September 01, 2007

The Poet of Passions

Few Russians knew the name Marina Tsvetaeva in 1961, when a small, grayish-blue book of her poems first appeared in Soviet bookshops. This is understandable: it had been over 40 years since Tsvetaeva’s early collection of poems – Mileposts – was published, just before her emigration from Russia. Yet the success of the 1961 collection paled in comparison with what occurred four years later. In 1965, when a weighty volume appeared in the Poet’s Library series, it sold out instantly. Inveterate bibliophiles were the only ones who could find the book, and then only on the black market. From that day forward, every edition of Tsvetaeva’s work, be it prose or poetry, initiated a ravenous hunt among readers. Still, Tsvetaeva’s works did not become readily available until the era of perestroika.

Despite staunch opposition from the Powers That Be, public readings of her work began as early as the 1970s, yet it was quite difficult to get into these events. I heard incredible tales from performers of Tsvetaeva’s poetry, how, among other things, they received thank you notes and touching, oftentimes expensive gifts. I experienced a similar phenomenon when I began lecturing on Tsvetaeva. The Tsvetaeva “boom” lasted a long time, and only began to wane during the perestroika period. Yet the steadfast army of enthusiasts – those who have taken this poetry into their hearts – remains to this day, both in Russia and abroad.

Nonetheless, good translations of Tsvetaeva’s poetry are difficult to come by. Why is that? And these enthusiasts – their eyes burning – who attend my lectures, where do they come from? As a Danish Prince once asked: “What’s Hecuba to them or they to Hecuba?” I lack a thorough answer.

One of the simplest explanations is a fascination for the strong and passionate personality that emerges from Tsvetaeva’s poetry. From first line to last, tension and energy permeate her lyric voice; she responds to the outside world, to humanity, to events that take place near and far, and inside herself. Her poetry is devoid of detached meditative observation, half-baked emotions or incomprehensible states of mind. For the true essence of Tsvetaeva is found where emotions are strained to the breaking point, where feelings are laid bare to the core, where one can hear great pain and exultant pleasure, final desperation and heaven-bound ecstasy, unbearable pangs of envy or excessive unruly arrogance.

It suddenly became clear that contemporary souls (oh, not every one!), share with those of antiquity an attraction to (and a need for) Great Passions – feelings that stun, elevate and purge the soul. Passions even drive the person we see watching space ships docking on TV while chewing on a steak. Age-old dilemmas and conflicts between Humans and Fate, Duty and Passion, Body and Soul affect modern hearts as strongly as they did the ancient ones. Tsvetaeva seemed to be a contemporary Phaedra and Penfesilea, Medea and Ariadna, speaking of herself and her readers with energetic and vibrant verse. Hers is the poetry of a heart laid bare, of striking passion, a voice of reckless truth resounding in a century of reason and ‘technological revolution.’

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892. Her father was a Moscow University professor who was a gentle-mannered philologist with irrepressible energy. The son of a country priest, Ivan Tsvetaev was responsible for the creation of Moscow’s new Museum of Fine Arts (today known as the Pushkin Museum). His mark on Russian culture thus rivaled his daughter’s artistic feats: father and daughter were equally talented, and both lived their lives within a matrix of passion.

Tsvetaeva’s mother also had many gifts – in music, art and poetry. But in her mother’s eyes, the pudgy, rosy-cheeked Marina was a stubborn, self-willed contrarian. “Other children act like children, but this one… she’s more stubborn than ten donkeys!” her mother lamented after Marina, to the question of which part of a concert she had liked best, replied “Onegin and Tatyana.” “What, not the mermaid?” “No, Onegin and Tatyana.” But how could she answer differently, if she was most taken by the scene of unrequited love between Pushkin’s protagonists? Should she lie? She never acquired that habit, not even in later life.

As a child, Tsvetaeva displayed stunning self-awareness of what she could and could not change: “This is mine, and that is someone else’s. I don’t need anybody else’s, but don’t take mine away from me or I’ll explode.” This had nothing to do with stubbornness. Instead, it was a kind of boundless power, to which resistance was futile and acceptance sweet. At times, this power so suppressed and paralyzed her that she would literally fall into a stupor (a stupor she mentioned countless times in her prose and correspondence).

It is unlikely that Tsvetaeva’s childhood scribbles on her mother’s musical notation paper reflected sincere aspirations of becoming a poet; she was simply inching her way toward a vague, distant light, doing what she could not help but do. Poetic diction bewitched her from an early age, and she felt the need to transcribe the magical language that burned “in the pit of her breast.” The struggle of transcribing, pen in hand, was not designed to “create,” but rather, to indulge in the sweet tortuous moment of writing something down as it unfolds, after which the burden on her soul was eased.

