Part of the first wave of Russian emigration to France, the poet-painter-collector Boris Borisovitch Bojnev was born in Saint Petersburg, in the Russian Empire of the time, in 1898. His father disappeared when he was only 4 years old and he was raised by his stepfather, who adopted him. The young boy is very early attracted by poetry, painting and music.After the revolution, he was sent to Paris in 1919 by his parents, but his...

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  Biography of Boris Bojnev

  Part of the first wave of Russian emigration to France, the poet-painter-collector Boris Borisovitch Bojnev was born in Saint Petersburg, in the Russian Empire of the time, in 1898. His father disappeared when he was only 4 years old and he was raised by his stepfather, who adopted him. The young boy is very early attracted by poetry, painting and music.
  

  After the revolution, he was sent to Paris in 1919 by his parents, but his financial situation was precarious; he worked as a music copyist, and at the same time pursued a literary activity, participating actively in the Russian literary life in Paris, notably at the Chambre des Poètes. Boris Bojnev joined the avant-garde poetic group "A travers", created in 1923 (Serge Charchoune was one of the members). In Paris, from 1921, he has a real "revelation" for the naive and primitive paintings that he sees as "the part of a Paradise that remained pure and innocent." Boris Bojnev starts a collection of paintinggs found in second-hand shops or bought in flea markets and from dealers. These were "small painted wooden panels, disgraced and neglected canvases of amateurs or strangers", which he retouched and framed (his "Auras") and in which he usually inserted female figures. Boris Bojnev also painted watercolors and landscapes with Chinese brushes. He also accumulated a collection of erotic postcards, including several thousand from the 1900s, their planned exhibition in Paris was prohibited by the prefecture.Boris Bojnev began to publish his poems in Sofia in 1920, some of which caused a scandal ("Struggle for Non-Existence", "Fountain", "Silentium Sociologicum", etc). After his marriage to Ella Kaminer, Boris Bojnev ceased to participate in the Russian literary life in Paris and soon broke definitively with the emigrant milieu. His next books were published on a self-publishing basis.In 1939, during the Second World War, he moved to Marseilles where he and his wife were threatened with internment and arrest several times because of the Jewish origin of his wife and her adoptive family. After the war, Boris Bojnev lived in the South of France, and in 1947, when his wife went to Palestine to visit her mother, his entourage became entirely French. He never stopped writing and published several books of poetry with makeshift means, creating a unique poetic universe, where the French influences of the avant-garde of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also Russian symbolism, are mixed in a whimsical way.In 1960, in great destitution, he found refuge at the Pastor family's home in Marseille, rue du Bon Pasteur. It was there, victim of a pulmonary embolism, that he died in 1969.Nine of his works are preserved in the category "Neuve Invention" created by Jean Dubuffet in the Art Brut collection in Lausanne.
  

  

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