“The world cannot only have been thought up by God, for thought lacks duration, its essence consisting in the ecstasy of revelation. Yet nor can the world only be God’s imagining, for the imagined must be subordinate to the imaginer, and in that case, there would be no sin, no freedom, no redemption … No, the world must be God’s dream, one that burgeoned and blossomed precisely at that moment when His imagination ceased to obey Him.”
So writes a young man in his journal, a character in Boris Poplavsky’s semi-autobiographical novel Homeward from Heaven. Perhaps these thoughts belong to Oleg, the protagonist of this novel. Most likely, they belong to Apollon, the central figure of Poplavsky’s earlier, eponymously titled novel Apollon Bezobrazov. The attribution of the quoted diary entry is unclear and perhaps immaterial. The year is 1932, and it is no wonder that to these young men the world seems to be a form of divine unconsciousness. Like their author, they were exiled from their country as young teens and are now in their early thirties, still unsettled in their adopted country. Apollon is now a theology student. Oleg has no formal education. He has already experimented with cocaine, tried painting and writing poetry, and is still nurturing a dream of becoming a published author.
Homeward from Heaven opens as the two of them travel to a French summer camp run by a Russian émigré charity. Together the young men set up a tent near the camp — it’s cheaper this way — and proceed to spend days swimming in the azure sea, boiling macaroni or rice with canned tomato sauce for lunch, and spending their evenings around the bonfire, singing, dancing, and arguing about their differences in attitude to life. Their main preoccupation, however, seems to be romancing the women from the camp.
Here, the paths of the two men split and Apollon all but disappears from the novel. Oleg continues to compare himself to him and we receive bits of summarized dialogue, from which we can glean that Apollon is devoted to his studies and Oleg doesn’t want to follow his path. In his introduction, translator Bryan Karetnyk suggests that Homeward from Heaven was planned as the second part of a trilogy that began with Apollon Bezobrazoff and not finished because of Poplavsky’s early death in 1935.
Karetnyk further explains that Poplavsky “constructed” this novel “around his tempestuous affair with Natalia Stolyarova, his lover and muse,” who a few years later chose to return from France to the Soviet Union.
I don’t see any evidence, however, that Stolyarova’s perspective is reflected upon in the novel. Though once in a while Poplavsky slips into the minds of his female characters, it is only for a phrase or two and only to showcase their opinions on Oleg’s character. The author doesn’t leave much room for the women to have a thought on a subject other than Oleg.
At the camp, Oleg falls in love with a young woman named Tania. She returns his interest, but when he shies away from outright kissing her, they exchange cruel words and he slaps her on the face. The narrative shifts, briefly, into Tania’s perspective:
“Then suddenly, seizing the initiative, he took her arm and hugged her shoulder. Tania put up no resistance; on the contrary, she yielded to him and waited, longing for other, more decisive actions, because, despite her soul, which oppressed and humiliated this statuesque body, she had always been subliminally drawn to him, had always wanted, always thrilled at his warm, dry touch; but much to his own distress, Oleg quickly sobered up and, as they neared the cottage, resumed his submissive, wary, inhibited, injured role.”
The violence escalates. Apparently, Poplavsky sees in Tania a woman wanting a display of force from her partner. After she is rude to him and he slaps her, she then runs after him, begging his forgiveness. Poplavsky’s narrator calls Oleg “the thirty-year-old adolescent” for the mere fact that he walked away from the chance of having sex at the first moment the opportunity arose. Later in the book, Poplavsky reiterates this point in starker terms: “Oleg failed to grasp how it was that he could never bring himself to rape anyone. His struggle with sex was so desperate that even in his dreams, where all living things roam free, it would continue.”
Shocked by this perspective, I had to go back to the Russian original to confirm that the word “rape” appears there: it does. Karetnyk, if anything, slightly elevates Poplavsky’s prose style, smoothing out the irreverent, adolescent vernacular of the original.
Thoughts are not actions, and we often praise a novelist for bravery in expressing his characters’ most base thoughts. However, this creative freedom comes at a price: Oleg is meant to be a sympathetic character, and not every reader will stay along for the ride. I found myself triggered by the violence, not only of Oleg’s actions but also by the narrative perspective that Poplavsky employs.
Uncomfortable, unable to settle into the proffered point of view, I questioned myself: what have I missed in this book that so attracted its early readers and led the current publisher to describe it as a “masterpiece”? Nothing in the book’s otherwise informative and lovely introduction and endnotes addresses its caricature-like treatment of women. Turning to the scholarship about this novel, I discovered a couple of useful things.
First of all, one of the early advocates of Poplavsky’s work was a UC-Berkeley luminary of Slavic Studies, critic Simon Karlinsky. A child of an émigré family, born in Harbin, China before finding himself in California, Karlinsky had contributed a number of insights to our understanding of queer Russian literature, from his work on Marina Tsvetaeva to the study of Mikhail Kuzmin, Sergei Diaghilev, and Petr Tchaikovsky, among others. In his essay, “In Search of Poplavsky: A Collage,” Karlinsky tells a fascinating tale of coming across this virtually unknown poet, falling in love with his language, and then over the years using what influence he had to add Poplavsky’s name to the canon of important Russian writers, with the caveat that “Poplavsky was in a sense a very fine French poet who belongs to Russian literature mainly because he wrote in Russian.”
