The Voice Over

The Maximum Cost of Living

(Marina Tsvetaeva)

On May 16, 1941 (that is, as we know from faraway in our own day and year, she still had three and a half months left to live), Marina Tsvetaeva wrote to her daughter in a distant northern labor camp: “We have a radio, we listen every evening, it picks up stations from far away, and I sometimes applaud like a fool—mainly—for statements of common sense, they’re a great rarity, and I notice that I myself am entirely common sense. That’s what POETRY is.”

By that time (and earlier than that, by the time of her return to Russia from emigration), she had already written her everything—(“I’ve written what’s mine. I could write more, of course, but I can easily not”)—with just a few exceptions, which make little difference. As another poet, Mikhail Kuzmin, said before his death, “The main thing’s finished, what remains are details.”

Thus, it’s tempting to consider this fragment from Tsvetaeva’s letter as something like an unintended last will and testament: a final line, drawn in the last minute under the labor of a life that was laborious in itself. It’s hardly worth letting it impress us overmuch: Tsvetaeva’s natural manner of speech and thought is an ascending dotted line of lightning formulas. They’re created “à propos,” as momentary answers to an internal or external demand, and therefore they often turn out to be mutually contradictory, refuting and rejecting one another. It’s better to consider them from a certain distance, in motion, noting the points of convergence and divergence and taking notice of the shared and unchanging center of gravity, toward which all the various utterances are oriented. Besides that, Tsvetaeva’s manner of writing involves constant stops and reboots. Drawing countless final lines under the most various circumstances of her own life and other people’s was a natural fuel for her: a means of picking up speed and transitioning into new texts and circumstances.

Let’s say, in 1939, when on the eve of leaving for the USSR Tsvetaeva copied a poem by her old literary enemy Georgy Adamovich into her notebook, adding below, “someone else’s poem, but which in places could be mine,” that gesture of poetic solidarity doesn’t annul her phrase from a letter three years before (“it turned out that it’s not bread he needs, but an ashtray full of cigarette butts: not me—but Adamovich and Co.”). What is alien remains alien, what’s her own remains her own; each assertion turns out to be totalizing: breaking out from a given sequence, asserting the priority of a dozen heterogeneous heavenly truths faced with the linear earthly truth. What should we consider the final judgment—a 1926 article full of icy (or sometimes boiling) scorn for Mandelstam’s Noise of Time or else “The Story of a Dedication,” a memoir on Mandelstam written in 1931, colored in tones of sisterly or maternal tenderness? Tsvetaeva’s testimony may benefit both the prosecution and the defense; her speech—every phrase taken separately—is something like a hanging bridge cast in haste from a fixed point (where the author is) to the transient subject of description, and invariably clinging to the air. Each phrase is a little model of a large system, a small will and testament, always ready to turn large. The letter from 1941 is one of many.

Yet, all the same, one wants to hold her formulations closer to one’s eyes and look at them against the light—in the end, what is the common sense she speaks of, if not what Tsvetaeva pushed away her whole life: the voice of the multitude she stubbornly scorned, of the triumphant majority? This phrase requires attention—neither the commonality of that commonness, nor the nature of that sense, apparently, are supposed to coincide with everyday—trivial—common sense, accepted wisdom intended for general use. However, in some sense Marina Tsvetaeva’s life and death, despite her desperate resistance, turned out to be nothing but common. Both in the sense of speedy and complete transformation into a literary myth—one of the primary ones of the Russian twentieth century, and also in a more essential sense: the nodal points of Tsvetaeva’s fate consistently turned out to be typical, emblematic, bringing the conditions of existence that were incompatible with life—émigré, Soviet, writerly, womanly—to extreme, white-hot clarity. That is, indicative (“my case is indicative”), and not only for the twentieth century with its wholesale deaths, but, however exaggerated it might sound, for human existence as such.

From the point of death (as if in a dream—from the point of waking), a human life casts back toward its beginning and acquires a final meaningfulness and clarity of structure, only now manifested. In Tsvetaeva’s case, the structure—the stubborn and destructive intention of fate—is so visible that it’s possible for that to obscure everything else. What we recognize first (“what is borne in the air,” as her mother says of Napoleon, in her prose)—is the dyad of poetry and suicide. It would seem to be an ordinary matter—dramatic biographies always cast a clear shadow, which makes them suitable for mass utilization (Pushkin—the duel; Mandelstam—death in the camps; Brodsky—exile, the Nobel Prize). But in Tsvetaeva’s posthumous fate, her suicide by far supersedes the poems, and sometimes it crowds them out. Mikhail Gasparov once wrote about that: “Today’s readers receive the myth about Tsvetaeva first of all, then afterward her poems as an optional appendix.” That seems to be true; and this particularity of Tsvetaeva’s case (which irritates many people) requires interpretation.

In essence, we have two texts in our hands, which complement and comment on each other—more than that, they don’t exist in isolation: “creative work” (her books of lyric poems, verses, long poems, plays, prose)—and “life,” where what Tsvetaeva herself wrote (the enormous archive of letters, rough drafts, diary entries) comprises barely a third. Other voices (witnesses and contemporaries) have an honorary and ungrateful mission—they step forward willy-nilly like the reasonable interlocutors of the Biblical Job: sympathizing or judging, but inevitably representing the side of order in the conversation—the way of things that they did not establish. They are the surface she was unable to cling to; the natural course of events for which she was a hindrance. Strictly speaking, they’re us ourselves, intending to live in the circumstances defined by this or that era; and by virtue of kinship we can’t avoid sympathizing with them, just as we can’t help sympathizing with Pasternak, who said of Tsvetaeva after her death, “She couldn’t wash a plate without Dostoevskian convulsions.”

Her biography seems to be widely known; therefore, I’ll permit myself to speak about it in passing, in a dotted line, emphasizing what seems to me most essential: nodes of meaning, unsolved (insoluble) problems.

