Slavonic and East European Review, 96, 2, 2018 In ‘the Paradise of Friends’: Boris Poplavskii’s Novel, Homeward from Heaven, in the Light of Alexandre Kojève’s Seminar on Hegel DMITRY TOKAREV This article will attempt to elucidate the rather enigmatic concept of the ‘Paradise of friends’ (also referred to as the ‘Kingdom of friends’ or the ‘Republic of the Sun’, or simply the ‘unknown friends’) that appears in several texts written by the Russian émigré poet and novelist Boris Poplavskii just before his unexpected death on 9 October 1935, arguing that this concept should be analysed in connection with Alexandre Kojève’s famous seminar on Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes ( The Phenomenology of the Spirit, 1807). 1 Aleksandr Kozhevnikov (1902–68), a Russian exile who gallicized his name in the late 1930s, delivered his seminar over a period of six years (from 1933 to 1939) at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE) in Paris. 2 Beginning with the publication in 1947 of Kojève’s Introduction à Dmitry Tokarev is Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the National Research University Higher School of Economics and Leading Researcher at the Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House) at St Petersburg. This article was implemented in the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2018. 1 On Poplavskii (1903–35), see, inter alia, Elena Menegaldo, Poeticheskaia vselennaia Borisa Poplavskogo, St Petersburg, 2007; Maurizia Calusio, Il paradiso degli amici: Per un’analisi della poetica di Boris Poplavskij, Milano, 2009; Dmitrii Tokarev, ‘Mezhdu Indiei i Gegelem’: tvorchestvo Borisa Poplavskogo v komparativnoi perspektive, Moscow, 2011. 2 The School, founded in 1868, has a special administrative and academic status. Until 2010 the humanities were taught in the Sorbonne’s historical edifice, so the school was often regarded as part of France’s oldest university.