In the 1980s, I read everything I could get my hands on from world poetry. I read Tsvetajeva little and sporadically. I had several anthologies of Russian poetry and, of course, the booklet from Radov's edition "Word and Thought" - "October in the wagon".
It was only later, when I myself experienced the life of an emigrant, that the work of Marina Tsvetajeva opened up to me, I felt that behind her hermetic and melodic songs there was a great gift.
In May 1922, Andrej Beli published the article "Poet-singer" about the book of poems "Farewell": "If Blok is a rhythmist... if Khlebnjikov is the master of sound, then Marina Tsvetajeva is a composer and singer". That's really the point. He who has no hearing and does not feel music will never believe the lyrics of this poetess. With the fact that the melody in Russian is incomparably more beautiful than even the best translations.
Predoktobarska Evropa
Marina Tsvetayeva was born in Moscow in 1892. Her father was a university professor and her mother was a pianist. Her childhood was spent playing the piano. Unlike her sister, she was talented. According to the customs of the educated class of that time in imperial Russia, foreign languages - French and German - were introduced to her by her parents in the cradle. In the autobiographical prose "The Devil", Marina Tsvetajeva describes how her brother recites a German children's song: "Fox, you stole the goose/ now give it back to us". Tyrolean governesses used to scare little Marina with a devil that looks like a Great Dane. Marina describes her relationship to the German language, which will further strengthen when she stays at a boarding school in Freiburg.
One scene from childhood gives us the key to understanding the depth of attachment to that language. Mother and Marina's half-sister, Valerija, sing on the banks of the Oka, since the Tsvetajevi have a house near the town of Tarusa. They sing in German.
A four-year-old girl listens to that double voice. Much later, on June 19, 1935, in French exile, battered by life, the famous poetess wrote: "From those words: Feuer-Kohle-Heiss-hemlich (fire - coal - hot - secretly) a real fire flared up in my chest, like that I don't listen to those words but swallow, I swallow the red-hot embers with my throat".
Although she studied the history of literature at the Sorbonne and loved French poets, although she also spoke Italian, her intimate relationship with German culture will remain a constant.
In the First World War, he writes that he cannot stop loving his Germany (Germania – my madness! / Germania – My love!). Then the young poet boldly swims against the current, because wartime patriotism is at its peak, and the main enemy is Germany.
Much later, the Germanophile's emotional attachment would change after the entry of Hitler's army into Prague - in her beloved Czech Republic. Then Tsvetaeva wrote down the prophetic verses: "You will burn, Germania, doing crazy things!".
Revolution and exile
Tsvetajeva entered the world of literature as a high school student. In Moscow, he meets the poetic elite of his time. And in Crimea, on vacation, future husband Sergey Efron. She has two daughters with him, Ariadna and Irina. However, her erotic temperament did not know the conventions of marriage. She had stormy relationships with Osip Mendeljštam and also with the lesbian poet Sofija Parnok.
He corresponds with his contemporaries. And those letters are literature. In May 1925, he wrote to Boris Pasternak, the future literary Nobel laureate: "I don't need fidelity as self-mastery (me as a springboard, humiliating). Fidelity as the constancy of passion is incomprehensible to me, someone else's. (Faithfulness as unfaithfulness – puts everything in its place!)”.
However, it should be remembered that in a letter to her husband in the bloody year of 1917, when she did not know if he was alive, she wrote: "If God works a miracle and you survive, I will follow you like a dog". She really did, right up to the end.
And in a letter to the young critic Aleksandar Bahrah, he states: "Ah! I got it! Painful in love is personal, sweet belongs to everyone. Pain is called you. It's sweet - nameless (element of Eros). And that's why we can be 'good' with everyone, but we only want pain from one".
The world in which she was born and grew up experienced a breakdown with the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917. A civil war followed. Her husband is somewhere at the front with the White Guards, she is fighting for the bare lives of her two daughters in Moscow. Misery knocks on her door for the first time, but not the last. In 1919, she was forced to place both daughters in a shelter because she had nothing to feed them. When her older daughter falls ill, she tries to nurse her back home. She succeeds, but the other daughter dies in the shelter. All her life she transferred to herself that she chose the life of one daughter and - the death of another. There was no food for both. And Marina Tsvetajeva was also in a terrible state.
She finds out that her husband is alive. She manages to leave Moscow and meets her husband in Berlin. After eleven months, the family left for Prague. There are many Russians in both cities. Tsvetajeva publishes in emigrant publishing houses. In the summer of 1925, he wrote to Pasternak from Všenori near Prague: "I have no friends - they don't like poetry here, and outside - not poetry, but what it is made of - who am I? An inhospitable housewife, a young woman in old clothes". In February 1925, her son Georgij was born, her absolute favorite.
