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Escape From Earth: A Study of Tsvetaeva’s Elsewheres

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Ieva Vitins
Ieva Vitins*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia
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Extract

In Tsvetaeva’s work, earth is essentially a place of exile where her persona stands “with only one foot.” From its confines she time and again seeks to return to her original home in the sky by escaping into the worlds of dreams, poetry, and, for a while, an impassioned correspondence. Perhaps nowhere is Tsvetaeva’s otherworldly orientation more strongly evident than in the imagery of her numerous flights, evocations of azure skies, and artistic simulations of the air and space of dreams. These pervade the poemy written at the time of the civil war and the correspondence-related works of the mid-twenties. In the late twenties and thirties, by contrast, there is a conscious turning away from aerial imagery to the immediate world, and finally at turning away from poetry itself to death.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , December 1977 , pp. 644 - 657
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1977

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References

1. Pasternak, Boris, “Avtobiograficheskii ocherk,” Prosa 1915-1958 (Ann Arbor, 1967), p. 46.Google Scholar

2. Bakhrakh, Aleksandr, “Pis'ma Mariny Tsvetaevoi,” Mosty (Munich), 1961, no. 5, p. 311.Google Scholar

3. For Tsvetaeva's account of her “relationship” to the sea, see Tsvetaeva, M., Mot Pushkin (Moscow, 1967)Google Scholar; her essay “Natal'ia Goncharova” in Volia Rossii, no. 5-6 (1929); and her pocma, S moria, in Tsvetaeva, Marina, Nesobrannye proizvedeniia, ed. Wytrzens, Gunther (Munich, 1971)Google Scholar (hereafter cited as NP). An extensive discussion of the sea in Tsvetaeva's work is to be found in leva Vitins, “Escape from Earth: A Study of the Four Elements and Their Associations in Marina Cvetaeva's Work” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1974), the chapter entitled “Water. “

4. Bachelard, Gaston, in L'Air et les Songes: Essai sur ('imagination du mouvement (Paris, 1943), p. 12 Google Scholar, writes: “dans le règne de l'imagination, l'infini est la region ou l'imagination s'affirme comme l'imagination pure… .” Above all, the imagination denotes for him “une type de mobilite spirituellè…. Un vrai poète … veut que l'imagination soit un voyage “ (P. 8).

5. Tsvetaeva, NP, pp. 470-71.

6. Tsvetaeva, NP, p. 471.

7. Tsvetaeva, Marina, Izbrannye proizvedeniia (Moscow, 196S), pp. 231-32Google Scholar (hereafter cited as IP).

8. Tsvetaeva, NP, p. 209.

9. Tsvetaeva, IP, p. 132.

10. Tsvetaeva, NP, p. 140.

11. In her reminiscences, Ariadna Efron suggests that this “Genius” was inspired by Blok, whom Tsvetaeva idolized all her life, but whom she never got to know in person. He was the inhabitant “tekh ee vershin, kotorye Tsvetaeva schitala dlia sebia nedosiagaemymi “ ( Efron, Ariadna, “Stranitsy vospominanii,” Zvezda, 3 [1973]: 177 Google Scholar). The dominant images of fire, snowstorms, and winds in the work tend to support this view.

12. Tsvetaeva, IP, pp. 441-42.

13. Tsvetaeva's familiarity with Nietzsche's work is reflected in her essay “Iskusstvo pri svete sovesti” and in correspondence. For a discussion of the essay, see Livingston's, Angela article, “Tsvetaeva's ‘Art in the Light of Conscience, '” in Russian Literature Triquarterly, no. 11 (1975), pp. 363–78.Google Scholar

14. Tsvetaeva, Marina, Mólodets (Letchworth, Eng., 1971), p. 105 Google Scholar. ProfessorKarlinsky, Simon, in his study, Marina Cvetaeva: Her Life and Art (Berkeley, 1966), p. 228 Google Scholar, perceptively links the image of physical ascension and apotheosis experienced in these folklore- inspired poemy with similar images in later poemy, finding that they demonstrate “the close connection in the poet's mind between the notions of artistic creativity and total union or fusion with another being, or, possibly, with the universe…. “

15. Tsvetaeva, IP, p. 453.

16. Tsvetaeva, Marina, Posle Rossii (Paris, 1928), p. 125.Google Scholar

17. Tsvetaeva, “Natal'ia Goncharova,” p. 42.

18. Tsvetaeva, Marina, Ncisdannye pis'ma (Paris, 1972), p. 271.Google Scholar

19. Ivask, Iurii, “Pis'ma M. I. Tsvetaevoi Iu. Ivasku (1933-1937),” Russkii Literaturnyi Arkhiv (1956), p. 230.Google Scholar

20. Bakhrakh, “Pis'ma Mariny Tsvetaevoi,” p. 328.

21. Tsvetaeva herself recognizes this fact in a letter to Pasternak: “la by ne mogla s toboi zhit’ ne iz-za neponimaniia, a iz-za ponimaniia… . la tebia ponimaiu izdaleka, no esli ia uvizhu to, chem ty prel'shchaesh'sia, ia zal'ius1 prezren'em, kak solovei pesnei. Ia vzlikuiu ot nego. Ia izlechus’ ot tebia mgnovenno. Kak izlechilas1 by ot Gete i ot Geine, vzglianuv na nikh …” (Tsvetaeva, Neizdannye pis'ma, pp. 310-11).

22. Tsvetaeva, IP, p. 753.

23. Tsvetaeva, Posle Rossii, p. 74.

24. Tsvetaeva, NP, p. 537.

25. A discussion of Tsvetaeva's friendship with Pasternak is to be found in Taubman's, Jane A. “Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak: Toward the History of a Friendship “ in Russian Literature Triquarterly, no. 1/2 (1972), pp. 303–21Google Scholar; and Raevsky-Hughes's, Olga “Boris Pasternak: Marina Tsvetaeva (K istorii druzhby),” Vestnik russkogo khristicmskogo dvizheniia, no. 100 (1971), pp. 281–305 Google Scholar. The initial versions of Tsvetaeva's letters to the poet were subsequently published in Tsvetaeva, Ncisdannye pis'ma.

26. Tsvetaeva reiterates that it is impossible to fashion a real room which approximates the space of a dream room in a letter to Anatolii Shteiger in 1936 (see Marina Tsvetaeva, “Pis'ma Anatoliiu Shteigeru,” in Opyty, 5 [19SS]: 61).

27. For an account of Tsvetaeva's quandary over Popytka komnaty and a more complete discussion of the work, see pp. 136-52 of Vitins, “Escape from Earth.” Water imagery, particularly inundations, frequently accompany the onset of sleep or departures in Tsvetaeva's verse (as they do in Mayakovsky's “Pro eto” and Mandelstam's “Bessonitsa “). Bachelard discusses this phenomenon in L'Air et les Songes, p. 33.

28. See Tsvetaeva, Neizdannye pis'ma, pp. 319 and 325.

29. Tsvetaeva, NP, p. 484.

30. Ibid., p. 318.

31. Ibid., p. 485

32. Ibid., p. 556.

33. Tsvetaeva, IP, p. 200.

34. Tsvetaeva, NP, p. 562.

35. Tsvetaeva, IP, p. 293.

36. Ibid., pp. 556-57.

37. Ibid., p. 297.

38. Ibid., pp. 297-98.

39. Tsvetaeva, Neizdannye pis'ma, p. 611.

40. Mastera russkogo stikhoivornogo perevoda, vol. 2, Biblioteka poeta, Bol'shaia seriia (Leningrad, 1968), p. 258.