Homeland—now already from one of
The stars...
This is astounding. For it's one thing to take a look at oneself from a distance; ultimately, she was engaged in this in one way or another all her life. To look at yourself through the eyes of Rilke is something else. But in this too, we must suppose, she engaged rather frequently, if we take into account her attitude toward Rilke. To look at herself through the eyes of the deceased Rilke's soul wandering in space, and moreover to see not herself but the world abandoned by him—is something that requires a spiritual optic capability which we don't know that anyone has. A reader is not prepared for such a tum of events. To be more precise, the deliberate awkwardness of "in which, without you, 111 moan myself empty" may prepare him for a lot of things, but not for the accelerating dactylism of "Homeland" or much less for the remarkable broken compound rhyme of odnoi iz ("one of'). And least of all, of course, does he expect that odnoi iz will be followed by that explosively abrupt Zvyozd ("the stars"). He is still lulled by the homey-sounding "yesterday's" (vcherashnei), he is still lingering over the slightly mannered iznoyus' ("I'll moan myself empty"), when he is overwhehned by the full dynamics and total irrevocability of "'Homeland—now already from one of/The stars." After two ruptured enjambments he is least prepared for a third—a traditional one.
It is not altogether improbable that this run-on verse is a bow, a private signal given by Tsvetaeva to Rilke in reply to his elegy to her, written and sent to Tsvetaeva in the summer of the same year, 1926, whose third line also begins with an enjambment containing a star:
О die Verluste ins All, Marina, die stilrzenden Sterne!
Wir vermehren es nicht, wohin wir uns werfen, zu welchem
218 I J О s E P H B R О D SEI
Sterne hinzu! Im Ganzen ist immer sclwn alles gezahlt ·
It is unlikely that in human consciousness two more divergent concepts exist than "homeland" (read "earth") and "star." Equating them with each other is in itself an act of violence upon consciousness. But the slightly disdainful "one of ...," in diminishing both "star" and "homeland," seems to compromise their mutual significance and debases the violated consciousness. In this regard, it is worthwhile to note Tsvetaeva's tactfulness in playing down, here and later on in the poem, her lot as an expatriate and in limiting the meaning of "homeland" and "star" to the context that emerged as a result of Rilke's death, and not as a result of her own peregrinations. Nevertheless, it is hard to rid oneself completely of the impression that the view described here contains an oblique autobiographical element. For the quality of sight—vision—that the author ascribes to her addressee was engendered not only by her psychological attachment to the latter. The center of gravity in any attachment is, as a rule, not its object but the one who has become attached; even if it is a matter of one poet's attachment to another, the main question is: What are my poems—to him?
As for the degree of despair over the loss ot a loved one, which is expressed in our readiness to swap places with him, the a priori impossibility of the realization of such a wish is in itself comforting enough, for it serves as a certain
· Oh, the losses into the All, Marina, the falling/starsl We can't make it larger, wherever we fling, to whatever/star we gol Numbered for all time are the parts of the Whole. (Translated by J. D. Leishman) emotional limit that spares the imagination further responsibility. Whereas the quality of vision responsible for perceiving "homeland" as "one of the stars" testifies not only to the ability of "Novogodnee's" author to switch the places of subtrahends but also to the ability of her imagination to abandon her hero and to look at even him from afar. For it is not so much Rilke who "sees" his homeland of yesterday as one of the stars, as it is the author of the poem who "sees" Rilke "seeing" all of this. And the question naturally arises: What is the author's own location and how does she happen to be there?
As for the first part of the question, one can be content with a reference to the thirty-eighth line of Gavrila Ro- manovich Derzhavin's ode "On the Death of Prince Me- shchersky" ( 1779).' As for the second part, the best answer is provided by Tsvetaeva herself, and a little later well turn to the quotes. For the moment, though, let us presuppose that the knack of estranging—from reality, from a text, from the self, from thoughts about the self —which may be the first prerequisite for creativity and is peculiar, to a certain degree, to every man of letters, developed in Tsvetaeva's case to the level of instinct. What began as a literary device became a form (nay, nonn) of existence. And not only because she was physically estranged from so many things (including motherland, readership, recognition). And not because in her lifetime so many things occurred to which the only response could be distancing, things that demanded distancing. The above- mentioned transformation took place because Tsvetaeva
· This line, referring to Prince Meshchersky, who has suddenly wed, reads: "^faere is he?—He's there.—Where there?—We don't know." the poet was identical to Tsvetaeva the person; between word and deed, between art and existence, there was neither a comma nor even a dash: Tsvetaeva used an equals sign. Hence, it follows that the device is transferred to life, that what develops, instead of craftsmanship, is the soul; that in the end they are the same thing. Up to a certain point, verse plays the role of the soul's tutor; afterward— and fairly soon—it's the other way around. The writing of "Novogodnee" took place at a time when the soul no longer had anything to learn from literature, even from Rilke. That's exactly why it became possible for the author of "Novogodnee" to get a view of the world through the eyes of a poet who had abandoned this world, but also to take a look at that poet from afar, from the outside —from where that poet's soul had not yet been. In other words, the quality of vision is determined by the metaphysical possibilities of the individual, which, in turn, are a guarantee of infinity—if not a mathematical, then a vocal one.
That is how this poem begins—with a fusion of extreme degrees of despair and estrangement. Psychologically that was more than justified, for the latter is often a direct consequence and expression of the former; especially in the case of someone's death, which precludes the possibility of adequate reaction. (Isn't art, generally speaking, a substitute for this unavailable emotion? And poetic art especially? And if so, isn't the "on the death of a poet" genre of poetry a sort of logical apotheosis and the purpose of poetry: a sacrifice of effect on the altar of cause?) Their interdependence is so obvious that it is difficult at times to avoid identifying despair with estrangement. In any case, let us try not to forget the pedigree of the latter when we talk about "Novogodnee"; estrangement is at the same time both the method and the subject of this poem.
Lest she should slip into pathos (something the development of the "homeland—one of the stars" metaphor might have led to), and also because of her own proclivity for the concrete, for realism, Tsvetaeva devotes the next sixteen lines to a very detailed description of the circumstances in which she learned of Rilke's death. The ecstatic character of the preceding eight lines is offset in this description (in the form of a dialogue with a visitor, Marc Slonim, who suggests she "do a piece" about Rilke) by the literalism of direct speech. The naturalness, the unpredictability of the rhymes that rig out this dialogue, the abruptness of the retorts—impart to this passage the character of a diary entry, almost prosaic verisimilitude. At the same time, the dynamics of the retorts themselves, reinforced partly by their monosyllables as well as by the dialecticism of their content, create an impression of shorthand, of a desire to be done with all these details as soon as possible and to get do^ to what is most crucial. Striving to achieve a realistic effect, Tsvetaeva employs all sorts of means, the main one being her mixing of lexical planes, which permits her (sometimes in one line) to convey the entire psychological gamut produced by some situation or other. Thus, through the give-and-take with the visitor soliciting the piece from her, she learns about the place where Rilke has died—the sanatorium at Valmont, near Lausanne, whereupon follows the nominative sentence that appears even without the question "Where?" that normally prompts such information: