Homeward from Heaven, page 2
16. Poplavskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 3: 78.
17. Poplavskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 3: 444.
18. Adamovich, Odinochestvo i svoboda, 255.
Detail of a deleted passage in the author’s typescript.
A Note on the Text
As it did for so much of his writing, Boris Poplavsky’s untimely death precluded the publication of any definitive authorized version of Homeward from Heaven. Thus, the question necessarily begs itself: How did the novel make its way into print, and on which edition is this translation based?
There is evidence to suggest that Poplavsky prepared at least one preliminary draft of Homeward from Heaven in manuscript, although only a single folio from that version survives today, held in the archives of the State Literary Museum in Moscow. The only extant copy of the complete text to have been produced during Poplavsky’s lifetime is a later typescript, to which he made a substantial number of corrections, revisions, and additions, mostly by hand. This, we may reasonably surmise, is the finished version that he mentions in his diary entry for September 15, 1935.
After the author’s death, his archive, including that typescript, was entrusted to his friend and literary executor, Nikolai Tatishchev, who, together with his wife Dina (née Schreibman)—Poplavsky’s former lover and muse, and the prototype of Thérèse—corrected and lightly edited the typescript, preparing three extracts of the novel for print. These extracts were published between 1936 and 1938 in each issue of the short-lived émigré literary almanac Krug. However, owing to the subsequent decline of émigré publishing and the continued prohibition on printing émigré works in the Soviet Union, the Krug publications marked the extent of the novel’s appearance in print for more than half a century.
In the decades after the war, Nikolai’s son Stepan Tatishchev undertook to prepare a new typescript. The reasons for and precise date of this undertaking are not entirely clear, but this second typescript was based on the author’s original one and took into account the edits made by Poplavsky and the senior Tatishchevs, with one important exception: it retained the passages that Poplavsky himself had marked for deletion. This typescript was eventually subjected to further revisions by Natalia Stolyarova and Alexander Bogoslovsky before going on to serve as the textual basis for the two ostensibly complete editions. The first of these was published by Logos in 1993, under the editorship of the French Slavist Louis Allain, while the latter was published by Soglasie in 2000 as part of Poplavsky’s three-volume collected works. Despite being based on the same “new” typescript, the two published versions of the text exhibit a number of significant discrepancies. The Logos edition, while being in many respects the more polished of the two publications, makes cuts and frequent editorial interventions in an attempt to refine and bring clarity to Poplavsky’s difficult, at times opaque, prose. The Soglasie edition, by contrast, makes fewer such interventions, yet incorporates a number of those passages that Poplavsky marked to be struck from the final version. Both editions, furthermore, contain errors of transcription, and their editors were forced to censor many of the text’s more explicit moments.
Faced thus with these not entirely reliable editions, I have, in preparing the translation that follows, elected to work from a copy of Poplavsky’s original typescript, which was provided to me from a private collection in France. By restoring to the text those previously censored passages and relegating those others marked for deletion to the endnotes, I hope to have produced what may be termed, with all the necessary provisos, a version of the text free from censorship and most closely resembling Poplavsky’s intended artistic vision, albeit one transposed into a foreign idiom.
A Note on Transliteration
The very nature of emigration meant that every Russian in exile underwent various reincarnations in foreign languages and scripts. As such, any transliteration system imposed on a work of this period invariably requires that certain concessions be made.
French transliterations and conventions appropriate to the era have been used throughout the main body of text to reflect most closely the styles and usage preferred by émigrés living in France at the time. Elsewhere, for the reader’s ease, I have used a simplified version of the common BGN/PCGN system, with names, places, and Russian words rendered further according to the most commonly recognizable and readable style (e.g., Lidia rather than Lidiya). Accepted and preferred spellings of historical figures, where they exist, have been also used (e.g., Serge Charchoune rather than Sergei Sharshun). Bibliographical entries detailing original publications, however, have been rendered uniformly according to the more scholarly Library of Congress system.