As an epigraph to the first part of After Russia, her last collection of poetry, published in 1928 when the lyrical stream had begun if not to dry up then to change streambeds, Tsvetaeva took a phrase from Vasily Trediakovsky, changing it a bit in her own way: “It does not follow from the fact that the poet is a creator that he is a liar; a lie is a word against reason and conscience, but poetic invention occurs according to reason, such as a thing could and should have been.”

Tsvetaeva’s biography, like those of the majority of people born at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, unfolded precisely in the logic of what should not have been: outside any kind of expectations, against concepts of the possible. Surviving in the conditions presented depended on readiness and ability to change: accommodating oneself to the improper, living in its speedy regimen of kowtowing to the future. For Tsvetaeva, whose deep-rooted virtue was going against the grain (“One out of all—for all—against all!”), and whose heart’s inclination was everything that was departing, conquered, or speaking from under the ground (“What happened in the past is dearest of all”), a natural place was amid the doomed majority. That is, among those who could not or did not wish to usurp the right to speech on behalf of the future. Her natural neighbors in history were not the doers, but the livers: women, old people, the cast of characters in minor history—and the easy victims of major history.

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow on October 8 (September 26, Old Style—Russian September, as she herself said¹), 1892. She spent the whole rest of her life looking into her own early childhood, digging deep into it, as if into a treasure chest, choosing what was needed and leaving the rest to lie on the bottom as an untapped capital, a gold reserve of exemplars—answers to all questions. The Spartan childhood of a Moscow girl from a professor’s family, with a father who looked over their heads at the portrait of his late first wife, and a mother who looked over the piano at her own quickly approaching death, with a Tarusa summer house and Moscow winter, was arranged in an elevated and fairly harsh mode: at the intersecting lines of prohibitions and self-restraints. It was, apparently, by right of any childhood, quite happy—enough that “yearning for my life up to the age of seven” remained the one place where Marina Tsvetaeva felt at home for her whole life, while the wish to erect a monument to that life before seven is one of her main creative volitions, carried out and unrealizable. “I agree to 2 years (I’m honest!) of solitary confinement […] NB: with a yard, where I can walk, and with cigarettes—during which two years I’ll take it upon myself to write a splendid thing: my early childhood (up to seven—Enfances)—‘take upon myself’ isn’t right!—I won’t be able not to” (from her notebook, 1932).

Her mother, Maria Aleksandrovna Meyn, died when the Tsvetaeva sisters, Marina and younger Asya, were thirteen and eleven years old. Her death knocked the framework of the family arrangement crooked at once. In place of unwilling hours at the piano came willing hours, with Napoleon’s portrait placed in the icon frame instead of the religious image; the mother’s “so it must be” was swiftly replaced by the daughter’s “I have the right.” What’s interesting here is not the external outline of a youthful breakaway, one and the same in all eras—switching through several high schools in a year, skipping class, binge reading in the unheated attic, her first literary acquaintances, the first—also predictably literary—love. What’s characteristic is something else: how the exaggeratedly old-fashioned, intentionally childish selection of Tsvetaeva’s preferences breaks out of a general (“fashionable”) repertoire. Napoleon—Marie Bashkirtseff—Edmond Rostand—Lydia Charskaya’s novels—all these books and heroes of very young years, already then passing into the institution of the antique or maidenly. Some change or break in Tsvetaeva’s circle of reading could be expected with the start of her literary life—about which we have yet to speak. But neither her acquaintance with Ellis (a pseudonym of Lev Kobylinsky), a Symbolist poet from Andrei Belyi’s circle, nor her sudden and ardent friendship with Maximilian (Max) Voloshin, prevent (they sooner force) her to stand up for and assert what was her own: the literature of the phrase, of the cloak and rapier, with which heroica was linked for her then: ideals of the life-by-truth, on a high note, inherited from her mother.

This impulse (the choice and confirmation of her own, going against what was commonly accessible and/or trending) defined the beginning of her literary fate—and, as it became clear later, also a lasting strategy—of separateness, standing against any curly brackets, any milieu, literary or everyday, out of those that life offered her. And insofar as life was hard indeed, that static standing against quickly became an open (or closed—locked up for long decades in Tsvetaeva’s archive) confrontation—shooting at a moving target. This credo was one she was already proclaiming in a youthful letter in 1908: “Against the Republic for Napoleon, against Napoleon for the Republic, against capitalism in the name of socialism […], against socialism, once it’s brought to life, against, against, against!” Tsvetaeva stepped back from this credo only once, in the mid-1920s, when for a moment her work turned out or seemed to be topical—written into a literary context rather than breaking out of it—but that didn’t last long.

For a long time consistent assertion of her own otherness also seemed necessary because at first Tsvetaeva saw the external frame of her own fate as insufficiently dramatic, overly fortunate, “too rosy and youthful”—just like her own young rosiness, just like the glasses she quickly and permanently abandoned—despite her extreme nearsightedness. What would some years later, during her Berlin meeting with Andrei Belyi, become a catchword of their shared near and dear past (“You’re the daughter of Professor Tsvetaev. Whereas I’m the son of Professor Bugaev. You’re a professor’s daughter, and I’m a professor’s son. You’re a daughter, I’m a son”), was at first a mark of what was hatefully typical: a Moscow miss from a decent family, “with demands” and with “verses.” Tsvetaeva recognized her own people and things by their stamp of solitariness and separation; in her autobiographical prose “The Devil” (1935), she would write about her half sister: “After the Ekaterininsky Institute she entered the Guerrier Women’s Courses […], and then joined the Social-Democratic Party, and then the teaching staff at Kozlov High School, and then a dance studio—in general she kept on joining up her whole life. Whereas the true token of his [the devil’s, and Tsvetaeva’s too—M.S.] favorites is full dissociation, from birth and from everything—excludedness.”

