Whatever the reasons that moved Tsvetaeva to t^™ to prose and regardless of how much Russian poetry consequently lost, one can only be grateful to Providence that such a turn took place. Moreover, poetry has in fact hardly lost; if it did lose something with respect to form, it remained true to itself in terms of energy and essence, i.e., it presened its substance. Every author expands upon—even by means of repudiating—the postulates, the idioms, the aesthetics of his predecessors. Turning to prose, Tsvetaeva was expanding upon herself—she was a reaction to her own self. Her isolation was not premeditated but enforced, imposed from without: by the logic of language, by historical circumstances, by the quality of her contemporaries. By no means is she an esoteric poet—no more passionate voice ever sounded in Russian poetry of the twentieth century. Besides, esoteric poets don't write prose. The fact that she ended up, nevertheless, out of the mainstream of Russian literature was only for the better. Thus, a star, in a poem by her beloved Rilke translated by her no less beloved Pasternak, like the light in the window "of the last house at the parish's edge," only expands the parishioners' conception of the size of the parish.
(Translated by Barry Rubin)
1979
Footnote to a Poem
On February 7, 1927, in Bellevue, outside Paris, Marina Tsvetaeva finished "Novogodnee" ("New Year's Greetings"), in many respects a landmark not only in her own work but in Russian poetry as a whole. In terms of genre, the poem can be regarded as an elegy—that is, the most fully developed genre in poetry; and this classification would be proper were it not for certain attendant circumstances, one being that this is an elegy on the death of a poet.
Every "on the death of" poem, as a rule, serves not only as a means for an author to express his sentiments occasioned by a loss but also as a pretext for more or less general speculations on the phenomenon of death per se. In mourning his loss (be it the beloved, a national hero, a close friend, or a guiding light), an author by the same token frequently mourns—directly, obliquely, often unwittingly —himself, for the tragic timbre is always autobiographical. In other words, any "on the death of' poem contains an element of self-portrait. This element is aU the more inevitable if the object of moaning happens to be a fellow writer with whom the author was linked by bonds—real or imaginary—too strong for the author to avoid the
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temptation of identifying with the poem's subject. In his struggle to resist such temptation the author is hampered by his sense of professional guild-like association, by the theme of death's own somewhat exalted status, and, finally, by the strictly personal, private experience of loss: something has been taken away from him; therefore, he must bear some relation to it. It may be that the only shortcoming of these wholly natural and otherwise respectable sentiments is that we learn more about the author and his attitude toward his own possible demise than about what actually happened to the other person. On the other hand, a poem is not a news report, and often a poem's tragic music alone informs us of what is happening more precisely than a detailed description can. Nevertheless, it is difficult, sometimes simply awkward, to combat the feeling that the writer is situated in regard to his subject as a spectator is to the stage, and that his own reaction (tears, not applause) is of greater consequence to him than the horror of what is taking place; that at best he simply occupies a seat in the front row of the orchestra.
Such are the costs of the genre, and from Lermontov to Pasternak Russian poetry bears witness to their inevitability. The only exception, perhaps, is Prince Vyazemsky and his "In Memoriam," written in 1837. Very likely, the inevitability of these costs, of this, in the end, self-mourning, at times bordering on self-admiration, can and even must be explained by the fact that the addressees were always, specifically, fellow writers; that the tragedy was occurring within native Russian literature, and self-pity was the reverse side of presumptuousness and an outgrowth of the sense of loneliness that increases with the passing of any poet and is, in any case, intrinsic to a writer. If, however, the subject was the demise of a preeminent figure belonging to another culture (the death of Byron or Goethe, for example), its very "foreignness" seemed to give added stimulus to the most general, abstract kind of discussion, viz.: of the role of the "bard" in the life of society, of art in general, of, as Akhmatova put it, "ages and peoples." Emotional distance in these cases engendered a didactic diffuse- ness, and some Byron or Goethe was not easily distinguishable from a Napoleon or from Italian Carbonari. The element of self-portrait in these instances naturally disappeared; for, paradoxical as it may seem, death, in spite of all its properties as a common denominator, did not lessen the distance between the author and the mourned ''bard," but, on the contrary, increased it, as though an elegist's ignorance regarding the circumstances of the life of a particular "Byron" extended as well to the essence of that "Byron's" death. In other words, death, in its turn, was perceived as something foreign, alien—which may be perfectly justified as circumstantial evidence of its—death's— inscrutability. Especially since the inscrutability of a phenomenon or, at least, the feeling of mistrust toward the results of cognition is what constitutes the ethos of the age of Romanticism, in which the tradition of poems "on the death of a poet" originates, and by whose poetics it is still colored.
Tsvetaeva's "Novogodnee" has much less in common with this tradition and these poetics than does the virtual hero of the poem, Rainer Maria Hilke. As possibly the only thread connecting Tsvetaeva with Romanticism in this poem one ought to consider the fact that for Tsvetaeva "German is more native than Russian," i.e., that German was, on a par with Russian, the language of her childhood, which coincided with the end of the last century and the beginning of the present one, with all the consequences that nineteenth-century German literature entailed for a child. This thread is, to be sure, more than just a connective—which is something we shall dwell on again later. For a start, let us note that it was precisely her knowledge of German that Tsvetaeva had to thank for her relation to Rilke, whose death, thus, delivered an indirect blow— across the whole of her life—to her childhood.
For no other reason than that a child's attachment to a language (which is not native but more native) culminates in adulthood as reverence for poetry (i.e., the form of that language's highest degree of maturity), an element of self-portraiture in "Novogodnee" seems inevitable. "Novogodnee," however, is more than a self-portrait, just as Rilke to Tsvetaeva is more than a poet. (Just as a poet's death is something more than a human loss. Above all, it is a drama of language as such: that of inadequacy of linguistic experience vis-a-vis existential experience.) Even irrespective of Tsvetaeva's personal feelings toward Rilke—extremely powerful ones that underwent an evolution from platonic love and stylistic dependence to an awareness of a certain equality—even irrespective of these feelings, the death of the great German poet created a situation in which Tsvetaeva could not confine herself to an attempt at a self- portrait. In order to understand—or even not understand— what had happened, she had to extend the limits of the genre and step up from the orchestra, as it were, onto the stage.