01
Je rêvais que j’étais ineffablement heureux, mais sans aucune forme, sans univers, sans Moi, et ma filière même était le Moi.*
▶ Jean Paul1
The sun was rising over the city. Serenely and independently, it lit up the empty streets and the upper stories of the buildings; determinedly and steadily it went about its business, penetrating every detail of the metalwork on the rooftops, illuminating the poplars’ innumerable leaves, drying out the drenched sidewalks; and, behind the Gare Montparnasse, through the white steam rising over locomotives on a viaduct, it played with a radiant, rose-tinted cloud. There was no life at this hour; life was still sunk in slumber, where the sun could not penetrate; only aslant, through curtains, did it illuminate sleeping bodies, their lips pouting, their magnificent heads unrecognizable; sunk in slumber, where the ignominious chaos of physiological mythology teems with yesterday’s insults, crushed arms, comestible atrocities, splayed bodies, and suppliant fears. Serenely and tranquilly the sun took charge of the street, for, despite the chaos and neurasthenia of the cosmos, summer was once again returning, serene and blinding. Many-winged time has swept over our group of melodeclaimers, familiar from the previous act.2 Each of them has changed, all except Apollon Bezobrazoff, who, not alive, ergo, not aging, not suffering, ergo, not partaking in anything, archaic and aloof, has continued to journey from one end of the city to another, like a serpent, slithering his way unhurriedly across the railway tracks. In more recent times, this serpent has taken to passing the hours with the Paris-Midi and Fichte’s philosophy of science, in the margins of which he keeps his unpretentious monastic diary.3
“Almost warm today—or, rather, altogether warm already. How quickly the city empties, how majestically it unwinds in the sun. Ever since I began my studies at the faculty of theology, I have found myself delighted more and more by the physical proximity to that from which, in moral terms, I am farthest removed . . . The days again pass without note (sans histoires), between dormitory (devious, melancholy eyes, clandestine toasts to Satan, insufferably shambolic singing and the inevitable ‘hilarity’ that goes with it . . . Russia, blessed Mother Russia), lectures (where I, of course, am top of the class), and library, crossing the length and breadth of the city on foot, on the sunny side of the street . . . By which I mean to say that each individual is utterly in thrall to his own dream of God . . .4
“But enough of all that. For now, my life is perfectly comfortable. The only thing I have not quite learned yet is how to stand through the entire service; then again, mastering the physically unendurable has always been a kind of Holy Grail for me, like eating without salt or writing with my left hand or, come to think of it, joining the clergy (as opposed to the army or the ranks of rakes and reprobates) . . . But what, exactly, does the devil—he who cares nothing for people or the State—busy himself with, if not God? The devil is the most religious being on earth, for he never doubts, has never doubted the existence of God, staring Him, as he does, in the eye all day long; he is doubt incarnate when it comes to the motives behind all this creation, however . . . Could He not have created . . . Or did that elementary indulgence in sexual fantasy force Him to . . . At what price, though . . . But enough of all that. Won’t this lecture ever begin?
“May 1932.”
(The years pass, while A. B. remains the same.)
Oleg and God were playing a duet on a sizzling piano made up of the city’s terracotta roof tiles. He was first to weary, but God went on playing for a long time yet, never tiring amid the storm clouds, whereas Oleg merely listened, scratching his head, narrowing his eyes, pulling a wry face at the white, but so excruciatingly white sky, so painful to behold even without the sun.
