Old Hollywood, the “New Odessa”
Review of Boris Dralyuk’s My Hollywood and Other Poems (2022)
By Eloise Grossman
In his 2022 debut collection, My Hollywood and Other Poems, Boris Dralyuk constructs a vision of Los Angeles defined by its dilapidated grandeur. In the titular section of the collection, a series of sonnets reflecting on the “good old days” which have “clearly passed” (17), Dralyuk carefully deconstructs the facade of Hollywood’s former glory to distill the spirit of what the neighbourhood represents, both within the greater culture of Los Angeles, and come seeking the summer sunlight of upward mobility. [1]
In “Aspiration,” the collection’s first poem, Dralyuk begins by describing the statue erected nearly a century ago in De Longpre Park for silent movie actor Rudolph Valentino, who died tragically young, and the scene surrounding it in the present day. There are broken trees splayed out on the ground and “vagrants begging alms” (17) as the statue reigns above the desolate scene beneath; head tilted upwards and ignorantly. Shortly after Valentino’s death came the death of silent film, and his legacy often acts as a metonymy for Old Hollywood as a whole, which Dralyuk highlights at the end of the poem with the lines: “A crow clacks in the branches overhead/like a projector slowly going dead” (17).
Through the following poem in the triptych, “The Flower Painter,” Dralyuk moves deeper into Hollywood’s past, writing partially from the perspective of Monsieur Paul de Longpre, the namesake of Aspiration’s resting grounds, who passed over a decade before Valentino. In this piece, de Longpre is in his chateau, lamenting the end of his Hollywood: “mon vieux,” a “grand old dame reduced to dishabille / her glory far too faded to restore,” whose “precious blossoms” were made to wilt. De Longpre’s bleak perspective in this piece comes as a great shock to the reader, as he was the man who created a “man-made Eden,” in his own backyard. He transformed Hollywood into a pastoral vision, whose image remains embedded in American culture today (18).
Drayluk then fast-forwards a few decades to “The Garden of Allah,” a famous hotel established by Russian American actress Alla Nazimova, opened the year after Valentino’s death. Here, Dralyuk briefly ends his mourning of Old Hollywood, to pay tribute to the once thriving Russian Hollywood, filled with signs of Cyrillic letters and “bustling little shops,” (19) now ending as rent prices rise out of control. To underscore the cultural impact of Russian émigrés on Hollywood’s history, he then turns back to the neighbourhood’s glamorous past, referencing Nazimova by name, and emphasizing not just her importance within American culture, but also, and more specifically for Russian Americans, as an icon of the American dream. In reflecting on the once populous Russian-Jewish neighbourhoods in the city, Dralyuk creates a feeling of nostalgia for both the grandeur of Old Hollywood and the neighbourhood he grew up in: two opposite ends of a spectrum which in tandem articulate the in-and-outsideness of the émigré perspective.
Dralyuk’s veneration of Hollywood bears great resemblance to lands described in Eastern European folktales, such as in the works of Teffi or Der Nister, and the consistent ballad rhyme scheme aids in creating similar fantastical images. The rhymes also evoke those of childhood nursery rhymes, bringing Dralyuk’s biography to the fore by giving us brief glimpses into specific places which have stayed with him throughout his life. Through his use of epigraphs before nearly every poem — quoting stories from the Los Angeles Times, KABC, and books including The Art of Street Lighting in Los Angeles to contextualize and consecrate the objects of his poetic attention — [2] reveals, in Dionne Brand’s term, the “literary substance” of which he is made. Reading this collection, it comes as no surprise that Dralyuk has also worked as a translator of the works of Isaac Babel (or that part of Babel’s “The Story of My Dovecot” is one of the featured epigraphs in this collection), as his storytelling bears a similar nostalgia to that of Babel’s minimalist and familiar yet striking prose that follows a heritage in which stories are a central aspect of everyday life.
Dralyuk’s imagery of Russian Hollywood continues in the aptly titled section “Russian Hollywood: Translations.” Here, he translates the works of five Russian poets who spent the end of their lives in Hollywood in pursuit of Los Angeles’ ever-changing sublime landscape and the promises it held. By translating their work, Dralyuk immortalizes these authors, equivocating their experience with that of the average Hollywood émigré and reilluminating their lives. The themes and symbols within these pieces are utilized in the earlier sections of the book: the Mexican birch in Vladislav Ellis’ poem becomes the lonely shiksa in “Babel at the Kibitz,” Vernon Duke’s depiction of the farmers market is then transformed by Dralyuk into that of “Stravinsky at the Farmers Market,” and his lament of the Sunset Strip is transformed into that of “The Flower Painter” and his reminiscence of his chateau.
The final section, “Late Style,” holds the poem, “Venice Beach: A Diptych,” in which Dralyuk commemorates the lives of vaudeville actress Sarah Bernhardt and film director Alexander Drankov, likening the setting of Venice beach, a “new-world Venice” to Venice, Italy, another city which has become defined by the glory of its past, filled with a similarly haunted and crumbling beauty. In drawing this comparison, Dralyuk reminds us that the promised land migrates from generation to generation, and that which we hold as shiny and new inevitably becomes worn and old, especially as we plant our roots. Throughout My Hollywood, presenting the landscape of an ever-changing Los Angeles whose not-so-distant past has clearly faded into days of old, Dralyuk deftly highlights the fragility of the emblems we use to define America, “Americanness,” or the American Dream. Here is a vision of an America which once held great promise for those who came in search of a better, meritorious life.
[1] Reference to “The Immigrant Story” by Grace Paley, The Collected Stories, (New York: FSG, 1994) p. 238.
[2] Reference to Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2024). pp. 14-15.
Eloise Grossman is a first-year English Master's student at McGill University. She is a student volunteer for the Montreal International Poetry Prize and a poetry editor at Scrivener Creative Review.
11 April 2026