By Gaito Gazdanov
A cold Parisian evening, then the night of a suffocating sleep that precedes death, and two lines which one cant help but have recalled - lines written in the midst of a distant foreboding:
Until upon the chest, both humidly and coldly,
Would lay down death, a winter-coated girl...
On the surface all is clear and understandable: Montparnasse, narcotics, and "it couldn't have ended in any other way." And one might have been able to, after saying "what a pity what happened", to cease thinking about it any longer, if only this death wasn't much more momentous and horrible than it may otherwise appear. The fact that Poplavsky has always been drawn into "that world" we've all known for a very long time. Why did he need these people who would spend their hungry nights inside of cafés; these people who, it would seem, inspire no interest: these pseudo-intellectual paupers no less pitiful than those Parisian bums who sleep away their nights beneath bridges? And, nevertheless, Poplavsky would inevitably always return there. His companions changed, time passed, and, yet, there he was, journeying across the very same spaces. He loved when people listened to him speak, though he was incapable of knowing that his very own Montparnasse found his musings littered with quotes from Valery, Gide, and Bergson incomprehensible and his poems just as inaccessible as the musings. And the only thing which was capable of bringing together Poplavsky with these lousy people was the fact that both he and they just couldn't grow into life; they haven't known either solid love, nor that inseparable independence of certain human relations, nor were certain about exactly how one must live and towards what it would make sense to strive. But "their" death would not have been a major loss. On the other band, the death of Poplavsky -- it is not merely the fact of his departure from life. Together with him went silent that last wave of music which, out of all his contemporaries, he alone would hear.
And also: Poplavsky's death is connected to the unsolved question of the final human loneliness upon the Earth. He paid dearly for his poetry. Were there truly people who loved Poplavsky warmly and candidly? Were there truly such people within the ranks of his innumerable friends and acquaintances? I don't think so. And that idea frightens me. Poor Bob! He always seemed like a foreigner --- within any social circle into which he would fall. He was always like someone returning from some fantastic voyage, like a person entering a room or a café straight out of some unwritten novel by Edgar Allan Poe. Just as strange was his habit of perpetually wearing costumes which combined within themselves a mixture of sailor and road-wanderer styles. What was not surprising was the fact that it was precisely this atypical person who would, in a voice like no one else's, start reading aloud poems which sounded just as unusual as his character:
Quickly manifests upon the trombone's mouthhole,
Squeal of spheres, which spin within the dark.
Wildly would be the dark Madonna shout out,
In a deathly dream would toss her arms.
And across the heat, the nightly, hellish, blesséd.
Through the lilac smoke, where clarinet sings,
There would flutter snow, so white and ruthless,
Snow that's fallen millions of years.
He would wear deft sunglasses which completely obscured his gaze and, since it was impossible to see his eyes, good smile works resemble the trusting smile of a blind man. But there was this one time that I recall when he removed his glasses and I saw that he had small eyes which were not smiling at all, but were very alien, and incredibly cold. He understood much more than was necessary: yet he loved, I think, much less than any person must allow themselves to love. I don't know of any other poet whose literary origin is so easy to determine. One simply can't separate Poplavsky from Edgar Allen Poe, Rimbaud, Baudelaire. There are a few notes within his poems which distantly evoke Blok. Poetry was for him the sole element inside of which he didn't feel like a fish out of water. If one is able to say about anyone the words: "He was born to be a poet", then they apply to Poplavsky with an absolute sinlessness - and in this he stood far from the crowd of all the others. He may have written bad poems on occasion, unfortunate lines, but that music, which none other was capable of catching, he could hear at all times. And within the literary arguments, which he would often become caught up in, would typically be hidden a singular inextinguishable misunderstanding which would separate him from his conversational companions: he spoke about poetry, while they went on about how to write poems.
In his final years he began to write differently from before, somewhat less confidently: he could feel the air turning mute all around him. That was the result of that slow catastrophe which led to the silencing of his earliest and best comrades. Their names are known to everyone who belongs to the literary crowd and are unknown to virtually anyone within the wider public. All of them ceased writing - yet, along with that, each one of them had something to say. But within that soundless, wild space that surrounded them, their words remained unheard. So they turned silent. And Poplavsky remained alone. That idiosyncratic conversation between visionaries in which he participated was suddenly interrupted and then vanished entirely. And his literary forsakenness became even more evident, even more tragic: in his life, he did not have anything at all besides art and also that cold, unspoken understanding that nobody needed art whatsoever. But outside of art he couldn't exist at all. And when it became completely meaningless and impossible, he died.
It is also difficult to write about him because the thought of his death is simultaneously a reminder of our own fate, --- us, his comrades and brothers, all of those perpetually untimely people who write useless poems and novels and are incapable of neither involving themselves in commerce nor organizing the business of their own lives, an association of fantasy-peerers and stargazers for whom almost no place remains on this earth. We participate in an unfair war, which we can not help but eventually lose, and the question is only in which ones of us are to perish before the others; and this wouldn't necessarily become manifest in physical death, but could be far less tragic. Yet, even the very fact that a person who has dedicated their life's best years to literature is still forced to involve themselves in physical labor, also is death, though lacking in caskets and mourning. And this is nobody's fault, but, I believe, just can not be any other way. Nevertheless, it remains incredibly saddening.