What became of this shy, rosy-cheeked girl who used musical notation paper to her own ends is now clear. Readers are familiar with her brilliant poetry and prose – both of which are unlike anyone else’s – and her life, lived with integrity, down to her very last day. Her poetry had different styles; her heroines frequently altered their appearance. But one aspect of her poetry remained constant: a passionate, indomitable striving toward the absolute. Tsvetaeva’s core reveals an impulse to run away from dull, earthly, daily living… Where to? Toward the place where one could escape from the most severe prison, to “where only the soul is important”:

Где ни рабств, ни уродств,

Там, где все во весь рост,

Там, где правда видней,

По ту сторону дней...

Where there is neither slavery nor deformity,

Where one can stand tall,

Where truth is clearly visible,

There, on the other side of the day...

This is not a self-created dreamscape, but a free spirit’s quest for freedom, ever defying the earthly laws of gravity, and soaring toward her own truth.

Tsvetaeva spent her youth in relative wealth, with governesses, nannies, and trips to a dacha in the most beautiful region outside Moscow. She published her first book of poems while still in gymnasium. Valery Bryusov, a leading 20th century poet and theorist, acknowledged Tsvetaeva’s talent as a budding poet; Nikolai Gumilyov, another poet, stressed that her poems “instinctively captured the most important laws of poetry.”

Tsvetaeva continued to write, but published little. In her youth, and in fact throughout her life, she categorically refused to belong to a specific ‘school’ of poetry. All of her literary encounters were exclusively personal. She revered the older generation of poets that included Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, Konstantin Balmont, and Vyacheslav Ivanov. Yet, this did not prevent her from praising Akhmatova and Mandelshtam’s “acmeist” verse, or Mayakovsky’s futurist poetry. Her closest friend and confidante at the time was the artist, philosopher and poet Maximilian Voloshin (see Russian Life, May/June 2007). Later, Boris Pasternak replaced him as her most intimate contact in the realm of Russian poetry. By the time she finished high school, she had a firm grasp of German and French poetry. And her love of poetry was absolute – regardless of what school a particular poet belonged to.

One year out of gymnasium, Tsvetaeva married Sergei Efron, who came from a family of revolutionaries, which significantly impacted his later life. Gentle and cheerful by nature, he ceded family leadership to Tsvetaeva.

Only the first three years of their marriage could be called happy. Years later, Tsvetaeva admitted to herself that she was to blame. Meeting such an incredible man (she wrote in her diary) should have evolved into a deep friendship, but instead resulted in a “premature” marriage “with someone too young.” Marina lived her entire life with a hungry longing for an “equal” partner. However, even during the most difficult of times, the couple remained devoted to one another. This is significant, for Fate decreed that the most tragic turns in Tsvetaeva’s life were set in motion by her husband.

Tsvetaeva considered the Bolshevik coup of 1917 to be a catastrophe for Russian culture. Efron took part in the short but bloody battles against the Bolsheviks in Moscow, and then traveled to the South, where the volunteer White Army was mustering. The Civil War divided northern Russia from the South, and Tsvetaeva only rarely received news of her husband.

She remained in Moscow with their two daughters – five-year-old Ariadna and Irina, still an infant. Times were horrific. Destitute and entirely impractical in domestic matters, Tsvetaeva began clumsily selling off their belongings to feed her children. During the winter months, when frost coated the inner walls of their apartment, Tsvetaeva chopped wood in the attic in order to fuel the furnace. At the end of 1919, government subsidies for children stopped. And in 1920, the most terrible thing occurred: her daughter Irina died of starvation.

Amazingly, amidst these conditions of daily struggle for survival, Tsvetaeva’s poetic energy increased. She not only continued to write poetry, but also created plays, narrative poems and prose.

When General Vrangel’s army suffered defeat in the Crimea in November 1920, Tsvetaeva was certain her husband had died, and she was on the verge of suicide – that is how she understood her duty toward matrimony. Yet she was saved by news that Sergei had survived the last Crimean battle and had managed to sail on a ship bound for Turkish soil…

These terrible months brought about a change in Tsvetaeva’s poetic voice. Cheerful, mischievous, wild notes from her early verse disappeared forever. Even the mood and appearance of her favorite heroines changed: tragic heroines from ancient mythology replaced Mariula, the reckless gypsy woman, and the capricious Carmen. These changes signified a radical shift in the poet’s world view, the appearance of an entirely different scope in her evaluation of her surroundings. The intonation of her poetry lost its light, melodic, graceful tone to one hoarse and broken with pain – it is the voice of someone who had spent time in Hades. This stylistic shift marks the beginning of Tsvetaeva’s mature period.

