibilityof interpreting dreaming as the description of his artistic method. Describing writing as

25Riffaterre, “La Métaphore filée,” 233.26Cf. Éluard: “Je ramasse les débris de toutes mes merveilles... / Je les jette aux ruisseaux vivaces et pleins

d’oiseaux. / La mer, la calme mer est entre eux comme le ciel dans la lumière... / Je m’endors et je mène la grandevie” (Mourir, 55).

27Aragon, Paysan de Paris, 82.28See Aragon, Une vague de rêves (Paris, 1990), 19.29See Breton, Poisson, 27–31, 47–50; idem, Clair, 78; Robert Desnos, Destinée arbitraire (Paris, 1997), 52–53;

and Éluard, Capitale, 66.

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water travel, Poplavsky’s narrator says: “Tenebrum mare-more temnoty. / Proidia, prolivchernila, my v tebe.” The association of ink and sea travel is enhanced by a pun: without acomma, the second verse reads “having crossed the strait of ink” (G, 45).

Poplavsky’s early poems abound in fantastic and baroque images steeped in graphicviolence. This aspect hearkens to French surrealists’ hesitation between skepticism andbelief in the supernatural. In Breton’s texts, castles are haunted by a ghost who is lookingfor his severed head.30 In other surrealist poems, a tiny swift bird drags a headless corpse ona mirrored surface; the Seine carries a “beautifully polished” female corpse with no head orlimbs; and the appearance of another female “boat of flesh” indicates that water travelersmust hurry to their graves.31

In “surrealist mimesis,” water may be replaced by air: sea may become sky, fish—birds, and submarines—dirigibles.32 Poplavsky’s dream narratives often shift from water toair.33 The description of a dream in “Voda vzdykhala” starts with the image of flying water,which initiates a series of metaphorical derivations: “rakoviny kryshi,” “meduzy oblakov,”“glubina letaiushchego moria,” and “kak ryba ryskal dirizhabl’-chudak” (G, 51). The im-age of a fish-like dirigible is important for Poplavsky. His manuscripts contain severaldrawings of a bird standing on a fish that looks like a dirigible. But the image of a fish- andsubmarine-like dirigible is not his invention. In Les Champs magnétiques, dirigibles floatamid small lakes in the sky, and Éluard describes a dirigible as an air icon that looks like aspinning giant fish.34

Another group of images derives from the semantic association with water’s transpar-ency and with the clarity of the “illuminated” unconscious. This group includes glass andall related signifiers. A common image in surrealist texts is a container of glass in which thenarrator finds himself.35 Several of Poplavsky’s poems describe unconscious states as lifein a glass house. In “Eshche valilsia bezzashchitnyi dozhd’,” an underwater glass house issmashed, throwing about “blood of ink” (G, 41). This house may be a glass ink-well thatrefers to the narrator’s occupation as a “scribe”-somnambulist.

COMPRCOMPRCOMPRCOMPRCOMPROMISE:OMISE:OMISE:OMISE:OMISE: FLAFLAFLAFLAFLAGSGSGSGSGS

Poplavsky remained aloof from émigré literary life until the last hope of publishing hispoetry in the “left” circles was lost. “From that point on, Poplavsky moved ever closer tothe émigré press. This compromise won him a new sphere of action and coldness in rela-tions with old friends.”36 In the winter of 1928 he broke his artistic seclusion, contributing

30Breton, Poisson, 28, 30.31Éluard, Capitale, 75; Breton, Poisson, 36.32See Breton, Clair, 63, 65; idem, Poisson, 47; Desnos, Destinée, 42, 43, 54; and Éluard, Capitale, 63, 85, 94,

95.33“Glubokii kholod okruzhaet nas” (G, 53); “Morskoi zmei” (G, 46); “Petia Pan” (G, 85); “Ochishchaetsia

schast’e ot vsiakoi nadezhdy” (G, 69); “S monoklem, s bakhromoiu na shtanakh” (G, 71).34Breton and Philippe Soupault, Les Champs magnétiques (Paris, 1967), 39; Éluard, Capitale, 109–10.35Aragon, Paysan de Paris, 44; Breton, Clair, 61, 62; Desnos, Destinée, 35, 38.36Zdanevich, “Boris Poplavskii,” Sintaksis 16 (1986): 168.


several poems to émigré periodicals. Justifying his action to Zdanevich, he wrote that “youare accusing me of following the ‘great road of men,’” but went on to wonder whether theycould “dare” to

stay on the crystal path up there in the mountain? You will laugh: “Another onedestroyed by Christianity.” Yes, I am a Christian, even if I look like a scoundreldefecting ignominiously from the “courageous crowd.” Yes, I have decided to“turn down the volume” (“sbavit’ tonu”), to become comprehensible (and dis-gusting for myself). ... But can you not see that the ways “beyond literature” havebecome shorter? ... “Remaining within oneself,” “sacred nothingness,” and “a geniuswho dies unknown.” But I do not want to die unknown, I do not accept thisSatanic pride, for I am a Christian. I curse your courage.37

This letter shows that Poplavsky’s reluctance to “follow the great road of men” was morethan politically motivated. It sprang from the specifically surrealist view of art as a way ofself-cognition (“remaining within oneself”) and rejection of the literary establishment. Theletter evokes Breton’s statements: “It is unacceptable for the human being to leave a trace ofpassage on earth” (“sacred nothingness”); and “Today, many young writers are devoid ofthe smallest literary ambition” (“a genius who dies unknown”).38 Like Poplavsky’s, thesurrealists’ artistic ambitions were frustrated by self-imposed alienation from the literaryestablishment and public. In 1926, Artaud and Soupault were excluded from the group forpublishing “too much” and contributing to nonsurrealist reviews.

Poplavsky’s letter illustrates the means by which the poet “enfranchised” himself. “Be-coming comprehensible” meant giving up the logical rupture of surrealist discourse, while“turning down the volume” implied his determination to play down surrealist imagery. Thetranscendental mysticism of surrealism was replaced by religious mysticism. The elitistaloofness of an avant-garde poet became “Satanic pride,” while Christianity functioned asan anti-Soviet marker. In many respects, the poet’s about-face was a return to his old inter-ests, dormant during his surrealist period—Christian mysticism, spiritualism, and Russiansymbolism, especially the poetry of Alexander Blok.