And I, it appears, have been wrong to set verbs into the present tense, rather than the past, because the vast majority of those with whom we once commenced our "lives of art", have already died to literature. Poplavsky and I were at the cinema one time and the orchestra was playing a melody unknown to me which contained in itself something some deeply, distantly familiar and frequently experienced feeling which I vainly kept trying to remember and determine.
"Can you hear it?" Said Poplavsky. "As if, by truth, time and time, a train keeps departing?" This was caught by him momentarily and spoken with borderless precision. His other reasonings, whenever he gave himself the effort of setting aside moments for truly deep thought and abstained from uttering, in an unbroken stream, absolutely every single thing that would come into his head, stood out by being marked by that same rapidness of comprehension.
He was childishly quick to feel wronged, incredibly sensitive towards many unimportant things, could get upset to the point of tears if a newly released issue of a magazine lacked the space for his poems. It was easy to buy him off - with the promise of money or of one of his poem’s printing, - he would agree to anything at all. There were occasions when people would take advantage of that and this was particularly indecent in relation to Poplavsky.
He once asked me: - “Tell me, would you ever agree to print something for free, just for the purpose of art itself?” - “No.” - “What about if they refused to pay you?” -“I don’t know, I don’t think that’s quite possible.” - “Well, what happened is that I was promised to be paid, but later they refused to give me anything, saying that this was my contribution to art, and instead of a wage offered me a used suit. But its size ended up being too large for me, so, I really don’t know what to do at this point.” I recall that I didn’t immediately know how to answer him. Later I began to explain to him how, I thought, he needed to carry himself in that situation.
He would listen to me speak, would shake his head, and then said: - “You can get away with a certain Independence, while I’m utterly barred from it, you know, since I am completely unprovided for in a material sense.” And at that point I suddenly felt a piercing sense of pity towards him of the sort one feels towards a hungry child or a cripple. I remember that night like it was happening right in front of me: that dark chilly night, those narrow and murky streets of the Latin quarter which he and I paced and, finally, that sensation of pity. That person with impressive biceps, at that point a sporty, athletic 23-year old, a person who has managed in that short lifetime to gain perfect insight into many things which the majority of his well-bred and universally successful colleagues couldn’t even dream off: that person was utterly defenseless in his life.
He had no idea how to manage money. Whenever he would have some - which was a pointedly rare occasion - he would buy gramophones, ruined vinyl records, some kind of rapiers of “unusual bendability”, brightly-colored ties. If after these purchases anything at all remained, he would proceed to squander it around Montparnasse.
Somewhere within the writings of Tolstoy there’s an observation about the fact that a person is never just smart or dumb, good or evil; they can be occasionally smart, sometimes dumb, at various points good, at others evil. If this understanding is applicable to all people, then in the case of Poplavsky the possibility of categorical evaluation is out of the question completely. He was more complex and deeper than others, -- at times with a complexity one could not even guess at, with unimaginable depths. He contained within himself much that was impossible to understand at first sight. Equally as inscrutable was that spiritual coldness of his with which he sometimes spoke about the most lyrical of his own poems. One thing remained certain: he knew things which others had no inkling of. He ended up not having time to say almost any of it. The rest is known to us and, perhaps, the possibility of sharing that understanding of his has vanished forever, disappearing into eternity like Poplavsky himself.
And now, that complex movement of his unusual fantasy, of his momentary and lyrical illuminations, that entire world of flags, oceanic azure, Salome, sailors, angels, snow, and darkness -- it simply stopped and shall never again become resumed. And nobody would ever return to us even a single note of that music which we loved so much and which ceased with his deathly wheezing.
A huge crowd was present at the ceremony of his last rites which took place in a pitiful church with stained-glass windows upon which an unskilled hand placed images of a certain holy content. Besides the people who knew Poplavsky as a person and as a poet, there were also people who would unfailingly be present at all funerals and memorials who are just as necessary as the casket and the hole in the ground and just as inseparable from the notion of someone’s death. Candles burned and hot wax would drip upon one’s fingers while splashes of rain barely traversed the distance from the wide-open doorway in order to touch one. And, just like always, there also lingered a sensation of some ultimate lack of justification, a sensation which no change of circumstance, no amount of time, or even of personal happiness could ever make one fully forget.
He was wronged and misunderstood when he left this life. I don’t know whether we could have kept him back from his fatal exit. But there was something that needed to be done - and we did not do it.
Poplavsky has gone away and, along with him, has departed his perpetual nonsense: all that sea, all those ships, and the infinitely stretching run of some distant ocean.
О Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps, levons l'anere!
Ce pays nous ennuie, ô Mort! Appareillons!
And again that very same vision: the night, the cold, the water, and the flames - and then a final maritime departure from an unbearably hard and fatally boring country.