Even if the loss of Rilke served Tsvetaeva only as "An Invitation to a Journey," it would be justified by the otherworldly topography of "Novogodnee." But this is not in fact the case, and Tsvetaeva does not replace Rilke the man with the "idea of Rilke" or with the idea of his soul. She would have been incapable of making such a replacement if only because that soul had already been embodied in Rilke's work. (On the whole, the not overly justifiable polarization of soul and body, a practice that is very commonly abused when a person dies, appears all the less convincing when we are dealing with a poet.) In other words, the poet invites the reader to follow his soul during the poet's lifetime, and Tsvetaeva, with regard to Rilke, was first of all a reader. The dead Rilke, consequently, is not particularly different for her from the living one, and she follows him in roughly the same way that Dante followed Virgil, with great justification in the fact that Rilke himself undertook similar journeys in his own work ("Requiem for a Lady Friend"). In brief, the next world has been sufficiently domesticated by the poetic imagination to warrant the assumption that self-pity or curiosity about the otherworldly might have served Tsvetaeva as motivation for "No!Jogodnee." The tragedy of "No!Jogodnee" lies in the separation, in the almost physical rupture of her psychological bond with Rilke, and she sets out on this "journey," not frightened by a Dantean leopard blocking her path, but by an awareness of abandonment, of being no longer able to follow him the way she did during his lifetime— following every line of his. And also—in addition to that abandonment—from a feeling of guilt: I'm alive, whereas he—the better one—is dead. But the love of one poet for another (even of the opposite sex) is not Juliet's love for Romeo: the tragedy lies not in that existence without him is unthinkable but precisely in that such an existence is thinkable. And as a consequence of this conceivability, the author's attitude toward herself, still living, is more merciless, more uncompromising. Therefore, when beginning to speak, and—if it ever comes to this—when beginning to speak of oneself, one does so as if confessing, for it is he— not a priest or God but another poet—who hears you. Hence the intensity of Tsvetaeva's diction in "Novogodnee," since she is addressing someone who, in contrast to God, has absolute pitch.
"Novogodnee" begins in typical Tsvetaeva fashion, at the far right—i.e., highest—end of the octave, on high C:
S Novym godom—svetom—kraem—krovom!
Happy New Year—World/Light—Edge/ Realm-—Haven!
—with an exclamation directed upward, outward. Throughout the entire poem this tonality, just like the very tenor of this speech, is unvarying: the only possible modification is not a lowering of the register (even in parentheses) but a raising of it. Imbued with this tonality, the device of the nominative sentence in this line creates an ecstatic effect, an effect of emotional soaring. This sensation is intensified by the outwardly synonymic enumeration, like ascending stairs (stages) with each step higher than the previous one. This enumeration, however, is synonymic only with respect to the number of syllables each word has, and Tsvetaeva's sign of equality (or inequality )—the dash—separates them more than a comma would: it thrusts each successive word upward beyond the one preceding it.
What is more, only the word god ("year") in S Novym godom ("Happy New Year") is used in its literal meaning; all the other words in this line are loaded—overloaded— with associations and figurative meanings. Svet ("world," "light") is used in a threefold meaning: first as "world," as in "New World," by analogy with "New Year"—i.e., geographically new. But this geography is the abstract one; Tsvetaeva more likely has in mind here something "at the back of beyond," rather than on the other side of the ocean: a certain outer limit. This understanding of a "new world" as another limit leads to the idea of the "next world," which in fact is the real issue. However, the "next world" is, first of all, light; for, owing to the drift of the line and the euphonic superiority (more piercing sound) of svetom over godom, it is located somewhere literally overhead, above, in the heavens, which are the source of light. The preceding and succeeding dashes, which nearly free the word from semantic obligations, equip svet with the entire arsenal of its positive allusions, At any rate, in the concept of "next world" emphasis falls tautologically on the aspect of the light rather than, as usual, of darkness.
Next, from the abstractly geographic svet the line acoustically and topographically flies upward toward the short, sob-like krai ("edge," "realm"): edge of the world, edge in general, heavenward, to paradise. S novym . . . kraem means, apart from everything else, "Happy new realm, happy new boundary, happy crossing of it." The line ends with the coda s novym krovom ("Happy new haven"), which is both phonetic and semantic, for the phonic substance of krovom is almost identical to that of godom. But these two syllables have already been raised a whole octave ^^ight syllables—above their original sound by svetom and kraem, and there is no way they can return either to the tonality of the beginning of the line or to its literalness. It's as though krovom, from higher up, were looking back upon itself in godom, unable to recognize either vowels or consonants. The consonants kr in krovom belong not so much to the word krov itself as to the word krai, and partly because of that the semantics of krov seems too rarefied: the word has been placed too high up. Its meaning as a refuge at the edge of the world and as a home to come back to, a haven, intertwines with the krov that means heaven : the universal heaven of the planet as well as the individual one, the last refuge of the soul.
Essentially, Tsvetaeva uses the trochaic pentameter here like a keyboard, a similarity made greater by the use of dashes instead of commas; the transition from one disylla- ble to another is achieved by a pianistic rather than a standard grammatical logic, and each successive exclamation, as when keys are pressed, starts up when the sound of the previous one dies out. However unconscious this device may be, it is eminently appropriate to the essence of the image developed in this line—of heaven with its levels accessible first to the eye, and after the eye, only to the spirit.