A hot, gray day, rain falling through a haze, but once again the pavement dries out, and over the rooftops, now and then, there comes the sound of distant thunder. Hot and damp, a summer without sun . . . How morose you are, Oleg . . . You too, like every passerby, have on your weary, perspiring face that constant, pointed, inevitable look of summertime sadness, the one shared by all those who stay or are left behind in the city . . . Why not go and seek out this summer by the beach, the one whose photographs fill the pages of illustrated magazines, the very ones you eye upon the walls of the kiosk with that air of studied indifference. A great many hang there, each cover boasting happy, rude faces and happy, suntanned bodies beside the dazzling water . . . Why not go there, to this thousand-visaged sea? Aren’t you ashamed of dreaming idly, or are you a dreamer, a masturbator of the imagination? . . . Again, the rain drums down on the warm asphalt and the glossy, freshly washed leaves of the chestnut trees . . . Rain, rain, rain . . .
Today you sit alone in a café. All your friends have either left or abandoned you because of your callousness, but now it is you who need them, for you are human too, and that is why it hurts so . . . So why not take off? Haven’t you already accomplished what you set out to achieve? Doesn’t it fill you with pride? . . . You haven’t wanted so desperately to get away from this warm, rainy, urban torment in a long while. To go there, to the wild, wanton, spirited sea, to the hopelessly beautiful women lying on the sand . . . Your exams are over . . . After all, he had no qualms about going: not him, the student, the boy scout. And he felt better for it immediately, as if a burden had been lifted from his soul. As he left, he even began to take pleasure in everything around him in a condescending sort of way, for how good it is suddenly to deliver oneself from forced, insincere sympathy for others . . .
“Now that I have the six hundred francs, I find myself no longer minded to go to this holiday camp . . .5 I think I’ll take a train to Toulon and try my luck alone. I’ll head down to the sea somewhere in the Bandol, where Katherine Mansfield so elegantly died.6 As I write on board this train, I am subjected to the unremitting, wretched, idle chatter of my fellow students, countrymen and women who all of a sudden grow exceptionally boisterous the moment the train begins to pull into a station. The rain let up some time ago, and so now people crowd the platforms, people who will remain here unfathomably all their lives, selling local news and coffee in paper cups . . . When I awaken, I’ll see the sunrise over the Rhône and something resembling mountains . . . I don’t feel like sleeping, though . . . My heart is empty, and it’s all so tedious that I’m grateful for any distraction afforded by my surroundings. With avid eyes, I take in my classmates’ ungainly, youthful, effeminate faces and the girls’ infinitely more mature, antique profiles—all this jaundiced, lumpen, ravishing, disgusting, Russian flesh . . . After all their whooping and shrieking, they grew tired and morose and began to croon, interrupting one another, out of tune and time. Then, after amiably ensconcing themselves (and gallantly crushing the women), they nodded off. Having claimed a spot for myself, I stepped into the corridor and poked my head out into the darkness, reveling in the speeding whirlwind of coal and steam, while occasionally, in the distance up ahead, I could make out the locomotive; a brilliant glow would burst forth from its chimney, momentarily and splendidly illuminating the trees, the telegraph poles, and the plume of smoke above the train . . .
“When I returned to my berth, I found the lamp already extinguished and opposite me, in the reflected light of the corridor, a pair of French newlyweds grunting and writhing, emboldened by the darkness to this touching intimacy. Isolated among Russians, they have spent the entire journey eating and gazing out the window, continually unfastening and refastening the buckles on their brand-new suitcases. During these long, dark hours, I went about clandestinely observing my old, original foe, which had so uninhibitedly possessed the couple together with slumber . . . I recall once having read in a newspaper somewhere that an old acrobat, whose signature act was the flying trapeze, lamented how difficult it was to find a partner, since only man and wife or a father and child of the same blood are able to understand each other implicitly, for they breathe with the same breath, are a single phrase within a great sea of bodily, carnal music; and I alone among them, like a cadaver among the living, a monster of suppressed sexuality, revel in this and perish from the freedom, the light, the chastity.
“The sleeping newlyweds continue to take on an ever more vegetative form, so that now I cannot even distinguish where either of them begins or ends; they are conjoined, glued, fused to one another, and, having renounced their individual independence, are rewarded with a warm and rich life, while I, like the devil on the rock, regard with enormous eyes of wonderment the first human couple in an earthly paradise, for they have money, and where there is money, there is life.
