Description
Book SynopsisHomeward 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, it recounts the escapades, malaise, and love affairs of a bohemian group of Russian expatriates.
Trade Review[Poplavsky] was, after all, the first hippy, the original flower child. -- Vladimir Nabokov
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. -- Boris Dralyuk, translator of Isaac Babel, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and others
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. -- Zinovy Zinik, author of
History ThievesThis 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. -- Maria Rubins, author of
Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar ParisThe book is compelling reading, with some beautifully lyrical writing, stream-of-consciousness prose sections and a most marvellous sense of place. -- Karen Langley * Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings *
Nearly a century after the novel’s composition, another wave of displacement from the former Russian empire demonstrates that Poplavsky’s tragic surrealist visions were all too real. With its forlorn peregrinations and portraits of lost exiles,
Homeward from Heaven is very much a book for these times. -- José Vergara * Times Literary Supplement *
This impressive version of
Homewards from Heaven is an important addition to the body of Russian émigré writing available in English. -- Peter France * Translation and Literature *
Table of ContentsIntroduction, by Bryan Karetnyk
A Note on the Text
A Note on Transliteration
Homeward from Heaven
Notes