Karlinsky was the first to point out that “Poplavsky’s poetic method seems to be similar to French Surrealism, and [Poplavsky’s] Diaries shows that he had studied and admired the writings of André Breton. When reading Poplavsky’s poems, one is reminded of surrealistic paintings.” The connection with visual arts was not accidental: Poplavsky had considerable early training as an artist. He had attended an art academy in Paris and had traveled to Berlin to study portrait painting and, for a time, was torn between pursuing visual arts and writing.
After Karlinsky, several other critics have commented on the Surrealist elements in Poplavsky’s work, including John Kopper, the translator of earlier Apollon Bezobrazov (Slavica Publishers, 2015). I think the Surrealist movement and its treatment of the female body provides the most useful context in which to interpret Oleg’s wish that he had the capacity to rape. The violence and the shock of this sentiment are absolutely intentional. They comport with the imagery of a contemporaneous painting, “Rape,” by another Surrealist, René Magritte. In it, a woman’s naked torso is presented as if it were her head, with breasts acting as eyes and pubic hair as her mouth. Aiming to upend bourgeois morality and to throw light on the Europeans’ suppressed desires, the male Surrealists intentionally dismembered female bodies and reconstituted the parts as they wished.
Oleg’s problem is, however, of a slightly different nature. He cannot imagine himself raping a woman, even though he thinks that this is what a man ought to be able to do. He doesn’t seem to measure up to his own ideals of masculinity, no matter how many weights he lifts (he’s devoted to the gym).
Feminist critics of the previous generations have convincingly highlighted the violence of the Surrealists’ dehumanization of women, but by reading Homeward from Heaven in this context, I came to terms with the violence that the male subject does to himself by trying to measure up to an idealized version of masculinity. This novel may be read as a response and even a critique of the Surrealist treatment of masculinity.
One very short scene, plopped in the middle of the book without much explanation or context, shows that Oleg — or perhaps Poplavsky himself — feels limited by the very gender binary. It’s written in a question and answer format as shown below. Oleg isn’t fully committed to his masculinity; to perform masculinity for him means to deny the feminine aspects of his personality, and he cannot fully reconcile that:
“Question: What is your greatest regret in life?
Answer: That I surrendered my virginity.
Q: But what is the suffering that it causes you?
A: A dying man comes to know the heart of woman. A dying woman comes to know the slavery of man. Each of them, lost, seeks himself vainly, without a way out in the other, hence this perpetuum mobile of hellish torments.
Q: But what exactly is the suffering that it causes you?
A: It’s hard for the living to understand . . . impossible . . . Oh . . . Oh, ugh . . . I’m M. I’m F. I’m M . . . I’m F . . .
Q: Are you able to pray?
A: No . . . Life is a photograph. Death is a phonograph’s record of life. But nothing new comes this way . . . Only more of the same: I’m M. I’m F. I’m M. I’m F.”
Throughout the novel, Oleg resists playing what he defines as the typical male role. He refuses to seek gainful employment, even though his girlfriend Katia expects it from him. “Why don’t you work?” Katia asks him. He deliberates in several ways, before landing on the idea that “It seemed as if he never had intended to provide himself with a family, an apartment, children.” A refusal to work is a refusal to perform the traditional lifestyle of a man of Oleg’s milieu.
The crux of the novel hinges on Oleg’s inability to perform the sexual act that Tania — whom he goes back to, after breaking up with Katia — expects of him:
“Urged on by the time-honored atavism of male vanity, Oleg tried to conform, tried to stir himself, to make a show of befitting passion … For the first time, his body seemed to obey, yielding to this grossly unnatural game, but then all of a sudden it renounced this obedience and the game entirely.”
His inability to maintain an erection throws Oleg into a full-blown crisis, and toward the end of the novel he is trying to decide between committing suicide and leading the life of an ascetic. The novel breaks off on this thought, its ending inconclusive. Unfortunately, Oleg’s personal crisis may not have been entirely his author’s invention. As I mentioned, Poplavsky died early, weeks after completing the manuscript of Homeward from Heaven, of a drug overdose — a dire form of nonconformity.
This insight into the nature of Oleg’s violence toward himself didn’t make the novel more palatable to this female reader, but it did help me to empathize. Reading and thinking about this novel today, it is difficult to avoid describing Oleg’s tragedy as stemming from what we call “toxic masculinity.” In today’s political climate, people who model alternate forms of masculinity and present as gender nonconforming are often discussed as a contemporary phenomenon, as though they were born of our changing language itself. It’s worth reading Poplavsky’s fiction, perhaps alongside Karlisnky’s commentary, to be reminded that the contemporary language serves only to describe a long pre-existing human condition.
[Published by Columbia University Press on February 7, 2023, 2568 pages, $16.95 paperback]