With the exception of several poems, most texts Poplavsky published in 1928–30 werewritten during that period. But the editing he performed on his published pre-1928 poemsillustrates the technical side of his resolution to write “comprehensibly” and to “turn downthe volume.” First of all, he introduced punctuation that is almost absent in the manuscriptsof The Gramophone. The absence of punctuation, common in surrealist texts, is a sign of“automatism” and often engenders semantic ambiguity and logical rupture. Poplavsky’sorthographic “conversion” is apparent in Flags. Zdanevich thought that the editor of Flagsintroduced punctuation without consulting the poet.39 In fact, Poplavsky started observingtraditional punctuation from his first publications in émigré reviews.

The poet also altered shocking phrases in his early poetry. In the poem “A ElémirBourge” (G, 74), published under the new title “Dolorosa” (F, 39), he modified two such

37Poplavskii, Pokushenie, 94–95.38Breton, Les Pas perdus (Paris, 1924), 9, 73.39Zdanevich, “Boris Poplavskii,” 168.

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phrases. “Na balkone korchilas’ zaria” became “na balkone plakala zaria.” The phrase “Onpodnial ee devichii krup,” where the female body is compared to that of a horse (“krup”instead of “trup”), was replaced with “podnialas’ ona k nemu i vdrug.” As a result, theshocking comparison of the falling night with a mysterious dying woman from ElémirBourges’ decadent novels was softened and rendered compatible with the poem’s new reli-gious leitmotif. The dead woman was replaced by the mourning Mother of God. Comparethe two versions (alterations are given in brackets):

На балконе корчилась [плакала] заряВ ярко-красном платье маскарадномИ над нею наклонялся зряТонкий вечер в сюруке парадном

А потом над кружевом решеткиОн поднял ее девичий круп[Поднялась она к нему, и вдруг,]И [он] издав трамвайный стон короткийБросил вниз позеленевший труп ...

Громко хлопнув музыкальной дверцейСоскочила дама [осень] на ходуИ прижав соболью муфту к сердцу[И прижав рукой больное сердце]Закричала как кричат в аду ...

И танцуя под фонарным шаромОпадая в пустоте [тишине] бездоннойСмерть запела совершенно даромНад лежащей на земле [М]адонной.

The poet goes from surrealist to Christian mysticism by eliminating some shocking im-ages, replacing the word “woman” by the more ambiguous “autumn,” and capitalizing“madonna” to transform a female stranger who suffered violent death into the mourningMary. Finally, he introduced punctuation.

In “Sentimental’naia demonologiia,” Poplavsky removed the ambiguity inherent inall poems which represent his surrealist experiments. In the original version, one couldinterpret the narrator’s adventures “under ground” as a reference to the surrealist method.The new version permitted only literal reading—a meeting with the devil. In the phrase“Vy pomnite kogda v kholodnyi den’ khodili vy pod gorodom na lyzhakh,” the preposi-tion “za” replaces “pod” (G, 60; F, 15). Since “pod gorodom” can mean both “outside thecity” and “under the city,” “za” eliminates ambiguity. In the first version, the narratormeets someone “dressed like/in a skeleton or even like a lady” (“v skelet odetym ili dazhedamoi”), in the new version the line reads “clothed in a dressing-gown or even like a lady”(“v khalat odetym”). This alteration purges the comic ambiguity of the narrator’s vision.

The poetic image was among the problems of Poplavsky’s conversion. He had tojustify fantastic and shocking imagery at a time when Parisian émigré poets—Adamovich,Chervinskaia, Ivanov, Knut, Otsup, Shteiger, and others—were heading in the directionof realistic and “simple” art. In the context of surrealist poetics, fantastic imagery referred


to surrealist experience as a record of the unconscious. Outside this context, it seemed too“literary.” Poplavsky accompanied the publication of his edited poems with an article inwhich he attempted to reconcile surrealist and émigré poetics. He indicated that his art wastraditionally Russian by citing Blok and Pushkin. Then he presented the Russian poetictradition as that type of writing in which the absence of rational control produced logicalrupture; written “in a dream or another unconscious state,” poetry was a “document” inwhich “everything could freely turn into anything.”40

This argument encapsulated the artistic program of surrealism and ran counter toémigré critical opinion. Although younger émigrés acknowledged the validity of surreal-ism as an artistic experiment, older, more influential literati rejected it as a naive view ofart.41 They insisted that without the control of reason an artistic text would become acompilation of literary clichés. They saw the main flaw of Breton’s program in the fact thatit gave the irrational a rational task.42 As a result, the predominant attitude toward surreal-ism in émigré literary circles was scornful dismissal.

The émigré aesthetic requirement that the artist control his material was among thereasons for the transformations in Poplavsky’s poetry. Comprising almost all of his poemspublished before 1931, Flags presents a clear picture of the poet’s evolution. The poems inFlags can be divided into four groups: those written before 1928 and marked by surrealistpoetics despite the author’s editing work; some poems of 1927 and all the poems of 1928,where he no longer uses the technique of the extended metaphor and whose surrealist imag-ery is alienated from the context of surrealist poetics; the poems of 1929, in which fantasticimagery is motivated as children’s dreams; and other poems of 1929–30 tending towardrealistic motivation, imaginative restraint, and a sober, “confessional” tone. Despite edit-ing, the poems in the first group contrasted with mainstream émigré poetry thanks to theirsemantically shocking images and fantastic plots (“Don Kikhot,” “Otritsatel’nyi polius,”“Angélique”), to logically incoherent narratives based on the extended metaphor technique(“Vesna v adu,” “Lumière astrale”), and to metric patterns and neologisms reminiscent offuturism (“V bor’be so snegom,” “Bor’ba so snom,” “Arturu Rembo”).

Poplavsky’s effort to modify his poetics is explicit in the second group of poems,where surrealist images and tropes are alienated from surrealist philosophy and symbolism.The poet abandoned the extended metaphor technique and drastically reduced the amountof semantic shock in these poems. They teem with dream evocations, motifs of water andair travel, infernal descents, and fantastic imagery that are separated from the exploration ofthe unconscious as the goal and mode of artistic creation. Estranged from surrealist phi-losophy, elements of surrealist poetics lose “documentary” motivation. Breton condemnedas “literature” artistic imagination unjustified by extraliterary considerations, and these

40Poplavskii, “Zametki o poezii,” Stikhotvorenie 2 (1928): 28–29.41See Elena Izvol’skaia, “Commerce,” Zveno 123 (1925): 2; Sergei Sharshun, “Magicheskii realizm,” Chisla 6

(1932): 229; Iurii Terapiano, “Zhurnal i chitatel’,” Novyi korabl’ 1 (1927): 26; and Vladimir Varshavskii, “O prozemladshikh emigrantskikh pisatelei,” Sovremennye zapiski 61 (1936): 413.