“As I reflected on all this, I fell asleep and awoke in the bright light of day, as the train skimmed along the low-running bank of a broad river. To our right towered mountains, nestled among which were whole desolate towns half-hewn from the rockface, complete with crumbling castles. I caught my first glimpse of the sea ere long . . .
“Thus encountering the sea, I felt as if I were turning away from the earth, away from man with his crude, formless weight, toward woman in all her dazzling, dubious, diabolical composure, redolent of nothing, reflective of everything. The train slowly snaked its way along the shore of the Étang de Berre’s smooth mirrorlike lagoon, from which, like doves from the shoulders of Aphrodite, seaplanes took steadily and gracefully to the air; there was something radiant, something abominably archaic and implacably splendid about its dazed azure dormancy, and I realized that I should have to wrestle with the luster of the sea as I once did with woman, with the luster of her body amid the dark of night, only now in the blaze of day, for, as congress with the sun is to a lustful woman, bringing her to hot perspiration and the point of exhaustion, so a love of the sea is to me, monster of suppressed lust that I am.
“We fellow travelers had long grown used to each other, and in daylight the carriage seemed so cozy and familiar, like a cottage that one must vacate the very next morning. The sky had been shining an immaculate pale blue for so long, but there it was at last, between the rose-colored factory buildings, like a sparkling ray of sapphire, like a magnificent nude set amid antique burlap, and beside it, in enormous lettering: Briqueterie Centrale de Marseille.* With sudden respectability, the newlyweds set about packing their cases, flaunting with every fiber of their being that they had somewhere to go; the fug of spilled vitality that hung in the carriage was replaced by the fragrance of eau de cologne, which reeked of morning, youth, and happiness. An irresistible frisson of anticipation quivered in my temples as everything outside burned, with a brightness that was almost unbearable, into my night-weary eyes, which were particularly photosensitive on account of a lack of sleep, and irritated by the endless tunnels, cuttings, back gardens, front gardens, and suburban stations that obscured the sea. At last, the train came to a halt at a cumbersome-looking station full of suntanned gentlemen wearing white trousers of a prewar cut. There we had to wait another half-hour, but as soon as the train started moving again, I made a run for it, locked myself in the lavatory, where the sky’s brilliance came streaming in through the frosted glass, and, stripping off, nervously set about examining myself in the shuddering mirror—was I in good enough shape to exhibit myself on the beach without any sense of shame?”
“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. He must have fallen asleep and dreamed it, losing His dominion, renouncing it. There was something of a heavenly fall from grace in this, the starry sky imagining itself a man—and, of course, it was none other than the devil who had taught asceticism to this man, because love is that self-same dream of life, which so dulcetly lulled God to sleep, whereas awakening spells the death of solitude and knowledge, while life itself is a hypnosis taken lachrymally seriously. Thus, here again, high above the shore, over the radiant music of the sea, I find myself wrestling with you, O happiness of mine, my dream, my love, my life; but how strange and sweet it would be to give in, once more to be a man, to suffer again . . . How sublimely cold and outrageously clever are those who manage to break, for an instant or a while, the fiery circle of the heart’s unceasing congress with life—but not for monstrous dreams of unsated lust, like the cabbalistic debauchery of Adam’s mind prior to Eve’s creation, debauchery that spawned every evil under the moon, not for sleepless Eros, but for a blinding, painfully bright light, for the stark awakening of Luciferian virginity, in which diabolical frenzy I look down from here, from this lofty precipice, onto a narrow strip of beach by the glassiest, most poisonously blue sea, whence the strains of an electric gramophone drift up to me so unmistakably amid the brilliant noonday still. There, among the tents and their gaily colored parasols, around an upturned canoe, bronzed figures dance in the water, half-naked virgins, the suntanned, strong-legged she-devils of these parts, splash and frolic about, while white clouds cover the distant horizon.”
