Boris Poplavsky (1903–1935) is one of the most talented and mysterious poets of the first wave of Russian emigration. Everything about him attracted the attention of his contemporaries: his appearance, behavior, poetry... A skinny young man at the beginning of his Parisian life and a few years later, he was a real athlete; a poorly dressed poor man and a Montparnasse dandy; a subtle art critic and lover of paradoxes like “the absence of art is more beautiful than itself”; “Russian surrealist” - and an admirer of Lermontov and Blok... Dmitry Tokarev’s book sets the task of a comprehensive analysis of Poplavsky’s poetics, with the comparative method becoming the main method. The author examines a variety of aspects of the poet’s work - philosophical and historical issues, physiology and psychology of perception of visual and verbal images, discursive practices, occult influences, intertextual “roll calls”, narrative organization of the text.