How did I live my life?" asked Proust in the twilight of his years. "Ma vie qui semblait devoir être brève comme un jour d'hiver. " ▶ Boris Poplavsky, "On the subject of . . . " (1931) T he final years of Boris Poplavsky's life were, according to his father, "profoundly enigmatic. " 1 His friend, the artist and writer Ilya Zdanevich, characterized them aphoristically and with a dash of foreboding: "Mysticism, poverty, dubious associations, perhaps despair. " 2 Rumors that his death, from a

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... dose of heroin, had not been accidental only added to his mystique. And in the end, the mythos, the cult that was built up around him after he died-"almost having reached the age of Christ," as the editor Louis Allain so elegantly observed-effectively canonized him, not only as one of the twentieth century's great poètes maudits, but also as a mystic, a seer, an oracle, a God-seeker. 3 Boris Poplavsky was the quintessential wild child of Russian Montparnasse. Born in Moscow in 1903, he was raised in the exquisite sophistication and fin-de-siècle decadence of Russia's Silver Age.