Tsvetaeva acts—differently, moving away step by step from any societalness or groupness. In 1912: “So far only Gorodetsky and Gumilev, both members of some kind of guild,² have attacked me. If I were in the guild, they wouldn’t attack me, but I’m not going to be in the guild.” In 1918: “I am really, absolutely, to the marrow of my bones—outside of any estate, profession, rank. A tsar has tsars behind him, a beggar has beggars, I have—emptiness.” In 1920: “My longing for Blok is like the longing for someone I didn’t finish loving in a dream.—And what could be simpler?—Go up to him: I’m so-and-so … If you promise me all of Blok’s love in exchange for it—I won’t go up to him.—That’s how I am.” In 1926: “I haven’t belonged to any literary tendency and do not belong.” In 1932: “No one resembles me and I don’t resemble anyone, therefore it’s pointless to recommend this or that to me.” And—in 1935, a time of penultimate evaluations: “I myself chose the world of non-people, what can I complain about?”

Her literary debut already demonstrates the directness and harshness of this—forever unbending—contour. Tsvetaeva’s first, half-childish book An Evening Album was published at her expense in a print run of five hundred copies—a gesture that at the time meant about the same thing it does today: either the author’s extreme naïveté, or else a similarly extreme degree of provocation—disregard for the accepted mechanisms of literary growth, rejection of or indifference to possible professional evaluation. A gesture that in those times was all the more radical because it was rare for people in her circle of literary acquaintances and connections.

The new step that followed logically after that one was disregard for literature, departing into private life (more exactly—not leaving her private life). That was one more gesture of magnificent scorn. “How can I really be a poet? I simply live, rejoice, love my cat, cry, dress up—and write poetry. Now Mandelstam, for instance, now Churilin, for instance, they are poets. This kind of attitude caught on: therefore I got away with everything—and no one had any consideration for me. […] Therefore I am and will be without a name.” In 1923, writing this letter to Pasternak, Tsvetaeva retrospectively gave this recollection a tint of bitterness already habitual to her—but ten years before such a position (“a haughty head”) seemed natural. Life had joyfully tossed her such an opportunity.

In that same year, 1923, Tsvetaeva wrote in her diary:

Personal life, that is, my life in life (i.e. in days and places), has not worked out. That must be understood and accepted. I think—30 years of experience (because it didn’t work out immediately) is sufficient. Several reasons. The main one is that I am I. The second: an early meeting with a person from among the splendid—utterly splendid, which should have been a friendship, but was realized in a marriage. (Simply: a marriage too early with someone too young. [Remark from] 1933.).

In the drafts of Theseus there’s a note that rhymes with this one: “A marriage where both are good is valorous, voluntary and reciprocal torment (-ing).”

The early meeting and the early marriage, which predetermined the whole subsequent course of Tsvetaeva’s life and, possibly, its conclusion, were a gift of gifts—but, as usual, with a double bottom. Sergei Efron, whom the eighteen-year-old Tsvetaeva met in Voloshin’s Koktebel and at once chose as her husband “in eternity—not on paper” was a person of exceptional internal beauty and nobility; he bore those traits, like stigmata, through his whole life full of circumstances that went poorly with beauty and nobility.

The way Tsvetaeva told their shared story to herself and others picked out as its main trait the inevitability, their doomedness to one other. The fates of two children, who met on the beach in Koktebel, folded into one like halves of a puzzle: loneliness, early orphanhood, their birthday, which they celebrated on the same day.³ In the series of Tsvetaeva’s love affairs (as time passed, more and more one-sided, and, as they say, virtual), it’s hard not to notice the underpinning of active pity, maternal concern (from the older to the younger)—what she herself called an inclination: “desired—pitied—piteous!” She departed from this logic, it seems, only once—in her epistolary dialogue with Boris Pasternak, where from the very start there was a sense of equality: possessing the power of an equal essence. But the appeal of female seniority, which made her choose people and relationships that could be stylized in that key, calling her peer Rodzevich a boy, and the younger ones (Bachrach—Gronsky—Shteiger) little sons (or “my wee one”) was insurmountable for her; she herself understood this, as always, more clearly and caustically than anyone—and she summed it up in 1936, in the epigraph to her poetic cycle Poems to an Orphan:

A little child went down the street,

Blue with cold and shaking all over.

An old woman was walking along that way,

Took pity on the little orphan.⁴

The high-schooler Sergei Efron was the first, if not the decisive one, in that series, and in Tsvetaeva’s eyes, his life (youth, tuberculosis, the recent double suicide of his mother and his younger brother) made him a task: a call of duty to be fulfilled.

But in 1912 the two-fold theme of predestination and doom connected in Tsvetaeva’s heritage with Efron’s name was showing only its front, rainbow, side. Their triumphal young affinity opens a new register of meaning for Tsvetaeva (“I also used to think it was silly to be happy, even indecent! It’s silly and indecent to think that way—that’s my today,” she writes to Voloshin.) The time of exultation begins: of superlative degrees, of exaggerated (“that is—at full height,” as she would write in Poem of the End) admiration of herself and her surroundings. It’s at this time, in fact, that her poems become recognizably Tsvetaevan, while her voice acquires ultimate freedom—the gutta-percha obedience of an intelligent instrument.

The change toward happiness meant a great deal for Tsvetaeva; among other things, it meant her juvenile, preverbal “I have the right” acquired the right to speech and began to be called “such craving to live!” Life and texts are flooded with earthly signs (the title of the would-be book of diary prose she planned in the 1920s). She took her mother’s and grandmother’s old-fashioned dresses out of trunks, which—decades later—surface as her farewell gift in The Tale of Sonechka; she and Efron choose and purchase a gramophone, they arrange their own living space, with an “underwater” blue lamp in it and a door that opens out onto the roof. This purely private life, intentionally led as separate from her (not-led) literary life, was meant to be splendid: congenial to poetry, which in turn was meant to bear witness to life: “Write it down as accurately as possible! Nothing is unimportant! Speak about your room: is the ceiling high or low, and how many windows are there, and what kinds of curtains are on them, and is there a carpet, and what kind of flowers are on it?” Here as before, in the semi-diary Evening Album, we face what won’t allow us to speak about Tsvetaeva outside the contours of her biography—a resolute will that compels us to seek the features of authorial presence above (or perpendicular to) the texts. What she apparently had in mind from the very beginning—something like a reality show with natural scenery—began to acquire genuine dimensions (replete with living life). Over the years the action began to resemble a live court trial, in the light of conscience, where the author took turns being present now on the defendant’s bench, now as the prosecutor. But the beginning, the happy Tsvetaeva years, gave her a brief opportunity to concentrate on the external and, from among all the options, to choose—all at once.