42See Georgii Adamovich, “Literaturnye besedy,” Zveno 109 (1925): 2; Vladimir Veidle, “Zhivopis’ siurrealistov,”Zveno 224 (1927): 6–7; “Monparnasskie mechtaniia,” Sovremennye zapiski, 47 (1931): 461; and “Mekhanizatsiiabessoznatel’nogo,” Sovremennye zapiski, 58 (1935): 463–64, 469.

98 Leonid Livak

poems would elicit his disapprobation. The fantastic imagery of Poplavsky’s post-1927poems, which captivated many readers and earned him renown as a “surrealist,” had little todo with French surrealism proper.

“Lunnyi dirizhabl’” exemplifies Poplavsky’s evolution (F, 42–43). The poem describesa trip in a dirigible with conventional surrealist symbolics, interchangeable air and waterimagery, and a descent into infernal spheres. But the poem lacks semantically and linguis-tically shocking images. The trip symbolizes neither a dream nor the process of poeticcreation. The narrator is removed from the fantastic world, which he describes rather thanexplores. There is nothing incoherent in the succession of images. The dirigible’s descentmotivates logically the transfer from air to water imagery. The use of the word “dream” andits derivatives does not allow the surrealist ambiguity of dream and death. The narratormakes clear that he is not describing his own dream, which could be interpreted as tempo-rary death, but a fantastic kingdom of sleep in which all characters are explicitly said to besleeping. All metareference to the surrealist method is absent; the narrator insists on hisstatus as a storyteller who invents and controls his narrative.

Poplavsky’s use of surrealist signifiers devoid of their initial referential function cre-ates the effect of gratuitous fantasy. Due to its imagery, the poetry in Flags has beencalled “visual.”43 It is true that such images as banners, towers, and dirigibles in Flagsseem to come “straight out of Giorgio de Chirico” but their presence in Poplavsky’s earlypoetry hardly had the same effect.44 Focusing on the poetic image, surrealism broughtpoetry and painting closer: “visual automatism” was developed simultaneously with “auto-matic writing.” Éluard described dadaist and surrealist paintings in several poems.45 Theimage of a tower in his “Giorgio de Chirico,” for instance, does not produce the same “vi-sual” effect as in Flags because it is dependent on the derivation of an extended metaphorand has its referential function in the context of surrealist poetics:

Un mur dénonce un autre murEt l’ombre me défend de mon ombre peureuse.O tour de mon amour autour de mon amour,Tous les murs filaient blanc autour de mon silence ...46

The first stanza of Éluard’s poem sets the code for the derivation. The polysemy of the verb“dénoncer,” to denounce/expose and to put an end to a relationship, initiates the parallel

43See Beaujour, Alien Tongues, 143; and Karlinsky, “In Search of Poplavsky: A Collage,” in The Bitter Air ofExile: Russian Writers in the West 1922–1972, ed. Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel, Jr. (Berkeley, 1977), 328.

44Beaujour, Alien Tongues, 143.45See Éluard’s “Max Ernst,” “Paul Klee,” and “Joan Miró” (Capitale, 13, 106, 129).46[“A wall denounces/exposes/cuts short another wall / And the shadow protects/prohibits me from my fearful

shadow. / Oh tower of my love around my love, / All the shadows weaved/followed/ran white around my silence”;Éluard, Capitale, 62]. The phonetic structure of “filaient blanc” evokes “filet blanc”—the white part of a filet dish.In surrealist poetry such phonetic coincidences are extremely significant, for they are means of developing anextended metaphor series. “Blanc” can signify brief silence in a conversation (cf. “around my silence,” whichfollows it and may derive from this meaning of the word) and a space between two lines in writing. The latter issignificant since Éluard’s poem has a strong metadescriptive function, referring to its own artistic structure. Thereader should be aware of my conviction that no translation of surrealist poetry can be even remotely adequate,although for the sake of those who do not know French I have provided this attempt.


development of two motifs: confinement (“mur ... un autre mur”) and the conflict of spatialrelations, where one wall cuts short another. The relationship of two shadows, evoked bythe cliché association of a wall and a shadow, echoes that between the walls thanks to thepolysemy of “défendre”—to protect and to prohibit. “Tour” (tower) is suggested by itsphonetic affinity with the word “mur” and by the semantic link between the two in terms oftheir architectural affinity, their ability to cast shade, and their function of both protectingand barring access. The word “amour” derives from the phonetic superposition of “mur”and “tour.” The second half of the third line is an exact phonetic rendition of its first half.Phonetic affinity propels the semantic development of the initial metaphor of the series,emphasizing the association of a tower with imprisonment and establishing the narrator’slove in a polysemic function of both prisoner and warden.

The image of self-imprisonment is common in surrealist poetry, referring to the artist’sself-imposed state as a “recording device” of his own unconscious. Desnos’s narrator de-scribes himself as a “slave” who “comprises the dictionary of unknown language” and writesaccording to its dictation despite his will.47 Breton’s narrator is a “prisoner of the world”who communicates with other prisoners in writing.48 The derivation of the extended meta-phor in Éluard’s poem leads to similar imagery. In the final stanza of “Giorgio de Chirico”his narrator is among those who “speak without knowing it” and describe the world “fromwhich they are absent,” that is, the world of their unconscious.

By contrast, Poplavsky’s towers and banners in the second and later groups of poemsin Flags neither derive from preceding images nor engender new ones, as in “Rimskoeutro”:49

... По вековой дороге бледно серойАвтомобиль сенатора скользит.Блестит сирень, кричит матрос с галеры.Христос на аэроплане вдаль летит.

Богиня всходит в сумерки на башню.С огромной башни тихо вьется флаг.Христос, постлав газеты лист вчерашний,Спит в воздухе с звездою в волосах ...

