Many things determine consciousness besides being^ (the prospect of nonbeing, in particular). One of them is language. The self-pitilessness that makes one think of Calvin (and whose obverse is Tsvetaeva's often unwarranted generosity in evaluating the work of her fellow writers) is not only the product of upbringing, but is—and this first of all—the reflection or continuation of the professional relationship between the poet and her language. With regard to upbringing, however, it is important to remember that Tsvetaeva's was trilingual, with Russian and German predominant. Certainly, it was not a matter of choice: her native tongue was Russian. But a child who reads Heine in the original becomes instructed, willingly or not, in deductive "seriousness and honor/ in the West, from an alien family."t Bearing an outwardly strong resemblance to the striving for truth, the striving for precision is by nature linguistic; that is, it is rooted in language, has its source in the word. The process of elimination mentioned above,
· Karl Marx: "Being [existence] determines consciousness." t From Mandelstam's poem "To the Cennan Tongue" ( 1932).
the need to discard the superfluous—which has reached, or rather been brought to, the level of instinct—is one of the means through which this striving is pursued. In the case of a poet, this striving often takes on an idiosyncratic quality, inasmuch as to the poet phonetics and semantics are, with few exceptions, identical.
This identity imparts to consciousness so much acceleration that it carries its possessor beyond the parentheses of any polis a lot sooner and farther than suggested by this or that energetic Plato. But that is not all. Any emotion that accompanies this imaginary or—more frequently—real relocation is edited by that identity; and the form—as well as the very fact—of the expression of that emotion proves to be aesthetically dependent on the said identity. In a more general sense, ethics slip into a dependence on aesthetics. A remarkable feature of Tsvetaeva's work is precisely the absolute independence of her moral valuations that exists along with such a phenomenally heightened linguistic sensitivity. One of the best examples of the struggle between ethical principle and linguistic determinism is her 1932 essay "The Poet and Time": it is a duel in which no one is killed and both parties are victorious. This essay, one of the most crucial for an understanding of Tsvetaeva's work, affords one of the most trenchant examples of a semantic frontal attack on the positions occupied in our consciousness by abstract categories (in this instance, on the idea of time). An indirect gain achieved by such maneuvers is that the literary language receives training in breathing the rarefied atmosphere of abstract concepts, while the latter acquire the flesh of phonetics and morality.
Represented on a graph, Tsvetaeva's work would exhibit a curve—nay, a straight line—rising at almost a right angle because of her constant endeavor to raise the pitch a note higher, an idea higher. (Or, more precisely, an octave and faith higher.) She always carries everything she has to say to its conceivable and expressible end. In either her verse or her prose nothing remains hanging in the air or leaves a feeling of ambivalence. Tsvetaeva is that unique case in which the paramount spiritual experience of an epoch (in this instance, the sense of ambivalence, of the contradictoriness of the nature of human existence) served not as the object of expression but as its means; whereupon it was transformed into the material of art. That a poet resorts to prose, which creates the illusion of a more consistent development of thought than poetry does, is in itself a kind of indirect proof that the paramount spiritual experience is not so paramount; that experiences of a higher nature are possible, and that a reader can be taken by the hand by prose and delivered to where he would otherwise have to be shoved by a poem.
This last consideration—the notion of concern for the reader—should be taken into account if merely because it is our only chance to squeeze Tsvetaeva into the tradition of Russian literature, with its main tendency toward consoling, toward justifying (on the highest level, if possible) reality and the existing order of things in general. Or else, it turns out that the "gray wolf" who keeps looking to the "thick woods of Eternity" no matter how much time you feed it, the mouthpiece or the ear of the voice of 'heavenly truth versus earthly truth," i.e., Tsvetaeva, who cares for nothing in between, really stands all alone in Russian literature, very, very much off by herself. An unwillingness to accept reality, motivated not only by ethics but by aesthetics as well, is something unusual in Russian literature.
This, of course, can be attributed to the quality of reality itself, within the Russian homeland and without; but the problem undoubtedly lies elsewhere. Most likely, the problem is that the new semantics required new phonetics, and Tsvetaeva provided it. In her, Russian letters found a dimension that hitherto had not been intrinsic to it: she demonstrated language's own self-interest in tragic subject matter. In this dimension justification or acceptance of reality is out of the question if only because the existing order of things is tragic in purely phonetic terms. According to Tsvetaeva, the very sound of speech is prone to the tragical and, in a way, even profits from it: as in a lament. No wonder, then, that for a literature so steeped in didactical positivism that the expression "to begin with well-wishing but end with 'Ashes to ashes' " is considered a formula for deviation from the norm, Tsvetaeva's work proved to be something novel, with all the ensuing personal consequences. Tsvetaeva's biography differs favorably only from the biographies of those of her contemporaries who perished earlier.
But what was a novelty for letters was not one for the national psyche. Of the entire pleiad of great twentieth- century Russian poets, with the exception of Nikolai Klu- yev, Tsvetaeva stands closest to folklore, and the style of the lament provides one of the keys to understanding her work. Leaving aside the decorative, not to say drawing- room, aspect of folklore, which was so successfully elaborated by, again, Kluyev, Tsvetaeva was compelled by force of circumstance to resort to that device which is the essential element of folklore: unaddressed speech. In both her verse and her prose we constantly hear a monologue—not the monologue of a heroine, but a monologue as a consequence of having no one to talk to.
The characteristic feature of this kind of speech is that the speaker is also the listener. Folklore—a shepherd's song —is speech intended for the self, for itself: the ear heeds the mouth. Thus, through self-audition language achieves self-cognition. But no matter how or through what one accounts for the genealogy of Tsvetaeva's poetics, the degree of responsibility placed on the reader's consciousness by its fruits exceeded—and exceeds to this day—the degree of the Russian reader's preparedness to accept this responsibility (with the demand for which the difference between folklore and authored literature presumably starts). Even protected by the annor of dogma or by the no less sturdy armor of absolute cynicism, he proves defenseless against the intensity of art lighting up his conscience. The inevitability of the presumably ruinous effect that this entails is understood more or less equally by both the shepherds and the flock itself, and to this day Tsvetaeva's collected works do not exist either outside or inside the country in the language of whose people she wrote. Theoretically, the dignity of a nation degraded politically cannot be seriously wounded by obliterating its cultural heritage. Russia, however, in contrast to nations blessed with a legislative tradition, elective institutions, and so forth, is in a position to understand herself only through literature, and to retard the literary process by disposing of or treating as nonexistent the works of even a minor author is tantamount to a genetic crime against the future of the nation.