In her prose memoir “A Living Word About a Living Man,” dedicated to the memory of Max Voloshin, Tsvetaeva recalls their daydreams of shared literary mystifications—unrealized, as she says, only due to her Germanic honesty, “the ruinous pridefulness of signing everything that I write.”

“Marina! You harm yourself with abundance. You have the raw materials for ten poets, and all of them—marvelous! But wouldn’t you like (cajolingly) to publish all your poems about Russia, for instance, as some him, say a Petukhov? […] And then (already entirely out of breath) […] there’ll be twins, poetic twins, the Kriuchkovs, let’s say, a brother and sister. We’ll create something that has never existed, that is, twin geniuses. They’ll write all your romantic poems.”

“Max!—and what will be left for me?”

“For you? Everything, Marina. All that you are yet to be!”

A conversation worth remembering: Tsvetaeva’s creative work would exist under the sign of this temptation (or this choice)—to be ten poets at once (but keeping for herself the right of signature)—for many years more. The romantic metaphors of her juvenile poems (“I crave all roads—at once!”) are realized here with literal exactness, and what’s more not only in the process of writing, in the selection of these or those speech masks, important for the “pre-emigration” Tsvetaeva. Some of the poetic collections Tsvetaeva published in her lifetime would be composed according to this (“Voloshinian”) scheme: the Gypsy poems (Mileposts II), the “White Army” ones (Demesne of the Swans), the “romantic” ones (Psyche, the plays), the “Russian” ones (Sidestreets, The Tsar-Maiden). It’s characteristic that the real (internal) chronology of Tsvetaeva’s oeuvre, whose stages she describes in 1935 in a letter to Yuri Ivask, has no place for the greater part of these books: the tasks that inspired their publication were too external. On the other hand, by the mid-1910s all the tasks Tsvetaeva was solving were already both broader and narrower than purely literary ones.

In particular, her logic at that time (“craving all roads,” the desire to experience everything and for everyone) had an everyday flip side, which was only indirectly related to literature, but which determined a great deal in the life of Tsvetaeva’s family. “My one conviction is that I have a right to absolutely everything, droit de seigneur. If life challenges that—I don’t resist, I’m just deeply astonished, and I won’t lift a hand out of fastidiousness,” Tsvetaeva wrote to her sister-in-law during the war in autumn 1916. The palpable, dazzling sunniness of her inner state and existence then is also linked to the fact that no one close to her would have even thought to challenge that right-to-everything, including her attempts to speak with several voices and to live several lives at once. The sense of things going slightly out of focus, of the overheating, as when air thickens over the asphalt in summer and starts to ripple, emerges from the Efrons’ family correspondence: an inexpert but still domestic life with cares about their little daughter Alya, with literary gossip, negotiations about firewood and nannies, keeps thinning out, letting us see Tsvetaeva’s next object of interest in the series. There seem not to be many (Sofia Parnok, Mandelstam, Tikhon Churilin, Petr Efron, Nikodim Plutser-Sarna)—at least their presence produces no impression of “Homeric debauchery.” Their names flicker in Tsvetaeva’s and Efron’s correspondence with his sisters as inevitable circumstances of the time. The fact that against that background Efron goes away, first as a male nurse to the front and then into military service, may be explained by his perpetual willingness to endure self-sacrifice—but a vague whiff of a looming breakdown appears in the story. The Revolution made the unnamed possibility of separation a reality, imposed from outside; it brought about a stony hopelessness with which it was impossible to make peace. Over the course of several years Tsvetaeva and Efron, who was fighting on the Don, in the Volunteer Army, had no news of each other—yet clung all the stronger to the memory of their life together. The fact that they both survived and made it through to a new meeting made their union unshakable: that is, in equal measure sacred and fatal.

The conditions of Tsvetaeva’s life in Moscow in the four years after the Revolution (she left Russia on May 11, 1922) may be considered simply typical, if only because all of Moscow and all of Russia wound up the same. Her reaction to them was also typical in its way: remaining in her emptied Moscow home—without money (her mother’s estate, on whose interest the Tsvetaeva sisters had been living, was confiscated in 1918), with no help from outside (the paid help left along with the money), with two small daughters, Tsvetaeva tried to continue living as before. The turn this life had taken could have frightened her, if not for her habit of embedding her biography in an elevated series of literary models. She tended to treat everything that happened to her in those first revolutionary winters as an Adventure—like dramatic chapters from Hugo novels: the growing poverty, and the apartment that quickly turned into a shell of its former self, and the attempts to sell everything that could have even the least value; the extreme disorder of everyday life—and, despite all that, the triumphant ceaselessness of higher being.

The quantity written in those years is impressive. What’s more, she had never written so much: eighty-seven poetic texts in the year 1917, a hundred and fifty-two in 1918, a hundred in 1919, a hundred and eleven in 1920, a hundred and eight in 1921, eighty-nine in 1922. We’re looking at a lyrical machine, producing—in the Stakhanovite mode, as it would be called later—unthinkable quantities of high-quality product, working independent of external circumstances or even in inverse dependence—producing more as things got harder for the person operating it. That same machine is revved up in her notebooks at this time—to process the living raw material of her heart’s and soul’s life. And inasmuch as the highest virtue of authorship is exactitude, this inevitably leads here to ethical maximalism of the soul, which doesn’t want to take into account what the body is doing at the moment, reduces the body to the function of experimental object—and lucky if not taking it to the anatomical theater. An extreme, uncompromising scrupulosity of analysis and a harshness of conclusions obtained remain in the notebooks, while the heart and the body keep on doing what they want, obeying their own caprices—and, therefore, providing new material for the notebooks.