It seems that, familiar with the symbolic system of surrealist poetics, the poet compensatedfor his divorce from it by an exaggerated use of surrealist images and tropes. Such amass-ing of repetitive images created a “visual” effect but was hardly an intentional “borrowing”from Chirico. One could contest Ménégaldo’s view that in Flags Poplavsky succumbed tothe surrealist temptation of unconscious image production.50 In fact, he played down thebasic precept of the surrealist image (semantic shock), employing the clichés of surrealistpoetry instead. This decontextualization of his surrealist imagery was noted by émigré

47Desnos, Destinée, 33.48Breton, Claire, 80.49Poplavskii, Flagi, 49. See also the use of the image of a tower in Breton, Clair, 79–80; and idem, Poisson, 28.

The image of dreaming flags is proposed in Poisson as a metaphor for the lips that speak in sleep (p. 54).50Ménégaldo, “L’Univers imaginaire,” 150–51.

100 Leonid Livak

critics. Georgii Adamovich wrote that Poplavsky’s poems produced the impression of vi-tality “amid a torrent of unwanted words.”51 Furthermore, the surviving instances of se-mantic shock in his writings drew accusations of linguistic incompetence.52

Poplavsky’s conversion entailed a change in versification. The metrical patterns ofRussian futurists, common in his pre-1928 poetry, gave way to the striving for “music”—analmost exclusive use of ternary meters. He presented these “musical” meters as part of theRussian poetic tradition incarnated by Blok and assiduously implemented this metricalshift, thus reviving his early attachment to Russian symbolism.53 The second group ofpoems in Flags is steeped in the metrical monotony of the dactylic or anapestic verse.54

Such repetitiveness was artistically detrimental but seemed intended to prove the poet’sadherence to the Russian poetic tradition. Émigré critics hailed his poetry for its “musi-cality” reminiscent of Blok’s “black music” and “metaphysics.”55

Entering émigré literature, Poplavsky joined the former acmeists who were the back-bone in the “Paris school” of émigré poetry: Georgii Adamovich, Georgii Ivanov, andNikolai Otsup. The “Paris school” was a loose and heterogenous movement. It arose inthe late 1920s and included, among others, such poets as Lidiia Chervinskaia, Dovid Knut,Aleksandr Shteiger, and Iurii Terapiano, all of whom embraced Adamovich’s aesthetic theo-ries. Adamovich argued that the shock of the war and revolution, exacerbated by the crisisof Western civilization, forced émigré literati to sacrifice imagination, “harmony, grace,unity, and other beautiful things” to describe the modern human condition in a “responsibleliterary form” that spoke only about the artist’s personal experience.56 This “human docu-ment” focused on the cultural and existential fatigue of the modern man. Its documentarymotivation was supported by ascetically simple language and imagery, often flawed bydeliberate imperfection that conveyed one’s commitment to “truthfulness” and “simplicity”as opposed to literary imagination and stylistic complexity.57

Ivanov and Adamovich praised Poplavsky’s poetry for its semantic imprecision, re-petitiveness, and metrical monotony, interpreting the flaws of his poetry as a challenge toartistic formalism.58 Poplavsky was drawn into the polemics surrounding the “Paris school,”

51Adamovich, “Literaturnye besedy,” Zveno 4 (1928): 190.52Nina Berberova, The Italics are Mine, trans. Philip Radley (New York, 1992), 269; Vladimir Nabokov, “B.

Poplavskii: ‘Flagi’,” in Boris Poplavskii v otsenkakh i vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, ed. Louis Allen and Ol’gaGriz (St. Petersburg, 1993), 168; Gleb Struve, “Zametki o stikhakh,” Rossiia i slavianstvo, 11 May 1929, 3.

53See Poplavskii, “Zametki o poezii,” 28; and idem, “Doklad o knige Georgiia Ivanova ‘Peterburgskie zimy’”(Neizdannoe, 253).

54“Solnechnyi svet, ia k tebe prikosnulsia, no ty ne zametil,” “Rozovyi chas proplyval nad svetaiushchim mirom,”“Voskhititel’nyi vecher byl polon ulybok i zvukov,” “Lunnyi dirizhabl’,” “Rukopis’, naidennaia v butylke,” “Gamlet,”“Smert’ detei.”

55Ivask, “Chudaki,” in Tri iubileia Andreia Sedykh (New York, 1982), 185; Mark Slonim, “Kniga stikhov B.Poplavskogo,” in Boris Poplavskii v otsenkakh i vospominaniiakh sovremennikov, 169; Veidle, “Sovremennyezapiski XXXIX,” Vozrozhdenie 1493 (1929): 3.

56See Adamovich, “Zhizn’ i zhizn’,” Poslednie novosti 5124 (1935): 2; Iurii Fel’zen, “Sergei Sharshun: Put’pravyi,” Chisla 10 (1934): 285; Vasilii Ianovskii, Polia Eliseiskie (New York, 1983), 247, 277; and Iurii Mandel’shtam,“Smert’ v kredit,” Vozrozhdenie 4035 (1936): 5.

57See Terapiano, “‘Rytsar’ bednyi (Eshche o krizise poezii),” Mech 8 (1934): 10; and idem, “Soprotivleniesmerti,” Krug 1 (1936): 147.

58Adamovich, “Literaturnye besedy,” Zveno 4 (1928): 190; idem, “Vadim Andreev,” Sovremennye zapiski 38(1929): 523; Ivanov, “Sovremennye zapiski. Kniga XXXV-ia,” Poslednie novosti 2626 (1928): 3; and idem, “Boris


which opposed the cult of poetic technique and rejected “aesthetic” considerations in art forthe sake of extraliterary ones.59 For Adamovich’s opponents, Poplavsky’s poetry was butthe exploitation of the latest émigré literary trends—a reaction to the “technical” aspect ofpoetry and “literariness” in general. The “music” of his metrical patterns and the semanticimprecision of his language were greeted by the “repenting” acmeists as those very ele-ments which they had earlier denounced in Blok’s poems.60

Poplavsky’s poetry met with success. Less than a year after his first publication he hadbeen admitted to all major émigré reviews and became a “fashionable” poet. By the early1930s his popularity among younger émigrés was unmatched.61 This was due not only tothe combination of surrealist imagery, appealing in its novelty, with “musical” meters anddeliberately “unskillful” semantic imprecision. The last two groups of poems in Flagsshow that the poet was very sensitive to émigré criticism. Critics wrote that if Poplavskydid not leave fantastic imagery and gain better control of his poetic material, he wouldbecome trite.62 The fact that he started doing away with the very imagery that contributed tohis initial success illustrates Poplavsky’s complex and contradictory position in émigréletters.

