Russian literature. A short introduction

princess for a mild-mannered young princely aesthete; The Swain showed the union of a peasant girl and vampire-lover as a sublime erotic experience. For Tsvetaeva, as for several other Symbolist and post-Symbolist women poets, appropriation of folklore was a means of breaking away from the constraints of ‘women’s poetry’ in a traditional sense – poetry of unhappy love, elegant narcissism, and self-effacing creativity. Her poem ‘The Muse’ represented a woman at the borders even of rural society, a vagrant, perhaps even a drab and an outlaw:

No birth, no marriage certificates,

No forefathers, no ‘bright falcon’ [i.e. young man].

She goes tearing along,

Such a distance away!

Under the dusky eyelids [Glows] gold-winged fire. With a wind-beaten hand She snatched – and forgot.

Her hem trails in the dirt, Her shoes gape apart. Not wicked, not kind, But far-off: her own woman.

Without ‘certificates’ (of birth, of marriage), without a man to ensure her respectability, and with her hem trailing in the dirt (a proverbial image of sluttishness in the sexual sense too), Tsvetaeva’s Muse could not have been more different from the decorous muses, with impeccable literary credentials, that figured in Akhmatova’s poetry. What is more, here, as in Tsvetaeva’s work as a whole, the polarization between ‘acceptable’ rural folklore and ‘vulgar’ urban folklore that ran through much work by other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers broke down. (Indeed, Tsvetaeva’s imitations of the ‘vulgar’ genre of street ballad in her poetry of the early 1920s were considerably