Three constants are present in Tsvetaeva’s new life: the independent, autonomous work of the poetic machine; an endless series of half-accidental affairs, accounted for in the department of caprices or extravagances, but in actual fact essential for keeping the machine in working order; and the hateful necessity of existing “in days,” which Tsvetaeva was less and less capable of managing. In hindsight, she herself recollected the junkyard of amorous relationships that she worked through in those four years, the mash of human lives she tried to make use of in propelling her own historical drama, as a bad dream. Many things may be explained here only if we keep in mind Tsvetaeva’s persistent need to look upon her everydays as a text of which she wasn’t the (sole) author—evidently, unconsciously also keeping in mind that the laws of plot construction ensure any darkness comes to an end, that in sum everything should straighten out by itself—without her own participation, obedient to the authorial sense of measure and justice.

As we know, that didn’t happen either then or later; one lesson Tsvetaeva learned herself and was ready to share with others was that “in life […] no-thing is permitted—nichts—rien.” In November 1919, tempted by rumors of a wonderful children’s shelter where there was no end to the chocolate (and, apparently, hoping for a breather, free time for the notebook, her soul, and her heart), she registered both her daughters there—seven-year-old Ariadna (Alya) and two-year-old Irina. Here again the theme of Adventure arises: “the great Adventure of your childhood is unfolding,” as Tsvetaeva tries to ease the separation for herself and her older daughter. There’s famine in the shelter; both girls get sick, but for some reason their mother is slow to bring them home; this drags on until mid-January, when Alya’s condition becomes threatening and she’s quickly taken away. Little Irina remains in the shelter and dies on February 2 or 3 (Old Style). She’s buried somewhere there, in an unmarked mass grave. Tsvetaeva did not attend the funeral.

The results of this catastrophe (not understood at first to its full, utmost degree), which always remained underwater for her (not pronounced aloud or else delivered in an abbreviated version “for outsiders”), are immeasurable. What she herself allows into her notebook is obviously insufficient (especially compared with the degree of finish of other, so much more incidental topics); it is a muffled incomprehension and bewilderment: why did it come out this way? Why did this child come into the world? Irina, whom no one needed, in her dirty little shirt, is a lacerating recollection of the collapse of maternal and female essence. Not managing to give her love to her ordinary younger daughter, who was tailored differently than the wonder-child Alya, leaving her outside the parentheses of her own existence, consciously or unconsciously (the second is worse) having chosen one of the two (she would later dissect the possibility of such a choice in “Mother’s Tale”), she turned out to be “a child-killer on trial” by her own conscience—and for the first time wrong all around in her own eyes.

What came after that? A sharp turn of her life, internal and external. Tsvetaeva turns toward Efron with all the powers of her soul—as if from a burning house or a sinking ship. She has no doubts about his moral goodness: in their relationship she had assigned him the just role—of ethical compass, showing the true path. The fact that his image becomes more and more stylized in her poems and memoirs (the Swan, the Warrior, Saint George the Volunteer), is crucial here, too—but the certainty that she could come only to him, “by black midnight, for the last help,” is long-standing: the poem just cited was written in 1916. Tsvetaeva doesn’t even know now whether Efron is alive; and what she is ready to promise to him and herself is entirely mythic and extremely urgent: she would like to bear him a hero. “If you’re alive—I am saved. […] We’ll have a son, I know that this will be—a marvelous heroic son, for we are both heroes.” The sudden, desperate thought of a son came amid her first reactions to Irina’s death; possibly, she saw here a chance to win back that death symbolically, to serve-out and de-serve, to become a genuine (“proper”) mother, with diapers instead of poems. In good time she succeeded in this, and even too much: her third (one wants to say: summary), passionate, arduous maternity was precisely like that—hard service, everyday work, source of a hundred anxieties and fears, the main one of which, perhaps, was the old fear of once again not managing.

In 1921, Tsvetaeva finds out that Efron is alive and that their meeting is possible, and this acts on her like the repeal of a prison sentence. Leaving Russia, she locks it closed, leaves it behind her back, along with her own memory of the past—in the name of a new, straightened-up life. Her poems written abroad will come out as a book entitled After Russia.

Yet the poems in the book Craft, written still in Moscow, in 1921–1922, and published in Berlin in 1923, already reflect a sharp shift in style—they are sung, as in a Russian folktale, with a new, reforged throat. Here it’s not a question of her no longer liking the “old style”: in a notebook in 1929 she remembers 1920 with a kind word, “when I was already writing well!” She wanted to change not her manner but her fate; the new poems reject (shake off) the old way of thinking and living. The multitude of speech masks, verbal foam, the extraordinary, swaggering omni-possibility of Tsvetaeva’s lyrics at once begins to subside. The place of ten poets (in letters she also names a second number—seven) gives way to the one-and-only. The manner of seeing that Tsvetaeva had adopted in her juvenile poetry—the embellishing glance of admiration, which magnifies several times over the dimensions of the chosen object—gives way to a different one. The degree of magnification is the same, but the lighting is much harsher: we see before us an unsleeping, unclosing X-ray eye of severe, analytical knowledge of herself and the world, penetrating the surface in search of the structure. Critics contemporary to Tsvetaeva took this turn correctly: with bayonets drawn. “There are no lively pictures and bright images here, it is as if the visible and palpable world disappears, and we are plunged into something immaterial and almost formless,” wrote Evgeny Znosko-Borovsky about Craft in The Will of Russia (Volia Rossii). (I’m intentionally choosing one of the most ingenuous reviews, i.e., one that understood what was happening straightforwardly and simply.) The turn and overturn experienced by Tsvetaeva’s creative mechanism became conclusive, while the position she chose—seeing any thing with ultimate eyes, in light of the Last Judgment, with posthumous ethical directness—acquired its final fixedness. This position turns out to be exceedingly uncomfortable both for the author and for her readers; that particularity has stayed with it until the present day.

Let’s imagine a classical shouter: an unpleasant person who loudly complains about the crush in an overcrowded bus, in a line—about its length, and in the sun—about its heat. His demands provoke no sympathy, they seem tactless or unfounded. How is he different from the majority who keep quiet? In his knowledge, true or false, of how “a thing could and should have been.” In certainty of his inborn right to that “as it ought to be.” In his determination to make the injustice audible. What we consider his fault or misfortune is for this person the highest virtue: it’s an unwillingness to adapt to circumstances; it’s a fateful inability to get accustomed to injustice; it’s faith in the complaint book—“the Last Judgment of the word.” Tsvetaeva provokes in many people a similar kind of dislike.