The posthumous myth of Poplavsky the “unknown genius” relied partly on the viewthat the condemnation of Flags’ surrealist aesthetics placed the poet in artistic isolation.63

This interpretation hardly fits his career as a “fashionable” poet whose evolution away fromsurrealism is clear in his poems of 1929–30. To acquit himself of all accusations of irratio-nal creation, Poplavsky further modified his imagery. He abandoned fantastic journeys,ascribed all dreams to characters other than the narrator, and reduced the surrealist ambigu-ity of the relationship between dreams and death. In Flags, the dream became death’ssignifier, as can be seen in Poplavsky’s poems about the dreams of children, who finish bydying.64 The new set of images in this cycle of poems replaced the infernal imagery of hisformer dreamer-narrator. Blok’s second book of poems provides the source of this newimagery. Veidle was among the first to point out that Poplavsky’s “little gnomes,” “littlepriests,” “little rabbits,” and “little angels” hearkened to Blok’s sentimental imagery.65

Poplavsky’s new imagery was accompanied by the introduction of the “Christiantheme,” whose excessive sentimentality makes one question the seriousness of his “angelic

Poplavskii: Flagi,” Chisla 5 (1931): 233. For the “Paris school,” repetitiveness, semantic imprecision, and metricmonotony were valid artistic procedures. Ivanov’s collection Rozy was among the examples of this intentional“awkwardness.” See Al’fred Bem, “Soblazn prostoty,” Mech 11–12 (1934): 15.

59See Roger Hagglund, “The Adamovich-Xodasevich Polemics,” Slavic and East European Journal 20 (Fall1976): 239–52.

60Konstantin Mochul’skii, “Molodye poety,” Poslednie novosti 3004 (1929): 2; Struve, “Zametki o stikhakh,” 3.61See Adamovich, “Sovremennye zapiski,” Poslednie novosti 3144 (1929): 2; Ianovskii, Polia Eliseiskie, 12–13;

and A. Leonidov, “Boris Poplavskii: Flagi,” Novaia gazeta 1 (1931): 5.62See Adamovich, “Sovremennye zapiski,” 2; Slonim, “Molodye pisateli za rubezhom,” Volia Rossii 10–11

(1929): 108–9; and idem, “Kniga stikhov B. Poplavskogo,” 169–71.63See Gomolitskii, Arion (Paris, 1939), 25; Karlinsky, “Surrealism,” 616; and Terapiano, “Boris Poplavskii,”

Sovremennik 16 (1967): 144.64“Smert’ detei,” “Detstvo Gamleta,” “Devochka vozvratilas’,” “Chernyi zaiats.”65Veidle, “Sovremennye zapiski XXXIX,” 3. Compare this to Poplavsky’s “Karliki i gnomy na skam’iakh

sobora” (F, 61), his “Malen’kii sviashchennik igral na roiale” (F, 62), and Blok’s “Devushka pela v tserkovnomkhore” or “V goluboi dalekoi spalenke.”

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accessories.”66 Poplavsky’s Christ is a beautiful forest spirit in whose nimbus a “meekrabbit” is warming up his paw (F, 79). The squashed paw of a rabbit is the symbol of“Christian pity” that Poplavsky derived, with the help of Blok’s poetry, from Dostoevsky’saphorism that one tear of a tormented child was worth more than “supreme harmony.”67

Citing Blok’s poem about a “little priest” who lived in a swamp and prayed for the achingleg of a frog, Poplavsky wrote that one human tear could dissolve the crude beauty of theworld, just as “one squashed rabbit paw was more important than the Louvre.”68 Beginningin 1929, “Christian pity” constituted an attribute of his poems, from “Zhalost’ k Evrope” tothe last poem in Flags, devoted to Adamovich (F, 70).

The last group of poems in Flags approaches the poems in Poplavsky’s posthumouscollection The Snowy Hour (Snezhnyi chas, 1931–35) in its linguistic and imaginativeeconomy, the elimination of semantic imprecision, the absence of bright imagery, and thelack of dramatic action.69 The leitmotif of existential fatigue in these poems, conveyed inconcrete and logically motivated images, supports the poet’s emphatic rejection of linguis-tic and artistic “vanity.” Poplavsky was becoming “simple.” Following “Paris school”precepts, he seemed ready to plunge into the fashionable existential anxiety of the “humandocument” and to speak exclusively about the “most important” questions of existence inlight of his own favored theme of “Christian pity.”

SURREALIST SURREALIST SURREALIST SURREALIST SURREALIST APOLOGYAPOLOGYAPOLOGYAPOLOGYAPOLOGY::::: APOLLO APOLLO APOLLO APOLLO APOLLO THE UGLTHE UGLTHE UGLTHE UGLTHE UGLYYYYY

According to Poplavsky’s personal myth, the “unrecognized genius” ignored by émigréreviews finally published his “surrealist” collection Flags, which was so badly received thathe condemned its aesthetics. Some critics argued that Poplavsky’s premature death re-sulted in part from his artistic submission to the pressure of the émigré literary establish-ment: the surrealist “suffocated” among former acmeists.70 But despite their aesthetic andideological divergence, the “Paris school” had much in common with the French avant-garde.71 They shared the war-shock motivation, which validated a gap between “ancient”(prewar) and “modern” (postwar) literary practices; the focus on inner life as the only “true”reality; the anti-aesthetic orientation toward “documentary” literature; and the valorizationof artistic failure and self-effacement over literary success.

Poplavsky exploited these affinities. In 1928 he revolted against the avant-garde idealof the “genius who died unknown.” But he unearthed this concept in the early 1930s andintegrated it into the antiliterary ethos of the “Paris school,” writing in an article: “Love forart is poshlost’. ... The most beautiful thing is ‘To be a genius and to die unknown.’” The

66Gaito Gazdanov, “Krug. Al’manakh. Kniga tret’ia. Parizh, 1938,” Sovremennye zapiski 68 (1939): 480.67F. M. Dostoevskii, Brat’ia Karamazovy, in his Sobranie sochinenii v dvenadtsati tomakh (Moscow, 1982),

11:288.68Poplavskii, “O misticheskoi atmosfere molodoi literatury v emigratsii,” Chisla 2–3 (1930): 311.69“Tselyi den’ v kholodnom, griaznom savane,” “Mir byl temen, kholoden, prozrachen,” “Solntse niskhodit,

eshche tak zharko.”70Karlinsky, “Surrealism,” 616; Gazdanov, “O Poplavskom,” Dal’nie berega (Moscow, 1994), 288; Gomolitskii,