In the spring of 1922, Tsvetaeva and her daughter Ariadna left Russia to be reunited with Efron.

The powerful waves of revolution and civil war displaced hundreds of thousands of Russians abroad. These émigrés belonged to different social classes and included countless famous writers, philosophers, artists, and musicians. For decades, many émigrés lived each day in anticipation of the Bolsheviks’ downfall, all but perched on their suitcases. Yet very few were fated to ever see their homeland again.

Tsvetaeva’s life in emigration lasted 17 years: after leaving Russia at the age of 29, she spent her first months in Berlin, just over three years in Czechoslovakia, and 13 years in France. Émigré existence turned out to be an arduous time; she felt like a stranger among aborigines, and mere survival demanded one’s constant energy. Initially, Tsvetaeva received recognition abroad, and five books of her poems were published by Berlin émigré presses: Parting, Poems to Blok, Psyche, Craft, King-Maiden. Her poems also appeared regularly in prestigious Russian periodicals, including Sovremennye zapiski (Modern Writings, Paris) and Volya Rossii (The Will of Russia, Prague).

By 1923, her poetry was in great demand from newspapers in Berlin, Prague, Paris, Warsaw, Riga and even Gallipoli. Such popularity can be explained by the fact that, in the first months after her emigration, Tsvetaeva published poems dedicated to the heroism of the White Army. Former “volunteers” in the furthest corners of the Russian diaspora could recite her poems by heart. However, Tsvetaeva’s honorariums and her husband’s earnings provided a sporadic income at best, and relegated the family to a life of poverty, where covering rent and her children’s basic needs was a constant struggle.

Yet economic turmoil did not slow Tsvetaeva’s poetic impulse: only dire circumstances caused her to take two or three weeks off from her writing. Such periods without writing caused Tsvetaeva extreme distress, as her bleak, brutally sad letters attested. However, the very next day she would write an ecstatic letter, in which the world was filled with exuberant colors. This could only signify one thing: that she was back at work! With poetry circulating in her veins, life could resume. Tsvetaeva wrote the superb lyrical collection After Russia during the three years spent in Czechoslovakia, and added new plays and narrative poems to her repertoire…

During this period, Tsvetaeva entered a period of emotional turmoil, as she had fallen in love with her husband’s friend, Konstantin Rodzevich. Their love was mutual, but the happiness was short-lived: Tsvetaeva refused to sever her family bonds. The lovers’ break-up gave birth to two brilliant poems, “Poem of the End” and “Poem of the Mountain,” arguably some of the best twentieth century love lyrics.

After giving birth to a son in February 1925, life in a small Czech village – Efron was just a student in Prague, so the family could not afford to live in the capital – became too taxing for the family, and they began contemplating a move. This coincided with the migration of Russians from Czechoslovakia to France. At the end of 1925, Tsvetaeva left for Paris.

Hopes for a more prosperous life in Paris were quickly shattered. Tsvetaeva found herself unable to forge “necessary contacts” in the émigré community. Her utterly uncompromising nature and her constant quest for freedom led to conflict. Ivan Bunin and Zinaida Gippius, Paris’ most famous Russian writers, never forgave her for daring to argue with them as equals.

Once in France, Tsvetaeva and her family found themselves living in the suburbs again; as they moved from Bellevue to Medon to Clamart to Vanves, economic hardships persisted. The late 1920s, a time of depression, ushered in a particularly difficult time for the émigré community: foreigners were of course the first to lose their jobs. Desperate pleas for help and suicide announcements began to sprinkle Russian newspapers. Efron’s efforts to earn a decent living were ultimately fruitless; his career roster included work as a journalist, a private tutor, an extra on film sets, a petty clerk.

One day, Tsvetaeva came home and opened the door of her apartment to be greeted by three men she thought looked like undertakers. They were policemen, sent to confiscate her personal property for neglecting to pay taxes. However, what they saw in Tsvetaeva’s apartment left the officers stunned: a bare apartment with boxes standing in for table, chairs and shelves. The imminent threat of expulsion from France was averted only by an unexpected honorarium that arrived in the mail from some publisher.

As previously, trying circumstances only seemed to fuel Tsvetaeva’s poetic talent. Her poetry in the 1920s and 1930s donned a tragic tone. It is the voice of a person suffocating in contemporary civilization; in her mind, people had morphed into “alcoholics of distance,” (alkogolikov verst) “capturers of minutes,” and “swallowers of empty spaces.” “Life is a space where one cannot live,” she wrote in “Poem of the Mountain.” In one of her letters, she exclaimed: “Our century would trade in ten Pushkins for a car.”

