Homeward from Heaven

Homeward from Heaven is Boris Poplavsky’s masterpiece, written just before his life was cut short by a drug overdose at the age of thirty-two. Set in Paris and on the French Riviera, this final novel by the literary enfant terrible of the interwar Russian diaspora in France recounts the escapades, malaise, and love affairs of a bohemian group of Russian expatriates.The novel’s protagonist and sometime narrator is Oleg, whose intense love for two women leads him along a journey of spiritual transfiguration. He follows Tania to a seaside resort, but after a passionate dalliance she jilts him. In the cafés of Montparnasse, Oleg meets Katia, with whom he finds physical intimacy and emotional candor, yet is unable to banish a lingering sense of existential disquiet and destitution. When he encounters Tania again in Paris, his quest to comprehend the laws of spiritual and physical love begins anew, with results that are both profound and tragic.Taken by Poplavsky’s contemporaries to be semiautobiographical, Homeward from Heaven stands out for its uncompromising depictions of sexuality and deprivation. Richly allusive and symbolic, the novel mixes psychological confession, philosophical reflection, and social critique in prose that is by turns poetic, mystical, and erotic. It is at once a work of daring literary modernism and an immersive meditation on the émigré condition.

[Poplavsky] was, after all, the first hippy, the original flower child., In the work of Boris Poplavsky, spiritual quests founder on the jagged shoals of daily existence, a dreadful world-weariness is fused with the restless energy of youth. Only a translator as sensitive and as versatile as Bryan Karetnyk could have re-created the alarming, electrifying effect of Homeward from Heaven. Open the pages and feel the current beneath your fingers., For Boris Poplavsky’s autobiographical hero—a rebellious decadent refugee in Paris of the 1930s—the fallout from catastrophic love affairs, described with graphic boldness, exuberance, and malicious joy, is indistinguishable from the trauma of exile from Russia. This is not a novel about exile. This is a unique verbal incarnation of the exiled spirit., This compelling novel, translated with literary flair, opens a fresh window on Russian literature beyond its well-known classics. Homeward from Heaven seamlessly blends Russian sensibilities with European modernity and Eastern spirituality. Saturated with mystical insights and intense passion, Poplavsky’s lyrical prose celebrates the evanescent beauty of every human experience., The book is compelling reading, with some beautifully lyrical writing, stream-of-consciousness prose sections and a most marvellous sense of place.

Boris Poplavsky (1903–35) was born in Moscow to a wealthy family and fled Russia in the wake of the October Revolution, settling in Paris in 1921. Although he published only a handful of excerpts from larger works and a single book of poetry during his lifetime, he was hailed by his peers as one of the leading writers of his generation. His works in English translation include the novel Apollon Bezobrazov (2015).Bryan Karetnyk is the translator of Alexander Grin’s Fandango and Other Stories (Columbia, 2020) as well as works by Gaito Gazdanov, Irina Odoevtseva, and Yuri Felsen. He is the editor and principal translator of the anthology Russian Émigré Short Stories from Bunin to Yanovsky (2017).