Arion, 25.71Bem, “Zhizn’ i poeziia,” Mech 16 (1935): 6.


surrealist view of literature as a personal psychological record is visible in this article,which proclaims that art is unnecessary and may survive only in the form of a “document.”72

Émigré readers saw in this proclamation a reiteration of the “Paris school” doctrine of the“human document,” but Poplavsky suggested that his idea of a “document” was closer to apsychological record than to an autobiographical confession. In another article he statedthat “the émigré young man” had yet “to learn from his ‘brother’ surrealists” the sharpnessand articulation necessary for affirming his mysticism.73

Poplavsky’s adaptation of surrealist poetics to émigré artistic expectations became thestructural principle of his first novel, Apollo the Ugly, begun in late 1927. The poet destinedApollo to be an apology for his artistic compromise, informing Zdanevich in 1928 thatApollo was “an attempt to justify Our life.”74 Capitalizing “Our,” he meant the life of the“courageous crowd” from which he “ignominiously defected.” John Kopper has arguedthat the surrealist element in Apollo is overshadowed and “defeated” by symbolist aesthet-ics.75 Although Poplavsky’s conversion indeed entailed a revival of his old interest in sym-bolism, I contend that in Apollo he struck a balance between surrealism and symbolism, abalance visible through the prism of intimate knowledge of both Russian and French let-ters. Émigré readers saw that side of Apollo which hearkened to the Russian literary tradi-tion. Although rooted in surrealist narrative, this novel was hailed by the “Paris school”literati as a “human document” and a realistic confession despite its mythological charac-ters and fantastic imagery.76 Zdanevich, to the contrary, saw Apollo as proof of Poplavsky’savant-garde and anti-émigré artistic persona.77

The aim of the surrealist novel was not to convince readers that it transcribed eventsfrom the world of the real or invented them according to its laws.78 Realism was at fault forreplicating the discontinuity of waking life and not accounting for the continuity of theunconscious and conscious self. The surrealist novelist “recorded” unconscious reality inthe continuity between conscious and unconscious existence. This task took the form ofwandering in the streets of Paris in search of “objective chance” (“le hasard objectif”)—any manifestation of the occult in everyday reality revealing that daily life was caught inthe net of supernatural forces. According to Breton, the recognition of the occult led to abetter understanding of the power of the unconscious to transform the human condition.79

Surrealist novels seem to wander as aimlessly as their authors in the streets of Paris.They shift effortlessly from abstract reflections to descriptions of the environment, to theevocations of memory and emotional states, to eruptions of chance coincidences. The searchfor mystery in the ever-changing city is an itinerary; city walks constitute the “action” of the

72Poplavskii, “O misticheskoi atmosfere,” 308–11.73Poplavskii, “O smerti i zhalosti v ‘Chislakh’,” Novaia gazeta 3 (1931): 3.74Poplavskii, Pokushenie, 106.75John M. Kopper, “Surrealism under Fire: The Prose of Boris Poplavsky,” Russian Review 55 (April 1996):

245–64.76See Adamovich, “Pamiati Poplavskogo,” Poslednie novosti 5320 (1935): 2; Fel’zen, “Poplavskii,” in Dal’nie

berega, 297; and Varshavskii, “O proze ‘mladshikh’ emigrantskikh pisatelei,” 412–13.77Zdanevich, “Boris Poplavskii,” 165–66.78See Breton, Manifestes, 16–17; and Jacqueline Chénieux, Le surréalisme et le roman (Lausanne, 1983), 12.79See Michel Carrouges, André Breton et les données fondamentales du surréalisme (Paris, 1967), 246.

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hero of the surrealist novel. Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926), Desnos’s La Liberté oul’amour! (1927), and Breton’s Nadja (1928) embody the surrealist ideal in prose, for theysucceeded in transforming the record of the writer’s personal experiences of daily life intomagical tales of poetic perception and expression.

The itinerary of the surrealist hero is “documented” by the meticulous notation ofaddresses, photographic reproductions of signs, posters, advertisements, and action sites,and the tone of a scientific report. This “documentary” motivation does not preclude fantas-tic descriptions, justified as the unconscious play of imagination, because one cannot relyon one’s senses alone to find “superreality.” In Le Paysan de Paris, Aragon argued that thesurrealist hero constructed a “modern mythology” and his itinerary engendered new mythsin everyday life; the surrealist “science of life” was the freedom to mythologize realitythrough the marvelous and the uncanny one found or invented.80 To insure the “documen-tary” nature of literary production, the author was identified with the narrator and themythologization of everyday life was taken quite literally by the group’s members.

Poplavsky also took this mythologization literally and considered Le Paysan de Paristhe model of the “new Western novel.”81 Apollo is a Parisian itinerary narrated from thefirst-person singular. The streets, sites, signs, and advertisements which Poplavsky’s narra-tor passes on his journey are cited in French to insure the authenticity of his report.82 Thenarrator of Breton’s Nadja accosts strange women during his walks until he finds the onewho becomes the heroine of his narrative. Breton’s novel is based on his chance meetingwith a mentally ill prostitute who fascinates him by her “illuminations.” According towitnesses, Poplavsky also conducted his search for “objective chance” in everyday life andshared this mythologizing obsession with passing women. He often abandoned his com-panions, pursued strange women who “inspired neither sympathy nor confidence,” and ex-plained his behavior by “some absolute nonsense of occult nature.”83

Poplavsky’s narrator meets his protagonists during wanderings. These are the de-monic Apollo; the mystic Teresa; Zeus, a Siberian peasant and Orthodox sectarian; andAveroes, a former rabbi, theological student, and industrialist who cultivates flowers ofunnatural colors. Poplavsky fancied the pseudonym “Apollo the Ugly” as early as 1921. Attheir first meeting, he gave Sharshun his business card, “Apollo the Ugly. Clown.”84 Apollowas an apt image for his “modern mythology.” If Aragon’s narrator sees Medusa in thewindow of a barber’s shop, Poplavsky’s narrator meets an émigré Apollo endowed withsupernatural qualities.85 The narrator Vasilii and Apollo are parts of one persona. Both are24, and this corresponds to the author’s age in 1927, when he started working on his novel.They share the same clothes and eat from the same plate; and both have Poplavsky’s boy-scout past. Vasilii knows in advance the intimate details of Apollo’s childhood. They fallasleep simultaneously, see the same dreams, and converse in sleep, mixing “you” and “I,” sothat the reader cannot distinguish between interlocutors (pp. 40, 72).

