[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 <i>Homeward from Heaven</i>. 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 <i>History Thieves</i>,
This compelling novel, translated with literary flair, opens a fresh window on Russian literature beyond its well-known classics. <i>Homeward from Heaven</i> 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 <i>Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris</i>,
The 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, <i>Homeward from Heaven</i> is very much a book for these times.
- José Vergara, Times Literary Supplement
This impressive version of <i>Homewards from Heaven</i> is an important addition to the body of Russian émigré writing available in English.
- Peter France, Translation and Literature
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
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).