"Novogodnee" is above all a confession. In this regard one feels inclined to mention that Tsvetaeva is an extremely candid poet, quite possibly the most candid in the history of Russian poetry. She makes no secret of anything, least of all of her aesthetic and philosophical credos, which are scattered about her verse and prose with the frequency of a first person singular pronoun. The reader, therefore, turns out to be more or less prepared for Tsvetaeva's manner of speech in "Novogodnee"—the so-called lyrical monologue. What he is not at all prepared for, however, no matter how many times he may reread "Novogodnee," is the intensity of the monologue, the purely linguistic energy of this confession. And the point is not at all that "Novogodnee" is a poem, that is, a form of narration that requires, by definition, maximum condensation of speech, sharpening of the maximum focus. The point is that Tsvetaeva confesses not to a priest but to a poet. And on her scale of ranks a poet is higher than a priest to roughly the same degree as man, in standard theology, is higher than the angels, since the latter were not created in the image and likeness of the Almighty.
Paradoxical and blasphemous as it may seem, in the dead Rilke Tsvetaeva found what every poet seeks: the supreme listener. The widespread belief that a poet always writes for someone is only half justified and is fraught with numerous confusions. The best answer to the question "Whom do you write for?" was given by Igor Stravinsky: "For myself and for a hypothetical alter ego." Consciously or unconsciously, every poet in the course of his career engages in a search for an ideal reader, for that alter ego, since a poet seeks not recognition but understanding. Baratynsky long ago consoled Pushkin in a letter, saying that one shouldn't be particularly surprised "if the Hussars don't read us anymore." Tsvetaeva goes even further, and in her poem "Homesickness" she declares:
Nor shall I crave my native speech, its milky call that comes in handy. It makes no difference in which longiie passers-by won't comprehend me.
(Translated by Joseph Brodsky)
This type of attitude toward things inevitably leads to a narrowing of the circle, which by no means always signifies an improvement in the quality of readers. A writer, however, is a democrat by definition, and the poet always hopes for some parallelism between the processes taking place in his own work and those in the consciousness of the reader. But the further a poet goes in his development, the greater—unintentionally—his demands are on an audience, and the narrower that audience is. The situation oftentimes ends with the reader becoming the author's projection, which scarcely coincides with any living creature at all. In those instances, the poet directly addresses either the angels, as Rilke does in the Duino Elegies, or another poet— especially one who is dead, as Tsvetaeva addresses Rilke. In both instances what takes place is a monologue, and in both instances it assumes an absolute quality, for the author addresses his words to nonexistence, to Chronos.
For Tsvetaeva, whose verse is distinctive for its almost pathological need to say, to think, to carry all things to their logical end, this was by no means a new destination. What turned out to be new—with the death of Rilke— was the fact that it turned out to be inhabited and for the poet in Tsvetaeva this could not but be of interest. To be fure, "Novogodnee" is the result of a particular emotional outburst; but Tsvetaeva is a maximalist, and the vector of her emotional movements is known in advance. Nevertheless, it is impossible to call Tsvetaeva a poet of extremes, if only because an extreme—whether deductive, emotional, or linguistic—is merely the point where, for her, a poem starts. "Going through life is not the same as walking across a field" · or "Odysseus returned full of space and time"t could never have been used as last lines in a poem of Tsvetaeva's; a poem of hers would have begun with these lines. Tsvetaeva is a poet of extremes only in the sense that for her an ''extreme" is not so much the end of the kno^ world as the beginning of the unknowable one. The technique of allusion, circumlocution, half-statement, or omission is characteristic of this poet to only a minute degree. Even less attributable to her is the use of the highest achievements of the rhythmic school, psychologically comforting to the reader with their lulling metrical pattern. Oversaturated with stresses, the h^mony of Tsvetaeva's verse line is unpredictable; she leans more toward trochees and dactyls than toward the certitude of the iamb. The beginnings of her lines tend to be trochaic rather than stressed, the endings mournful, dactylic. It's hard to find another poet who has made such skillful and abundant use of caesura and truncated feet. In terms of form, Tsvetaeva is significantly more interesting than any of her contemporaries, including the Futurists, and her rhymes are more inventive than Pasternak's. Most importantly, however, her te^nical achievements have not been dictated by formal explorations but are by-products—that is, natural effects— of speech, for which the most significant thing is its subject.
· The last line of "Hamlet," by Boris Pasternak. t The last line of 'The Stream of Golden Honey Was Pouring . . ." by Osip Mandelstam.
Art, generally speaking, always comes into being as a result of an action directed outward, sideways, toward the attainment (comprehension) of an object having no immediate relationship to art. It is a means of conveyance, a landscape flashing in a window—rather than the conveyance's destination. "If you only knew," said Akhmatova, "what rubbish verse grows from . . ." The farther away the purpose of movement, the more probable the art; and, theoretically, death (anyone's, and a great poet's in particular, for what can be more removed from everyday reality than a great poet or great poetry?) turns into a sort of guarantee of art.
The theme of "Tsvetaeva and Rilke" has been, is, and will continue to be the subject of many investigations. What interests us is the role—or idea—of Rilke as the addressee in "Novogodnee'' his role as the object of psychic movement and the extent of his responsibility for the by-product of that movement: a poem. Knowing Tsvetaeva's maxi- malism, one cannot but take note of how natural her choice of this subject is. Apart from the concrete, deceased Rilke, there appears in the poem an image (or idea) of an "absolute Rilke," who has ceased being a body in space and has become a soul—in eternity. This removal is an absolute, maximum removal. The feelings the poem's heroine has— i.e., love—toward their absolute object, a soul, are also absolute What in addition proves to be absolute are the means of expressing this love: maximum selflessness and maximum candor. All this could not but create a maximum tension of poetic diction.
There is, however, a paradox in the fact that poetic language possesses—as does any language in general—its own particular dynamics, which impart to psychic movement an acceleration that takes the poet much farther than he imagined when he began the poem. Yet this is, in fact, the principal mechanism (temptation, if you will) of creative work; once having come in contact with it (or having succumbed to it), a person once and for all rejects other modes of thought, expression^^onveyance. Language propels the poet into spheres he would not otherwise be able to approach, irrespective of the degree of psychic or mental concentration of which he might be capable beyond the writing of verse. And this propulsion takes place with unusual swiftness: with the speed of sound—greater than what is afforded by imagination or experience. As a rule, a poet is considerably older when he finishes a poem than he was at its outset. The maximum range of Tsvetaeva's diction in "Novogodnee" takes her much farther than the mere experience of loss could; possibly even farther than the soul of Rilke himself is capable of getting to in its posthumous wanderings. Not only because any thought of someone else's soul, as distinct from the soul itself, is less burdened than that soul by its deeds, but also because a poet, generally speaking, is more generous than an apostle. A poetic "paradise" is not limited to "eternal bliss," and it is not threatened with the overcrowding of a dogmatic paradise. In contrast to the standard Christian paradise that is presented as a kind of last instance, the soul's dead end, poetic paradise is, rather, a peak, and a bard's soul is not so much perfected as left in a continual state of motion. The poetic idea of eternal life on the whole gravitates more toward a cosmogony than toward theology, and what is often put forward as a measure of the soul is not the degree of its perfection essential for achieving likeness and merger with the Creator but rather the physical (metaphysical) duration and distance of its wanderings in time. In principle, the poetic conception of existence eschews any form of finiteness or stasis, including theological apotheosis. In any case, Dante's paradise is much more interesting than the ecclesiastical version of it.