She knows very well that in the deep ideological division of Russians she is on the third side. What she said about one of her works probably applies to her entire creation: "No one will want it." To the right, it is to the left in form, to the left, it is to the right in content."
Marina and Rainer
From that decade, her correspondence with the then greatest living poet of the German language - Rilke - should be singled out. In August 1925, Marina Tsvetajeva wrote to him from France, where the family moved after the Czech Republic, to Switzerland: "If I tell you, Rainer, that I am your Russia, I am only telling you one more time that I love you."
Rainer Maria Rilke died in December 1926. Before that, he wrote "Elegy" dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva Efron.
"Those who love shouldn't, Marina, they shouldn't
So much to know about doom. They must be like new".
Then the poet describes the common, poetic destiny in verses: "This work is silent... it becomes holy and kills us".
Upon the news of Rilke's death, Tsvetaeva leaves one of the most beautiful epistolary poems in the Russian language, "New Years".
"What should I do in this year's dark night,
With that inner rhyme: Rainer died.”
In his Elegy, Rilke actually offered the key to understanding the poet's understanding of poetry. And Tsvetaeva clarified it in the essay "Epic and Lyric of Contemporary Russia (Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pasternak)".
Tsvetajeva says that only one of those two names would be enough "and yet all poetry will be contained in it, as in every great poet, because poetry is not divided into poets or poets, it is in all its appearances - one , one, in each is - all, just as, in essence, there are no (many) poets, but there is only one poet, one and the same from the beginning to the end of the world, a force that receives the color of certain times, tribes, countries, languages, faces, which it passes through what it, that force, and carries, like a river, along this or that bank, this or that sky, this or that bottom".
This mystical understanding of the unique global essence of poetry, which only has different physical and linguistic manifestations, is confirmed by the poetess in her poetry. In the poem "Poets" he asks the question "what should I do... with this immensity/ in the world of measures?" And a little further: "Poet - from afar the word leads". And then: "A poet - a word takes you far."
Cvetaje's poetry took her on an incredible, luxurious and tragic life adventure. But the price was high. In the second poem, he says: "Because if your voice, poet, was given, / The rest is taken away from you".
Marina and the Soviet Union
In a survey of a magazine from Prague, Tsvetaeva answered the question of what she thought of Soviet Russia and whether it was possible to return: "Fatherland is not the conditionality of territory, but the immutability of memory and blood." Only the one who thinks of Russia outside himself can not be in Russia, forget Russia. The one in which she is inside - that will only lose her together with life... For lyricists, epic writers and storytellers, who are far-sighted by the very nature of their creativity, it is better to see Russia from afar - all of it - from Prince Igor to Lenin - than boiling in the suspicious and boiling cauldron of the present". She noted that "one should admire the heroic capacity for life of the so-called Soviet writers, who write like grass grows under prison plates - regardless and in spite of it." And she said for herself: "I will return to Russia not as a 'relic of the past' but as a desired and awaited guest".
In 1928, she did not want to give up her affection for Mayakovsky, who was performing in Paris as a star of the Soviet poetic sky. Tsvetaeva dedicated the song much earlier - back then in Moscow - to Mayakovsky, "the archangel of heavy steps", as the third verse of that song reads. And in Paris, she even publicly answered the question of what she thought of Russia after Mayakovsky's performance. She said briefly: "If the strength is there". With that, she angered "her" White Guard audience. But it was Tsvetaeva. After Mayakovsky's suicide, she writes a poem in which the refrain is repeated: "Do we want Serjož?" - We want Volodya!" That's how Marina Tsvetaeva left a note about the suicide poets whom Russia loved - Sergei Yesenin and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Did she have an inkling that she would join them herself?
Her husband, Sergei Efron, is accused of being a Bolshevik because he is in the circle around the magazine Eurasia, which among "whites" advocates accepting the revolution for patriotic reasons - it separates Russia from the decadent West and ties it to the uncorrupted traditions of Asia. And that angered most supporters of the White Guards in emigration more than Bolshevism.
Back in the USSR
In the 1933s, her husband increasingly turned to the Soviet Union. There are indications that he worked as an agent of the Soviet People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD). She stands her ground. In a letter from XNUMX, he says that the emigrants hate the Bolsheviks because they took away their properties, and they hate them because they can forbid Pasternak from visiting Marburg or her from entering her native Moscow. Not even a word of praise for the petty-bourgeois nationalism of the emigration: "They don't love Russia, but Spahian geese and country beauties". In addition, she is categorical, in her humanist attitude, so she writes: "I will not submit to any kind of organized violence anywhere, no matter in whose name it is and no matter whose name it takes place...".