80Aragon, Paysan de Paris, 15–16.81Poplavskii, “Sredi somnenii i ochevidnostei,” Utverzhdeniia 3 (1932): 96.82Poplavskii, Apollon Bezobrazov, in his Domoi s nebes: Romany (St. Petersburg, 1993), 47, 76–77, 124, 176.83Emmanuil Rais, “O Borise Poplavskom,” in Dal’nie berega, 301.84Natal’ia Rovskaia, “Sergei Sharshun,” Novyi zhurnal 163 (1986): 126.85Aragon, Paysan de Paris, 50–52.


The oxymoronic name Apollo the Ugly provides the key to the novel’s semantic struc-ture. The narrator’s contradictory split personalities are the author’s alter egos. Vasilii is aChristian mystic, weak in body and will, tearfully sentimental, and obsessed with “eternalquestions.” Apollo is an athlete, a boxer, and a fan of the boxing champion Primo Carnero(pp. 54, 173). He cultivates intellectual and physical rigor, emotional restraint, and reti-cence. He is also a student of metaphysics, black magic, alchemy, astrology, and occultism,which give him an anti-Christian aura suggested by the title of the chapter in which the twoalter egos meet—“How I Met the Devil.”86 Both personalities correspond to Poplavsky’scontradictory image. On the one hand, he was a Christian mystic who advocated universalpity, mourned squashed rabbit paws, and appalled his acquaintances by lies, spinelessness,and monologues on “eternal questions.”87 On the other hand, he was an athlete and a boxerwho signed his articles on boxing and Primo Carnero “Apollon Bezobrazov.”88 He studiedmetaphysics, occultism, alchemy, and black magic in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève,where Apollo studied the same subjects.89

The motif of split personalities appeared in Poplavsky’s 1924 poem “Chernyi i belyi”(“Dvoetsarstvie” in Flags), whose narrator describes how the “sword of death” slices in twohis head and soul, his past and his future. His brain is pecked out by the “sparrows ofdreams” and the two halves of his body are buried in heaven and hell (D, 39; F, 10). Thisopposition acquires a more concrete form in the coexistence of the saintly Vasilii and thedevilish Apollo, whereby Apollo incarnates the surrealist attitude in life.

Émigré critics of Apollo did not discern or did not acknowledge the novel’s surrealistundercurrent. However, the text is open to two readings. The first yields a “confession”about the author’s émigré experience, in which the characters of Vasilii and Apollo do notmerge. Vasilii is identified with Poplavsky himself and his peregrinations are the “truthful”account of the writer’s life. Apollo is a fictional character, the devil who tempts the goodChristian Vasilii. Apollo’s dreams justify the presence of fantastic elements and passages inrhythmical prose that accompany these dreams.90 In the second reading, done through theprism of French surrealist poetics, the two characters unite in one complex personality,offering an apology for Poplavsky’s pre-1928 career, that very period he called “Our time”and claimed to justify by this novel.91

86The juxtaposition of Vasilii and Apollo hearkens to Erenburg’s novel Khulio Khurenito (1921) in which AlexanderTishin, a “Russian intelligent” endowed with all the qualities of Vasilii, is the exact opposite of his demonic teacherKhulio.

87See Adamovich, “Pamiati Poplavskogo,” 2; idem, “Kommentarii,” Krug 3 (1938): 133–34; Aleksandr Bakhrakh,“Po pamiati, po zapisiam... II,” Novyi zhurnal 190–191 (1993): 336–37; Zinaida Shakhovskaia, Otrazheniia (Paris,1975), 52; Tatishchev, “O Poplavskom,” 92; and Terapiano, Vstrechi, 113.

88See, for example, Chisla 1 (1930): 259–60; and Chisla 6 (1932): 249–51.89Poplavskii, Apollon, 124. See also “Boris Poplavsky,” Nouvelles Littéraires, Artistiques et Scientifiques 631

(1935): 3; Andrei Sedykh, “Monparnasskie teni,” in Boris Poplavskii v otsenkakh i vospominaniiakh sovremennikov,85; Tatishchev, “Poet v izgnanii,” 201; and Varshavskii, Nezamechennoe pokolenie (New York, 1956), 195.

90Poplavskii, Apollon, 39, 61, 74. See also Tatishchev, “O Poplavskom,” 94; and Varshavskii, Nezamechennoepokolenie, 190–91.

91In addition to Khulio Khurenito, this doubling of the alter ego may have been inspired by Philippe Soupault’s1923 novel Le Bon apôtre which had two protagonists: Jean X., Soupault’s dadaist alter ego, and Philippe Soupault,the narrator. Describing his transition from Dada to surrealism as a compromise, Soupault sees its alternative in theuncompromising Jean X. who, like Apollo, “leaves” at the end.

106 Leonid Livak

In the first chapter, Vasilii narrates his life before his meeting with Apollo. The epi-graph from Éluard provides a metaphor for his existential situation—“a bird trapped inflight.” 92 Describing his frequent “flights” across Paris, Vasilii confesses to a feeling ofconfinement in the émigré environment and a desire to break free from the people whodecried the “metaphysically worthless” Russian Revolution. He prefers “civic death” (ex-clusion from the émigré community) to the mourning of lost material comfort—his inter-pretation of the White cause (pp. 24–25). His promenades are steeped in surrealist imagery.Constantly sleepy, he floats semiconsciously down the river of the Parisian summer (p. 24);the Parisians move slowly, as if in water, while the trees give off a sweet cadaverous smell(p. 22). Poplavsky incorporated into this description lines from his early poems aboutfantastic water and air trips.93 Vasilii craved some “presence” that would finalize his innerliberation through “civic death” and surrealist walks (p. 25).

Finally, he runs into Apollo, who sits in a boat surrounded by orange water and dreamswith his eyes open (p. 26). This meeting helps Vasilii to find other “semiconscious wander-ers” (p. 25) and initiates the “legendary period” of his life (p. 126). Apollo the dreamer,who never wakes from semiconscious meditation (pp. 30, 34), takes his companion under-water and underground. Vasilii’s life becomes a succession of dreams. They are joined byother somnambulists and their city walks end in water trips steeped in surrealist imagery:submarines, dirigibles, glass houses, skeletons. Apollo’s apartment looks like a submarinethat easily becomes a dirigible (pp. 43, 46). Every time the tearful Christian would awakenin Vasilii, Apollo the submarine’s captain said: “Let’s sleep instead” (pp. 35, 43). As they“submerge,” Paris submerges into the sea: giant fish swim through the Café du Dôme,waiters float upside down, a submarine crosses the boulevard d’Observatoire, and the beau-tiful floating corpses of Montparnasse prostitutes reflect the rising sun (p. 122).

