There is still another explanation of the methodology of Tsvetaeva's prose. Since the day that the narrative genre first came into being, every form of it—short story, tale, novel—has dreaded one thing: the charge of being unconvincing. Hence either a striving for realism, or structural mannerisms. In the final analysis, every writer strives for the same thing: to regain or hold back time past or current. Toward this end a poet has at his disposal caesura, unaccented feet, dactylic endings; a prose writer has nothing of the kind. Turning to prose, Tsvetaeva quite unconsciously transfers to it the dynamics of poetic language—essentially the dynamics of song—which is in itself a form of restructured time. (If only because a verse line is short; each word in it, frequently each syllable, is subjected to a double or triple semantic burden. A multiplicity of meanings presupposes a corresponding number of attempts to comprehend, that is, several takes; and what is a take if not a unit of time?) Tsvetaeva, however, is not particularly concerned about how convincing the language of her prose is: whatever the topic of her narrative, its technology remains the same. Furthermore, her narrative in a strict sense is plotless and is held together mainly by the energy of monologue. But all the same, unlike professional prose writers and other poets who have resorted to prose, she does not submit to the genre's aesthetic inertia: she imposes her own technology on it, she imposes herself. This is not a result of an obsession with her own self, the belief generally held; instead it comes from an obsession with intonation, which is far more important to her than either poem or story.
Verisimilitude in a narrative may be a result of complying with the genre's requirements; the same effect may also be ascribed to the timbre of the voice that does the narrating. In the latter case both the plausibility of the story line and the story line itself recede into the background of the listener's consciousness (i.e., into parentheses), as the author's dues paid to the proprieties of the genre. What stand outside the parentheses are the timbre of the voice and its intonation. To create this effect on the stage requires supplementary gestures; on paper—that is, in prose—it is achieved by the device of dramatic arrhythmia, which is most often brought about by interspersing nominative sentences among a mass of complex ones. In this alone one can see elements of borrowing from poetry. Yet Tsvetaeva, who doesn't have to borrow anything from anyone, starts with the utmost structural compactness of langiage and ends with it as well. The degree of linguistic expressiveness of her prose, given the minimal use of typographical means, is remarkable. Let us recall the author's stage direction describing Casanova in her play Casanova's End: "Not starlike—tsarlike" (Ne barstvenen—tsarstvenen). Let us now try to imagine what space this would have taken in Chekhov. At the same time, this is not a result of intentional economy—of paper, words, or effort—but a by-product of the poet's instinctive laconism.
Extending poetry into prose, Tsvetaeva does not obliterate the boundary existing between them in the popular consciousness; instead, she shifts it into hitherto syntactically inaccessible linguistic spheres—upward. And prose, where the danger of a stylistic dead end is much greater than in poetry, only benefits from this shift: there, in the rarefied air of her syntax, Tsvetaeva imparts to it an acceleration that leads to a change in the very notion of inertia. "Telegraphic style," "stream of consciousness," "the art of subtext," and so forth, bear no relation to the above. The works of her contemporaries, not to mention authors of subsequent decades whose production begs for such defini- lions, can be read seriously mainly for nostalgic reasons, or else for literary history (which is about the same) considerations. The literature created by Tsvetaeva is a literature of "supertext"; if her consciousness "streams," it follows a channel of ethics. The only way in which her style approaches the telegraphic is through her principal punctuation mark, the dash, identifying proximity of phenomena as well as leaps across the self-evident. That dash does serve one more purpose, though: it crosses out a great deal in Russian literature of the twentieth century.
2
"Marina often begins a poem on high C," Anna Akhmatova said. The same thing can be said, to a certain degree, about Tsvetaeva's intonation in prose as well. Such was the character of her voice that her speech almost always begins at the other end of the octave, in the highest register, at its uppermost limit, after which only descent or, at best, a plateau is conceivable. However, the timbre of her voice was so tragic that it ensured a sensation of rising no matter how long the sound lasted. This tragic quality was not exactly a product of her life experience; it existed prior to it. Her experience only coincided with it, responded to it, like an echo. This timbre is already clearly distinguishable in her Juvenilia (a collection of lyrics written between 1913 and 1915):
Lines of my poetry, so early written
That I knew not I was a poet yet . . .
This, already, is not so much an accounting as a discounting of oneself. Her life experience could do nothing but follow the voice, permanently lagging behind it, for the voice was overtaking events—after all, it had the speed of sound. On the whole, experience always lags behind anticipation.
Yet the issue here is not only that of experience lagging behind anticipation; it is a question of the differences between art and reality. One of them is that in art, owing to the properties of the material itself, it is possible to attain a degree of lyricism that has no physical equivalent in the real world. Nor, in the same way, does there exist in the real world an equivalent of the tragic in art, which (the tragic) is the reverse of lyricism—or the stage that follows it. No matter how dramatic a person's direct experience is, it is always exceeded by the experience of an instrument. Yet a poet is a combination of an instrument and a human being in one person, with the former graduaUy taking over the latter. The sensation of this takeover is responsible for timbre; the realization of it, for destiny.
Perhaps this may partly explain why a poet turns to prose, especially to autobiographical prose. In Tsvetaeva's case, it is certainly not an attempt to reset history—too late for that; it is, rather, a withdrawal from reality into prehistory, into childhood. However, this is not the "when-nothing-is- known-yet" childhood of a certified memoirist. It is the "when-everything-is-already-lmo^" but "nothing-has-be- gun-yet" childhood of the mature poet caught up in the middle of her life by a brutal era. Autobiographical prose— prose in general—in this case is just a breather. Like any respite, it is lyrical and temporary. (This sensation—of respite and its accompanying qualities—is quite evident in most of her essays on literature, along with the strong autobiographical element. Because of it, her essays prove to be "literature within literature" to a much greater extent than all modem "textual criticism of text.") In essence, all of Tsvetaeva's prose, except for her diary entries, is retrospective, for only after taking a glance backward is it possible to pause for breath.
The role of detail in this kind of prose thus becomes similar to the role of the very flow of the prose itself, slackened in comparison with poetic speech. This role is purely therapeutic; it is the role of a straw at which we all lrnow who clutches. The more detailed the description, the more obvious the need for the straw. In generaclass="underline" the more a work of this kind is constructed in the "Turgenev mode," the more avant-garde are the author's own "modifiers" of time, place, and manner. Even the punctuation takes on an added burden. Thus, a period that completes a narrative denotes its physical end, a boundary, a precipice plummeting into reality, into nonliterature. The unavoidability and proximity of this precipice, which are controlled by the narrative itself, make the author's striving for perfection within the allotted bounds ten times as great and, in part, even simplifies his task, forcing him to discard everything superfluous.