All this is too easy to understand in the framework of a funny story: “Ooh, see, we’re so sensitive!” At the turn of the last century, demanding special conditions and brand new ethical scales was typical for people in the arts: as Akhmatova put it, “Sins don’t stick to poets at all.” In that sense, the case of Tsvetaeva, of a person who is unable and unwilling to handle the weight of days that had fallen onto her, becomes general, indicative: she’s a soldier in an army that remains unknown; behind her stand hundreds and thousands of people who could not adapt to the new reality and had no voice to make their own “no” audible. As a rule, we have to deal with history written by the ones who managed: who welcomed the arrival of the new (like Nina Berberova); who considered it necessary to be like everyone and “in concert with law and order” (like Pasternak); who chose a place apart and lived long enough for that to become a place of power (like Akhmatova). But the crowds that fell out into the cracks of the ultra-new time have neither the right to a voice nor an intercessor. Despite her own wishes, that intercessor was Marina Tsvetaeva, who insisted all her life on the exclusivity of her own case, until it became almost universal.

Therefore, her fate is so electrified by posthumous readerly interest, while conversation about her almost inevitably runs in the mode of a comrades’ court. Any biographical twists of Pasternak, Kuzmin, or Daniil Kharms still keep the reader at a distance, remaining in full measure the author’s private business. When we speak about Tsvetaeva, we’re speaking about ourselves—and not only because her life bears the mark of that horror about whose existence we know thanks to our own worst misgivings. Her story is an important chapter in the invisible book of collective experience; and, unlike in many, here we receive the information straight from the horse’s mouth. Everything in this family chronicle is documented in the most detailed manner; the progress (and outcome) of this life may be recreated by the day and by the week—every movement of the soul is recorded and analyzed; letters and notebooks keep a detailed enumeration of misfortunes and grievances. Here we must remember once again the mechanism of a reality show—and it grips you as if your own fate were at stake, even though we know how it ended. It’s not a matter of the (always real and always fictive) conflict of the exception and the rule, the poet and the crowd; it’s just that in what Tsvetaeva talks about and what she insists on everyone is a poet, a suffering exception to all the rules, no matter how thick the crowd from which he looks out. This voice, the childlike voice of pure godforsakenness, of final despair, of eternally trampled right, is familiar to everyone—because we all share it. At that depth where every person is Job, presenting his lonely account to God, he speaks in Tsvetaeva’s voice; and this speech still offends the imagination and the hearing, like the “howl of great longing” in Baratynsky’s poem “Autumn.”

To stand facing the wall of one’s own death cell is a pretty excruciating business. It’s more natural to prefer poetry that helps us turn away, better yet forget about the cell’s existence. There are authors who suggest that we look out the window (“Which century is it outside, my dears?”⁵) or take a close look at moving pictures. Tsvetaeva is in a different group, among those who represent memento mori here and nothing else. There are few of that kind—therefore her testimony is worth its weight in gold.

For her, emigration meant the necessity for the first time in her life to become a professional writer—that is, to earn her bread with literary labor. If she had existed earlier outside of ranks and contexts, publishing or not publishing according to her own wishes, now she had to fit herself into circumstances already inhabited by everyone else, to switch her natural regimen of non-participation and non-joining from external to internal, though that made it no less obvious to everyone. In the mid-1920s, it seemed she had succeeded in this and become one of the authors who occupied a strong position with regard to the times. She briefly, unintentionally turned out to be what she had always shunned: one who expresses the aspirations of the epoch, the banner of a certain generation; more accurately, one of two banners—the other was Boris Pasternak. In those very years the two of them joyfully explored the potential and range of their rhymedness, the internal affinity they both acknowledged. In readers’ perception, they represented the most up-to-date contemporaneity, a word and concept that was deeply alien to Tsvetaeva, who was interested only in things that didn’t age—or else in things that had aged once and for all. Both Tsvetaeva and Pasternak, although their first books had come out before the Revolution, entered the orbit of broad readership only at the start of the 1920s—and their new brand of poetry, unmuddied by political engagement like Mayakovsky’s, and not seeming to contemporaries archaic, museum-like, as Mandelstam’s poems did at that time, suggested the possibility of a new literature—not Soviet, not émigré, different: clearing the throat and the vision. This didn’t last long. As Tsvetaeva’s poetic idiom changed from (relative) conservatism and general comprehensibility toward obvious complicatedness, its novelty began to acquire a distinctly negative hue in the eyes of the literary milieu; and that milieu itself was becoming more and more rarefied, while the possibility of selling a manuscript⁶ grew ever more unrealistic.

One of the points of divergence with her era was Tsvetaeva’s principled utilitarian and even condescending attitude to language: as an obedient instrument—or a part of her own body not requiring ceremonious handling. (This is fairly rare in the poetry of that time with its cult of quality—and in today’s as well, which in many ways exists within coordinates that Brodsky suggested, where language represents a self-regulating machine, recruiting authors of its own will to perform a certain type of work.) For Tsvetaeva, language is used or overcome as a material—the external membrane of the essence that alone is important. Disregarding externality in the name of meaning was so natural for Tsvetaeva that she was invariably bewildered by critical articles that spoke of her poems as toys, performed in this or that style, describing the surface while not reaching the internal task. Her belief in the extra-linguistic power of meaning explains the effort Tsvetaeva expended to make her poetry accessible in French. The titanic labor—translation of her own long poem The Swain into French, which never did find a response, was an attempt to let the piece be realized anew in one of the languages native to her (“German more native than Russian / To me, Angelic is most native of all!”). In émigré literature, obsessed with the idea of preserving the Russian language as a shared safe conduct, Russia in a traveling bag, this position (“For a poet there is no native language. Writing poetry is in itself re-wording”) was unique—and deeply alien.

It was her relationship with Pasternak that, for Tsvetaeva, happened to be her primary bet on life of that time. Their internal mutual commitment “to live up to each other” was a streambed along which Tvetaeva’s thought flowed for years, flooding the underwater rocks of the inevitable affairs and infatuations, which in their shallowness and finiteness only confirmed the correctness of the main choice. But how finite that choice, too, turned out to be! Their correspondence, which began in 1922—starting at once on the highest note—was meant from the beginning to be something much more than a literary friendship: a meeting of equals (Siegfried and Brunhilde, Achilles and Penthesilea), doomed by the power of things to each other and to a shared stand against the world, back-to-back, on the boulder of the word “we.”⁷ In Tsvetaeva’s private mythology, where poetry’s source is impersonal and supra-personal, all poets (starting with herself and all the way to Orpheus) comprise something like a caste of translators-ferrymen from the angelic language into the one they were given at birth. Speaking with Rilke’s words, which she could have considered her own, “One poet only lives, and now and then / Who bore him, and who bears him now, will meet.”⁸ The meeting with one of her own caste became in her consciousness an event that could justify an entire life and explain all the earlier failures and disappointments as stemming from a disparity of species—the general human with her own, particular kind. More than that: only the meeting and equality of that higher order could knock loose the predetermined march of time of her fate, render harmless the active myth of her eternal bond with Efron.

Pasternak’s appearance and presence in Tsvetaeva’s “days” (“in full purity of heart, the first poet in my whole life”), the feeling they both admitted of “relatedness along the whole front”—of a gift, of a human dimension and of that same other species—in and of itself summoned to life amorous connotations, a dream of complete coincidence and union. They both lived in rays of that union, now hurrying, now deferring a future meeting, until the early 1930s, when Pasternak’s new marriage made the daydream of their devotion to each other meaningless for Tsvetaeva. (“Well then I’ll refuse to look for my organic rhyme in this world, here. While there—everything rhymes!”—she wrote to him.) His choice and turn toward the masses (which Tsvetaeva did not notice before his “you’ll come to love the collective farms,” directed to her in 1935, in Paris, at the long-awaited meeting that so disappointed her) was a still worse refusal—now not just of her, but also of his direct predestination. “You don’t understand anything, Boris (oh, liana that has forgotten Africa!)—you’re Orpheus, devoured by beasts—they’ll chew you up.” The Africa of lyrics, which Pasternak had “forgotten” in the name of a faceless multitude and a beautiful woman as a representative of that multitude, now remained in her sole possession—an inheritance needed by no one, which she couldn’t share with anyone.

By the mid-1930s, Tsvetaeva’s lyric poetry had already become completely superfluous to the milieu of readers, too. If in 1921–1925 she had managed to put out ten poetic books, the next collection of verse was published with difficulty only in 1928, and it was the last book published in her lifetime. As time passed, publishing only got more complicated; a great, if not the greater, part of what Tsvetaeva wrote in emigration remained unread. After the publication of her article “The Poet on the Critic(ism),” which sharply departed from the accepted literary etiquette of the time, literary society’s sympathies turned out not to be on Tsvetaeva’s side. Over time there were fewer and fewer publications willing to collaborate with her, while the frameworks of that collaboration were ever more narrow. They asked not for new poems, but for some “understandable to the reader,” that is, hopelessly out-of-date for the author. They did print her prose (written “for earnings: reading aloud, that is in a forcedly articulate and explanatory mode […] for one-year-old children”), but reluctantly, with cuts that hopelessly distorted the author’s conception. In some cases, Tsvetaeva for various reasons had to refrain from publishing her work, which meant for her not only the impossibility of being heard but also a misfortune of a wholly everyday character: loss of the means for existence. Given the extreme poverty in which the Efron family lived, this impossibility of getting accommodated to life acquired a tragic character. Tsvetaeva was unsuited to other kinds of work; simply—she couldn’t do anything else (all the more so since in her own, verbal domain she could do everything and was very well aware of it). “I’m not a parasite, because I work, and I don’t want to do anything but work: but—my work, not someone else’s. Forcing me to do someone else’s work is pointless, for I’m incapable of doing any other than my own and menial labor (hauling weight, etc.). For I’ll do it in such a way that they’ll throw me out,” she wrote in her notebook in 1932. Against that background it seemed to those close to her, and sometimes she herself felt, too, that the place commensurate for her, the milieu in which she could sound forth to her full ability (and her full power) would have to be Soviet Russia with its multimillion population of new readers.

For Sergei Efron the choice was already made by the mid-1930s. The theme of a possible return to Russia stands above Tsvetaeva’s correspondence of the final years like a cloud (“I live under the stormcloud—of departure”). Everything, it would seem, was pushing her out, nudging her: the growing Sovietness of her husband and daughter, tightly connected with the Paris “Union of Return to the Homeland”—an organization directed and financed by the Soviet intelligence agencies (the GPU, then NKVD); the sense “that strength is over there,” as she wrote in a letter welcoming Mayakovsky; the airlessness of her own life, which was quickly turning into a vacuum.

Yet, nevertheless, Tsvetaeva once again takes a stand in opposition—this time not only to the logic of life, but to her own family, too: to her husband, her daughter, her son Georgy (nicknamed Mur), who is growing by the hour. “Horror at a self-satisfied Soviet unchildlike Mur—with his mouth full of programmatic clichés” is only a shadow of her everlasting horror before the kingdom of the victorious majority that she would be compelled to love: she is soberly aware of the impossibility of being an individual there. “I’m interested in everything that interested Pascal, and I’m not interested in anything that did not interest him. I’m not to blame for being so truthful, it would cost nothing to answer the question: ‘Are you interested in the future of the people?’ with ‘Oh, yes.’ But I answered: No, because I am sincerely uninterested in any kind of or any person’s future, which is for me an empty (and threatening!) place.”