Her poems do not completely abandon the tone of her early years: of an emotional diary. Yet her later verse does become more philosophically charged: her current emotional state now contemplated the “essence of the universe.” Heated raw emotions from her youth are now supplemented by equally heated meditations on the “essence of things.” Her poetry plunges the reader into a thunderous atmosphere of terror and doubt, hovering between life and death. “What am I to do … with the immeasurable in a world of measure?”... “Vanity! It lies within me, immense and boundless!” The incandescence of these lines is quintessentially Tsvetaeva. And, in a calmer tone, she writes:

А может лучшая победа

Над временем и тяготеньем

Пройти, чтоб не оставить следа?..

Распасться, не оставив праха

На урну?

Perhaps the best victory

Over time and its gravitational pull

Is to walk past, in order to not leave footprints?..

To crucify oneself, without leaving any ash

For the urn?

And yet, Tsvetaeva’s poetry eschews the label of pessimism: even her darkest poems overflow with vitality and energy. This quality alone distinguishes her from most other émigré poets.

In the 1930s, Tsvetaeva turned to prose. But not fiction. Tsvetaeva created a prose style all her own that blended elements of the memoir, autobiography and the essay. The subjects she chose helped her make sense of her times, but also of her earthly existence. She dedicates her best literary portraits to her Russian contemporaries: the poets Bryusov, Mandelshtam, Voloshin, Bely, and Kuzmin, and to the painter Goncharova. The actress Sofia Goliday would later become the heroine of the delightful “Story of Sonechka.”

Despite all of the difficulties, the years of emigration turned out to be the time for the blossoming of Tsvetaeva’s multifaceted talent. The tragedy, however, is that her 17-year-long émigré creative output only amounted to two books: The Swain (1924), a narrative poem, and After Russia (1928), a book of poems written during her Czech years. Mark Slonim, Tsvetaeva’s close friend and critic, offered the following explanation in his memoirs: “In émigré Paris, Tsvetaeva obviously could not fit in at ‘court.’ Newspapers and journals tolerated her, in the best of times, but she often found the idea of collaborating with others offensive. She could never occupy a place in émigré ‘society’ salons, political and literary circles where everyone knew each other… She remained forever the wild outsider, divorced from the group, and distinguished herself by her appearance, speech, outfits and mark of poverty…”

And yet, Tsvetaeva’s authority continued to grow, year after year. Her talent was obvious to all. Ten years after leaving Russia, she secretly became the greatest poet in emigration.

Yet a problem that Tsvetaeva shared with other exiled writers was the tragic shortage of readers. Nothing written outside of Russia after the 1920s made it back into the country. To make things worse, young readers in emigration preferred to read literature in European languages. Émigré press held forums to debate whether Russian literature could truly develop “on foreign ground,” and the pessimists inevitably held sway in answering “No.”

It is only in our day that critics have begun to acknowledge the sea of literary treasures left behind by Russian émigrés in the 1920s and 1930s: Tsvetaeva, Khodasevich, Bunin, Nabokov, Ivanov, Aldanov and Gazdanov... philosophical texts by Berdyayev, Shestov, Fedotov, Ilyin... music by Stravinsky... ballets by Nijinsky and Lifar... paintings by Serebryakov and Goncharov... and many, many others.

Tension in Tsvetaeva’s domestic sphere escalated in the 1930s. By the end of the 1920s, Efron had become actively involved in the “Eurasian Movement,” which engulfed a broad spectrum of Russian emigration. For several years he devoted – in his typically impassioned way – his efforts to the Eurasian Club in Paris, joining the editorial board of their newspaper, Eurasia. With greater impatience, he sought out ways to return to Russia, the pain of nostalgia eclipsing his more sober political judgments. In June 1931, he asked Soviet authorities in Paris for a passport to return home.

Tsvetaeva would not hear of a return. She was not seduced by Soviet propaganda and believed all the bad news that reached her from Russia. In response to a journalistic questionnaire, she wrote, “The best place for a writer is where he can write (breathe) in peace.” And, in 1935, she repeated, more forcefully still, “At this time, my homeland is more dangerous than being abroad, just as certain death is more dangerous than a freak accident.” A feeling of foreboding prevented her from the agreement which her husband eagerly awaited. It was a foreboding of happiness for her entire family. Alas! The foreboding was fated to be cast aside.

