Homeward from Heaven

Written shortly before his fatal heroin overdose at the age of 32 in 1935, Poplavsky’s torrid, impressionistic roman à clef reveals the inner and outer life of one of the most striking and outlandish figures among the Russian émigré community in 1920s Paris. Poplavsky reads like a less upbeat Jack Kerouac, not only in the pseudonymous depiction of his bohemian set but in the fervid flood tide of his prose, a headlong rush of impressions, passions, moods, and existential musings, swirling around a core of anguished self-loathing. A perpetual outsider and tortured “thirty-year-old adolescent” at odds with his own bodily desires, Poplavsky’s alter ego Oleg is serially obsessed with Tania, majestic and sun-warmed in Saint-Tropez, and moneyed Katia, who initiates him into the nightlife of Montmartre, and then some. Translator Karetnyk keeps Poplavsky’s heady and hyperbolic “dazzlingly sublime tempest of the spirit” beating ever onward through a sea of adjectives, with many arresting lyrical flights along the way.