Nevertheless, the worm of emigrant longing works in her, which in the poetess is actually a longing for language. Her position in France is a dead end: "I am unnecessary here. I am impossible there".
This feeling is reinforced by the family's isolation and material poverty. Pasternak, who returned to Russia, came to the anti-fascist congress in Paris in 1935. He is shocked by the state in which he finds the Tsvetaje family. But he does not know whether to advise them to return. Tsvetaeva knows herself - she does not know how to court and how to cut her tongue. Her husband returns to the Soviet Union in 1937, the Russian émigrés have completely boycotted her since then. She is being questioned by the French police. It was recorded in the record that instead of answering, Tsvetajeva recited the verses of great French poets in French. On the train that will leave France for Russia on June 12, 1939, she writes to her best friend Anna Teskova in the Czech Republic that the happiest period of her life was the one in the Czech town of Vsenor. And he states: "Now it's no longer difficult - now it's destiny."
Moskovski horor
When Tsvetayeva set foot in Moscow, she found out that sister Asya had been in the camp for two years. Two months later, her daughter Ariadna Efron – Alja was arrested. She was 27 years old. She returned from the camp 15 years later, broken. A little later, Marina Tsvetaeva's husband, Sergey Efron, was arrested. She and her son were thrown out of the dacha where they lived.
Tsvetajeva wanted to restore "brotherhood" and closeness with the writers of her language. Some like Pasternak help her, but there are no socializing and long conversations about poetry. In June 1941, Pasternak introduced her to Anna Akhmatova, who has cult status in the country of the Soviet Union.
In 1916, Tsvetajeva dedicated a poem to this poet, which begins with the verse: "Oh, my wife cries, even more beautiful, but she loves everything". Five years later, he dedicates another one to her, in which he addresses himself as a "witch".
She wrote a letter to Anna Akhmatova on November 13, 11, after the false news that Akhmatova had committed suicide. In the letter, he says that the only poet who is really Akhmatova's friend is Mayakovsky, who believed the fake news and "wandered around the Poets' Cafe like a killed bull".
But now, several decades later, Tsvetajeva is disappointed with the poems that Akhmatova read. They did not understand each other or get closer.
Slippery loop
Tsvetaeva and her son live a difficult life, fighting in the tenement rooms in Moscow. In one letter, he says that there are three home libraries in the Rumyantsev Museum alone - his maternal grandfather, Alexander Danilovich Main, his mother, Maria Aleksandovna Tsvetayeva, and his father, Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetayev, who founded the Museum of Fine Arts, today the Pushkin Museum. "We gave Moscow - a gift. And she drives me out - drives me out".
In April 1941, she found out that her daughter was alive, but she knew nothing about her husband for a long time. Stalin's state knows, but will not say. Sergei Efron was accused of being a spy. He was shot in October 1941.
During the war, Tsvetaeva was evacuated from Moscow, but not with the other writers to Čistopolj, but to the small town of Jelabuga, where she knew no one. Her sixteen-year-old son blamed her for bringing him there. She begged to be transferred to Čistopolj. The writers stood up for her. The committee sat and still gave in.
Writers met her in Čistopolje and asked her to read something. She started reading Longing for the Motherland. She hung up and said she would be back that evening. She went to Jelabuga and never came back.
The housemates and the son were not in the accommodation. When they returned, they found her hanged. She had a message in her pocket: "Please accept me to work as a dishwasher in the open canteen of the Literary Fund". And two more messages in which she begs her son and friends to forgive her. It was August 31, 1941.
Her son died as a Red Army soldier in the summer of 1944, somewhere in Estonia. He left behind a diary, which is an important testimony of the last years of the family, as well as a literary document. Georgij inherited his mother's gift.
Pasternak said: "In despair, she hid in the greatest haste to die, putting her head in a slippery noose like under a pillow." And Ilja Erenburg noted that there are many tragic characters among poets, but that "there is no more tragic character than Marina Cvetajeva". Josif Brodski noted: "The tragedy of that voice did not come from biography: that voice existed before." The biography only coincided with him, as if it responded...".
Marina Cvetajeva wanted to be buried at the Tarus cemetery, called "where the reddest and largest strawberries grow in our region". And her grave is not known in Jelabuga, Tatar. Today's monument at the cemetery is no more than a spatial landmark.
But the monument of words she left behind, that mausoleum, in the eyes of the world community of poets and poetry readers, today, exactly 83 years after that fateful August day, remains a magnificent gift of the Russian language to the world. Tsvetajeva knew this from the very beginning. In May 1913, at the age of twenty-one, she wrote a poem that ends like this: "My verses, like expensive wines, will meet their hour".
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