Rarely, very rarely, does poetry waft through the poems of Poplavsky. “Day descended, in extreme decline, and the finger of rain turned the transparent globe around.”1 The second line is splendid—hard to say why it’s splendid, but it is, it is. “The dead fir tree went away. Sledges scrape / ironing the road with the green manes of hands….”2 That’s not bad, either. “We’re still so young. Rain poured all summer, / but rowing boats rocked beyond the wet glass. / Pistols cracked in the green garden.”3 Beautiful lines—it’s damp, it’s green, one breathes freely. However, finding such examples is no easy task, and the ones I’ve listed are almost the only instances of poetry in Poplavsky’s poems (I say “almost” because I also like the first poem in the collection, which is funny and tasteless, but also, as is sometimes the case with Pasternak, somehow captivating). Occasionally, the ear is also seduced by a fleeting tonality, such as, for instance, the beautiful sound of the following line, which is nevertheless rather meaningless: “Go to sleep, O, Morella, how awful are aquiline lives….”4 Pathos, thunder, tension…“Go to sleep, O, Morella, how awful are aquiline lives…” You could repeat it all day….And yet, when you read such sonorous and glossy lines as “Don Quixote’s jade flies up onto the porch / along with scented Sancho on a red donkey,”5 you already begin to feel doubt and a faint nausea. Let me specify (as the critic Adamovich is fond of saying, incidentally): what is good and genuine is so rarely met in Poplavsky, it’s just a matter of happy chance. To be frank, Poplavsky is a bad poet, his poetry is an unbearable blend of Severyanin, Vertinsky, and Pasternak (the latter at his worst), on top of which it is seasoned with a kind of awful parochialism, as though the man were permanently living in the same little Estonian town where the book was printed, and printed very badly at that.
“Motors burst out laughing, monocles tumbled,”6 and “the days turned blue, turned lilac,”7 vividly remind us of the poet of “moiré dresses” and “lacy forests”8 (who also loves all the trips to Mars, dirigibles, Titanics, etc., so dear to Poplavsky’s heart), while all of these tinsel little angels of Poplavsky’s—his blue boys, pink girls, little hares, dwarves, steamships, female travelers, and youths—remind us no less vividly of the sickly sweet nonsense in those notorious songs about “handsome boys,” and about how “the plumes on the blind horses swayed, / the old priest ardently swung his incense….”9 Indeed, Poplavsky is so laughably helpless as a poet (so random are the four lines of his stanza) that at times it seems as though four not particularly literate people have been playing Bouts-Rimés. But, like many poets of his type, Poplavsky is simultaneously prone to sportive verbal refinement: “This game of words could break a donkey, / but I am an iron donkey made of jelly. / I’ve always felt pity yet I’ve turned to jelly.”10 I’d like to note that, despite a very superficial knowledge of the Russian language, an un-Russian mode of speech, and poor vocabulary and turn of phrase, Poplavsky harbors a strange predilection for the living, folk word an11: “and only the pipe on the armchair burns,”12 or “While a cow is flying in the sky,”13 or “but then disappears through our fingers….”14 It sounds sweet and courtly. He also likes the word “chic”: “Africa chic,”15 “Wild chic of operetta divas,”16 “the chic little hall.”17 The epithet “beautiful,” of doubtful quality, is popular with him. One comes across unbearable stresses: magázin (shop), svadébnyi (wedding), pozhúryu (rebuke), and so on. Since he lacks a feel for language, some fairly unpleasant things happen to him from time to time, for example: “…people lean towards happiness along with the vessel.”18 He is incapable of composing a more complex sentence and fitting it into a line: “two goddesses with whom I am in love….”19 Blunders of cadence are extremely common, schoolboy blunders: for instance, the carelessness, that slovenliness of cadence, which doubles the final syllable in a word that ends in two consonants and assigns it two beats in a line: oktyaber’ (October), pyupityr (lectern), dirizhabel’ (dirigible), korabel’ (ship).20 Talking of ships. Poplavsky hasn’t avoided the craze for voguish images—there are seafaring and roses galore. It’s a curious fact that, after many years when poets left the rose alone, considering it banal and in bad taste to mention it, young poets appeared who judged thus: “Ah, but it’s become totally new, it’s rested, its vulgarity has disappeared, and now the rose in poetry sounds recherché….” It would be one thing if this idea had struck just one head, but, alas, the rose has been taken up by them all, and, honest to God, I don’t see how these roses are better than K.R’s.21 Ladinsky, needless to say, is an exception.22
With all this in mind, it is difficult to take Poplavsky’s poems seriously. It is especially unpleasant when he begins to color them with angelic epithets; it’s like some kind of colored marzipan or a colored photographic postcard with mother-of-pearl spangles. The thought even strikes me that perhaps this is all an empty amusement—perhaps it would be better for Poplavsky to try his hand at prose? I hesitate to give any advice, for every pure-hearted suggestion of this sort is usually taken as tactlessness. And yet…How good it is at times to go deep into oneself, to refrain piously from writing poetry, to force the muse to fast a little….“O, Morella, go to sleep, how terrible are aquiline lives….”23 It has a ring to it, there’s no way around it, it has a ring—and yet it’s such nonsense….
* V. Sirin, “Boris Poplavsky. Flagi. Izd. Chisla,” Rul’, March 11, 1931, 5. In his autobiography, VN recalled decades later: “I did not meet Poplavski who died young, a far violin among near balalaikas. ‘Go to sleep, O Morella, how awful are aquiline lives.’ His plangent tonalities I shall never forget, nor shall I ever forgive myself for the ill-tempered review in which I attacked him for trivial faults in his unfledged verse” (SM, 287).