Efron received an ultimatum: in order to return, he had to renounce his White Army past. And he also had to accept the offer to become an agent of Soviet espionage abroad. Initially, his job was restricted to cultural policy work in émigré communities. In the Parisian Union for a Return to the Homeland, Sergei enthusiastically organized Soviet movie nights, ran a library and literary circles, and organized émigré art exhibits. However, once the Spanish Civil War broke out, he began to help form international brigades to fight alongside the republican army. Later, he was asked to spy on Leo Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov.

With some certainty it can be said that, knowing well his wife’s uncompromising attitude toward the Chekists, Efron did not offer her any details of his activities. What is more, he spent months at a time away from home; by this time, the family unit had virtually collapsed.

In the fall of 1937, a political murder in Switzerland was traced back to the NKVD. The investigation brought the police to the doors of the Union for a Return, and its members began to be interrogated. At the end of October, the police knocked on the door of 65 Jean-Baptiste Potain Street, Tsvetaeva’s home. But her husband was nowhere to be found; he had secretly left Paris 10 days earlier, on orders from above. Tsvetaeva was twice interrogated at a Parisian police station, where she categorically refused to admit to the possibility that her husband had any part in the killing. Her words from the interrogation are now famous: “His word might no longer be trusted, but my belief in him remains unfailing.”

Few in the émigré community believed Tsvetaeva. Which should not be surprising, given that there was ample reason to mistrust Efron’s intentions. Yet today we know with certainty, thanks to the memoirs of Pavel Sudoplatov – former head of the 4th division of the NKVD – that Efron was not in Switzerland at the time of the killing. Sudoplatov’s memoir, published in the 1990s, revealed the killers’ names (Pravdin and Afanasief) and wrote the following about Efron: “he certainly did work for the NKVD in Paris, but he knew nothing about this business [the murder]…” Nevertheless, for nearly half a century, Efron was widely thought to be a participant in this NKVD “wet operation.”

From the moment her husband left France, Tsvetaeva was no longer in control of her own fate. Parisian NKVD agents “watched over her” and left her little room to exercise any semblance of free will. On June 12, 1939, in the French port of Le Havre, Tsvetaeva and her son boarded the ship Maria Ulyanova to return to Russia. “Oh, God, oh God, what am I doing?!” This cry, full of hopelessness, appeared in one of Tsvetaeva’s letters written immediately before her departure. They arrived in Leningrad on June 18, left for Moscow the same day, and then set out for Bolshevo, where Efron was living. Russia’s literary community was entirely ignorant of Tsvetaeva’s return.

After 17 years separated from her homeland, Tsvetaeva returned to a surreal world. Russia was overcome with paralysis, frozen in fear; the scope of Stalin’s repressive regime was incredible. Most horrific of all was that there was no rhyme or reason to the timing and cause of arrests. Soon after she arrived, Tsvetaeva learned that her sister and cousin had been arrested, as had Mandelstam, Pilnyak, Babel, and Svyatopolk-Mirsky. In her notebook that summer she wrote, “Terror! In and about everything.”

Less than three months later, her daughter Ariadna was arrested. A month and a half after that, Efron was hauled off to the NKVD. Efron and Ariadna were presented with ridiculous charges of working as foreign government spies and collaborating with Trotskyites – standard accusations at that time. Interrogations, torture and confrontations dragged on for months. While doing research in KGB archives, I read that, during Efron’s interrogations, he exhibited extreme courage. Refuting absurd accusations, he constantly repeated words of devotion to the interests of his homeland. He was executed in October 1941. Ariadna was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp.

Tsvetaeva wrote letters to Stalin and Beria, brought parcels to the prison, and, with Pasternak’s help, managed to earn money translating poetry. She lived in constant fear for herself and her son, since families of those arrested were usually sent to distant labor camps.

World War II broke out in the summer of 1941, and Tsvetaeva was evacuated to the Tatar city of Yelabuga, where she lived just 12 days before committing suicide. In her suicide note she granted custody of her son to the poet Aseyev, who lived in the neighboring town of Chistopol, and wrote of the dead end from which she saw no escape.

It is completely possible that the NKVD in Yelabuga would not leave Tsvetaeva in peace. I traveled to Yelabuga several times while working on Tsvetaeva’s biography and confirmed this version of events, which were first advanced by Kirill Khenkin, a former NKVD official, in his memoir published in the 1980s, The Upside Down Hunter. I am convinced of the truth behind his hypothesis.

One of the brightest stars on the horizon of twentieth century Russian culture, Marina Tsvetaeva’s name transcends literary fame alone. She was a unique personality, whose words embodied the rare richness of her soul, the immortality of her mind, and her uncompromising conscience. She fused the gift of poetry and passionate human essence into a tight union that infects a current of tension into every line of her poetry. RL

September 01, 2007

The Poet of Passions

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