At first she decides not to travel into that empty place, the country of the victorious future (“mainly—because of Mur,” she writes to Pasternak in 1933); later, “mechanically, passively, by the will of things,” she begins to move closer and closer to the edge. In 1937, after her daughter’s departure and the sudden, secret flight of her husband, who was entangled in a political assassination the NKVD had carried out abroad, Tsvetaeva had no ground left to stand on. She was living in Paris under surveillance, possibly also on NKVD money, feverishly sorting her archive, trying to stash manuscripts that would clearly not pass Soviet censorship with people she knew (“half of them—I can’t bring!”)—in fact, taking care of her own posthumous life, doing the external work of an archivist and commentator. The departure forced by circumstances didn’t have even a shadow of personal volition: she was leaving “like a dog,” not resisting—and that was all. On June 12, 1939, in Le Havre, Tsvetaeva boarded the steamship Maria Ulyanova, which took her and her son to Leningrad. “I’ll snap my own neck—looking back: at you, at your world, at our world …”—she writes to Anna Tesková on June 7, a few days before the final letter of farewell.

This already final turn toward that world and herself within it, the decisive summing-up, would become Tsvetaeva’s final task long before the threat of departure became real. Time after time the notebooks and letters of the 1930s analyze a riddle that didn’t cease tormenting her until the very end: the repeated failure of her earthly/female life. Some of the notes are in French: the language of a conversation with herself, assuming no other reader and interlocutor. Enumerating everything that had been given to her (name, external appearance, gift), Tsvetaeva tries to and is unable to solve the equation that resists her:

They approach, get frightened, disappear. […]

Sudden and total disappearance. He—gone without a trace. I—remain alone.

And it’s always one and the same story.

They abandon me. Without a word, without a “good-bye.” They used to come visit—they don’t come any more. They used to write—they don’t write any more.

And here am I in a great silence, which I never break, mortally wounded (or—cut to the quick—which is the same thing)—without ever understanding anything—neither for what, nor why.⁹

The great silence of abandonment, the bewilderment of culpability are the same here as in a short note from 1920: “Why does nobody love me? Isn’t the fault—in me?” The long-lasting farewell, beginning in her youth, to the potential—those subjunctive possibilities that youth offers a person—becomes final, humiliating in its forcedness. A straight perspective turns out to be impossible, the time comes for reverse perspective.

The only home that remained to Tsvetaeva, who did not accept what the present offered her as such and regarded any future with justified suspicion, became the unchangeable and never-betraying time of eternal stasis, which she fell into as if going back home. In her last years, she began to use the longing for the past that accompanied her all her life as a refuge. The past became not only a synonym for solitude in one’s chest, but also a model of a better world, and the mere fact of belonging to it testified to the good quality of a person or phenomenon. She perceived what had passed away as a nature preserve, the last place where one could still find things and qualities that she had received from there and uncharacteristic of the new epoch: both the “round-robin of goodness,” and “scorn for the temporary garment of flesh.” Turning to face her own and other people’s yesterdays, she sought and found a living support in them: “Only little Marcel relieves my suffering from the lack of sensitivity in the surrounding world, being of a different generation where every man gave up his seat to a woman, whether or not she was pretty, where no one remained seated when a woman was standing, and—oh, especially this!—where no one talked to you with their feet up on a chair.”¹⁰

The mention of Proust here is no accident: his manner of textually resurrecting the past turned out to be the key to new writing for several Russian writers left without a place by the epoch that had arrived (besides Tsvetaeva, here we might also recall Kuzmin, who in 1934 arranged his final, experimental diary “according to Proust”). Tsvetaeva’s corpus of retrospective prose (to call it memoirs would be a very big stretch), written in her last years, seems to have been intended to carry out a purely magic action: resurrecting (or at least preserving, placing in the fireproof safe of verbal eternity) everything and everyone she had loved, extending their being—and standing beside them: there and that way, as she herself wished. “The more I bring you to life, the more I myself die, perish from life—toward you, into you—I die. The more you are here, the more I am—there. As if the barrier between the living and the dead is already removed, and both these and those move freely through time and space—and through their opposite. My death is payment for your life.”

By the time of her departure from France this payment was complete. “How many lines gone by! I don’t write anything down. That—is finished.”

Instead of describing everything that happened to Marina Tsvetaeva next—her meeting with her family, life locked up in an NKVD dacha, her daughter’s arrest, her husband’s arrest, dragging through lines outside prisons and writers’ organizations, the first days of the war, the catastrophe of evacuation from Moscow, her extreme solitude and her solitary suicide, I shall copy here—letter by letter—at least part of the open letter she wrote for an émigré children’s magazine in winter 1937–38, which remained unpublished at the time. It’s that very same farewell voice of common sense, which may also be called heavenly truth: the truth of higher courtesy and genuine (not trying to be that)—poetry; I think it is that kind of voice.

Dear children,

I’ve never thought of you separately: I’ve always thought that you are people or non-people (like us).

But they say that you’re a special breed that’s still susceptible to influence.

Therefore:

—Never pour out water for nothing, because at that moment a person is dying in the desert for want of this drop.

“But he won’t get this water if I don’t pour it out!”

“He won’t get it, but there will be one senseless crime fewer in the world.”

—For the same reason, never throw bread away, and if you see some on the street, underfoot, pick it up and put it on top of the nearest fence, for there’s not only a desert where people die without water, but also slums where they die without bread. Besides that, maybe someone hungry will notice that bread, and will feel less bad taking it that way, rather than from the ground.

Never be afraid of a funny thing, and if you see a person in a silly situation: 1) try to get him out of it, and if that’s not possible—jump in to join him as if into water, with two people a silly situation is divided in half: half of it for each—or else, at worst, don’t notice it.

Never say that everyone does it that way: everyone always does it badly, if people are so eager to refer to them […] 2) everyone has a second name: no one, and has no face at all: a blank haze. If they say to you: no one does that (dresses, thinks, etc.), answer: “But I am someone.” […]

Don’t say “not fashionable,” always say: not honorable. It both rhymes, and it sounds and works better.

Don’t be too angry at your parents—remember that they used to be you, and that you will be them. Besides, for you they’re parents, but for themselves they’re each—I. Don’t limit them to their parenthood.

Don’t condemn your parents to death before (you are) forty. And then—you won’t dare lift a hand!

2010

Translated by Sibelan Forrester