The discarding of the superfluous is in itself the first cry of poetry—the beginning of the predominance of sound over reality, of essence over existence: the source of tragic consciousness. Along this path Tsvetaeva went farther than anyone in Russian and, it would seem, world literature. In Russian literature, at least, she has occupied a place extremely apart from all—including the most remarkable— of her contemporaries, fenced off from them by a wall built of discarded excess. The only one who proves to be near her—and precisely as a prose writer—is Osip Mandelstam. The parallel relationship between Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam as prose writers is indeed remarkable. Mandelstam's The Noise of Time and The Egyptian Stamp can be put on a par with Tsvetaeva's Autobiographical Prose; his essays in On Poetry and "A Conversation about Dante" with her literary essays; and Mandelstam's Journey to Armenia and "Fourth Prose" with Tsvetaeva's Pages from a Diary. The stylistic similarity—plotlessness, retrospectivity, linguistic and metaphorical density—is clearly even greater than the similarity of genre and theme, although Mandelstam is somewhat more traditional.
It would be a mistake, however, to try to explain this closeness of style and genre by the similarity of the two authors' biographies or by the general climate of the era. Biographies are never known in advance, just as "climate" and "era" are strictly transitory notions. The basic element of similarity between the prose works of Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam is their purely linguistic oversaturation perceived as emotional oversaturation and quite often reflecting it. In the "thiclrness" of writing, density of images, sentence dynamics, they are so close that it is possible to suspect if not blood ties then cliquishness, adherence to the same ism. But while Mandelstam was in fact an Ac- meist, Tsvetaeva never belonged to any group, and even the bravest of her critics never ventured so far as to attach a label to her. The key to the similarity between Tsvetaeva and Mandelstam in prose lies in the same place as the reason for their difference as poets: in their relation to language, or more precisely, in the degree of their dependence on the same.
Poetry is not "the best words in the best order"; for language it is the highest form of existence. In purely technical terms, of course, poetry amounts to arranging words with the greatest specific gravity in the most effective and externally inevitable sequence. Ideally, however, it is language negating its own mass and the laws of gravity; it is language's striving upward—or sideways—to that beginning where the Word was. In any case, it is movement of language into pre- (supra-) genre realms, that is, into the spheres from which it sprang. The seemingly most artificial forms for organizing poetic language—terza rima, sestinas, decimas, and so forth—are in fact nothing more than a natural, reiterative, fully detailed elaboration of the echo that followed the original Word. Consequently, Mandelstam, outwardly a more formal poet than Tsvetaeva, needed prose that spared him from echo, from the power of repeated sound, not a whit less than she did, with her ex- trastanzaic—on the whole, extraverse—thinking, and with her principal strength lying in the subordinate clause, in word-root dialectics.
Any uttered word requires some sort of continuation. It can be continued in various ways: logically, phonetically, grammatically, in rhyme. This is the way a language develops, and if not logic, then phonetics indicates that language needs development. For what has been uttered is never the end but the edge of speech, which—owing to the existence of time—is always followed by something. And what follows is always more interesting than what has already been said—and no longer on account of time but, rather, in spite of it. Such is tie logic of speech, and such is the basis of Tsvetacva's poetics. She never has enough space: either in a poem or in prose. Even her most scholarly- sounding essays are always like elbows protruding from a small room. A poem is constructed on the principle of the complex sentence; prose consists of grammatical enjamb- ments: that is how she escapes tautology. (For invention in prose plays the same role with respect to reality as rhyme in a poem. ) The most awful thing about service to the Muses is precisely that it does not tolerate repetition— either of metaphor, subject, or device. In everyday life, to tell the same joke two or three times is not a crime. One cannot, however, allow oneself to do that on paper; language forces you to take the next step—at least stylistically. Not for the sake of your inner well-being, of course (though subsequently it does prove to be for its sake as well), but for the sake of language's own stereoscopic (-phonic) well- being. A cliche is a safety valve by means of which art protects itself from the danger of degeneration.
The more often a poet takes this next step, the more isolated a position he finds himself in. The process of elimination, in the final analysis, usually turns against a person who overuses the method. And if we were not speaking of Tsve- taeva, it might be possible to see in a poet's turning to prose a kind of literary nostalgie de la boue, a desire to merge with the (writing) mass, to become, at last, "like everyone else." We are considering, however, a poet who knew from the very beginning what she was headed for, or—where language led. We are dealing with the author of the lines: "A poet starts his speaking from afar. I The speaking takes the speaker far . . ."· We are dealing with the author of "The Pied Piper." Prose for Tsvetaeva is by no means a refuge; it is not a form of emancipation^^ither psychological or stylistic. For her, prose is a witting expansion of her sphere of isolation, that is, of the possibilities of language.
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This is, in fact, the sole direction in which a self-respecting writer can move. (In essence, all existing art is already a cliche: precisely because it already exists.) And insofar as literature is the linguistic equivalent of thinking, Tsvetaeva, taken extraordinarily far by speech, proves to be the most interesting thinker of her time. Any generalized description of any person's views, especially if they have been expressed in artistic form, inevitably tends toward caricature; any attempt to approach analytically a phenomenon whose nature is synthetic is doomed by definition. Nonetheless, without running any particular risk one can define Tsvetaeva's system of views as a philosophy of discomfort, as a plea for the cause not so much of borderline situations as of existence on the edge. This position can be called neither stoic—since it was dictated above all by reasons of an aesthetico-linguistic nature—nor existentialist—since it is precisely the denial of reality that makes up its substance. On a philosophical level there is no evidence of her having either forerunners or successors. As for contemporaries, if it were not for the absence of documentary evidence, it would
· Opening lines of "The Poet" ( 1923).
be natural to assume a thorough knowledge of Lev Shestov's works. There is no such evidence, alas; or the sum of it is quite insignificant. The only Russian thinker (or rather, ponderer) whose influence on her work—though only in its early stage—Marina Tsvetaeva openly acknowledged is Vasily Rozanov. But if indeed diere was such influence, it should be recognized as strictly stylistic, however, since there is nothing more polar to Rozanov's lack of discrimination than the brutal, at times almost Calvinistic, spirit of personal responsibility that pervades the work of the mature Tsvetaeva.