Those familiar with surrealist poetics could read these scenes as encoded messages.Poplavsky spoke about his poetry as a form of cryptic correspondence in the 1926 poem“Pokushenie s negodnymi sredstvami” (G 91), evocative of the imagery of slavery andconfinement which referred to the surrealist method in the poetry of Breton’s group:

Мы в гробах одиночных и точныхГде бесцельно воркует дыханьеМы в рубашках смирительных ночьюПерестукиваемся стихами.

Thus, while the protagonists of Apollo searched for soulmates “like the radio operators of asinking steamboat,” Poplavsky sent signals to the “courageous crowd” he had left behind(p. 127). His former artistic associates from Zdanevich’s circle could easily recognize hisdescription of the “legendary” time when “They” opposed everybody else in Russian liter-ary Paris by the lifestyle of dreamy existence and “automatic music” (p. 131).

The somnambulists finally confront reality, their submarine comes up to surface,and the “legendary” time ends (p. 132). Apollo can be divided into the “legendary” time

92“Oiseau enfermé dans son vol, il n’a jamais connu la terre, il n’a jamais eu d’ombre” (Apollon, 20).93Cf. “Moe letnee schast’e osvobozhdalos’ ot vsiakoi nadezhdy” (Apollon, 25); and “Ochishchaetsia schast’e ot

vsiakoi nadezhdy” (G, 69).


(chapters 1–13) and the time of awakening to reality (chapters 14–18). The conflict be-tween the Christian and the Satanic in the narrator’s persona culminates in Apollo’s depar-ture. Echoing Poplavsky’s “Christian” rejection of avant-gardist “Satanic pride,” this con-flict is ambiguous. Vasilii’s sympathy lies with the “paradise” he finds in Apollo’s persona(p. 25). It is not Vasilii but Apollo who goes through crisis, condemning “his freedom andhappiness” for the sake of Christian humility (p. 167). Next to the passionate description ofthe surrealist “paradise,” the demon’s conversion is even more unconvincing than the con-demnation of “Satanic pride” in Poplavsky’s letter to Zdanevich. But it fits Poplavsky’spost-1928 image as an “émigré” writer. In his second novel, Homeward from Heaven (Domois nebes, 1932–35), Apollo is a student of theology at the Sorbonne. Incidentally, in a 1930letter, Poplavsky wrote that he, formerly an “ardent futurist,” studied the history of religionat the Sorbonne and considered a career in religious philosophy.94 Left without a counter-balancing Apollo, the narrator of Homeward from Heaven is a maudlin creature whose Parisis devoid of its former surrealist dimension.

Upon his conversion and departure, Apollo leaves a diary consisting of twenty-nine“automatic” texts that recall Poplavsky’s poems in The Gramophone and The Dirigible.But even after explaining these poems as the writings of his literary character, Poplavskyexcluded them from the published segments of Apollo. Choosing Tatishchev as the execu-tor of his archive, Poplavsky asked him to publish his early poetry thirty years after hisdeath.95 The poet did not want to publish the texts whose surrealist aesthetics contradictedthe image he forged for himself after 1928. In 1933–34 he compiled a collection entitledAutomatic poems (Avtomaticheskie stikhi), recently discovered in Tatishchev’s archive.96

This collection includes several poems from Apollo and numerous undated poems that couldhave been written after Poplavsky had become an “émigré” poet. The very fact that hepersevered in his interest for surrealist poetics testifies that his artistic career was not asclear-cut as his critics have presented it. I think that the “Christian voice” and the “Parisschool” aesthetics failed to transform completely this avant-gardist, who used them as toolsfor his artistic adaptation in an aesthetically hostile environment.

It seems that Khodasevich was right when he observed that Poplavsky’s poetry afterFlags testified to his growing indifference to literary expression and to his desire to ex-press himself outside literature: his poetry “reveals the unimportance of the question ‘Howto write?’ with respect to the question ‘How to live?’ ... and the danger of turning from thesubject of literary activity, a poet, into its object—an interesting personality that expressesitself in life. ... He may have consciously provoked this danger.”97 Echoing this opinion,Adamovich considered Poplavsky “characteristic” of his time in that he strove to “efface theboundary between art and a personal document, between literature and a diary.”98 But thiseffacement was valued not only by the “Paris school.”

94Poplavskii, “Pis’ma Iu. P. Ivasku,” 207–8.95Tatishchev, “Boris Poplavskii: Poet samopoznaniia,” Vozrozhdenie 165 (1965): 37.96Hélène Ménégaldo, “Boris Poplavskii — ot futurizma k siurrealizmu,” in Poplavskii, Avtomaticheskie stikhi

(Moscow, 1999), 5–6.97“Dva poeta,” Vozrozhdenie 3984 (1936): 3.98“Literaturnye zametki,” Poslednie novosti 5516 (1936): 3.

108 Leonid Livak

Abolishing all distinction between the literary and nonliterary, French surrealism en-couraged its adepts to create their own life-in-poetry. Written poetry lost its poetic mo-nopoly because life itself became poetry. Breton saw no value in literature if it was notsupported by the writer’s attitude to life.99 Blurring the distinctions between literature andlife, Poplavsky steeped his everyday existence in the “modern mythology” hailed by Aragonas the surrealist science of life. He wrote to Zdanevich in 1928: “Literature must be aslightly disguised fact of life ... while life must become a literary event, that is, material forthe realization of the most charming inventions.”100 The cultural paradigms present inPoplavsky’s literary aesthetics may have influenced his lifestyle, especially since his aes-thetic compromise hampered his literary creativity. An investigation of the ways in whichPoplavsky lived his “surrealist connection” lies beyond the scope of this article. But if weare to reach a fuller understanding of the poet’s place in Russian émigré literature, such aninvestigation is a necessary continuation of the study of surrealism in his writings.

99Breton, Manifestes, 38; idem, Les Pas perdus, 137.100Poplavskii, Pokushenie, 104.

the surrealist compromise of boris poplavsky

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