"In a sanatorium."
And immediately afterward, the author, who has already t^^ed downwn the request to "do" a piece, that is, who does not wish to bare her emotions in public and therefore conceals them from her interlocutor, adds in parentheses: "A rented paradise."
This is an important shift from the albeit feverish but nonetheless civil tone of the dialogue: a shift toward vulgarity, almost a marketplace womanish yammer ( cf. the standard saying: "A lawyer's a hired conscience"). This specific shift—let us call it a do^ward estrangement—is triggered not so much by the desire to conceal one's feelings as by the wish to humiliate oneself—and by this debasement defend oneself from those feelings. As if to say, "It's not me, it's somebody else who's suffering. I couldn't have taken it . . ."· Nevertheless, even in this self-flagellation, in this self-denial, in this vulgarity, the poetic tension doesn't slacken, and this is attested by the word "paradise." For the point of the poem is the description of the "next world," the comprehension of which is derived from "this" one. The coarseness of the sensations, however, is evidence not so much of their strength as of their approxi- mateness, and by exclaiming "A rented paradise," the author alludes to her still imperfect conception of the "next world," to the level of comprehension on which she still exists; that is, to the need for further developing the subject, something which, in the first place, is necessitated by the very rapidity of the verse, which is increased by the telegraphic piling up of monosyllables and sentence fragments.
· Akhmatova, "Requiem."
S nastupayushchim! (Rozhdalsya zavtra!)— Rasskazat', chto sdelala uznav pro ... ? Tss ... Ogovorilas'. Po privychke. Zhizn' i smert' davno beru v kavchki, Kak zavedomo pustye splyoty.
Happy forthcoming year! (Born tomorrow!)— Shall I tell you what I did when I learned of... ? Sh! ... A slip of the tongue. Out of habit. I have long put life and death in quotes Like known-to-be-empty gossip/fabrications.
Throughout the entire poem Tsvetaeva never once uses the phrase "your death." She avoids it even when the line allows it; even though several days after writing "Novogodnee" she wrote a short essay with just that title: "Your Death." It is not so much a question of superstitious reluctance to acknowledge death's proprietary right to Rilke —or his to death. The author simply refuses to hammer with her own hands this last psychological nail into the poet's coffin. First of all because such a phrase is the first step toward oblivion, toward domestication—i.e., toward incomprehension—of the catastrophe. And, in addition, because it is impossible to speak of a person's physical death without speaking—because of not knowing—about his physical life. In that case, Rilke's death would have taken on an abstract character against which Tsvetaeva would have rebelled purely as a realist. As a result, death becomes the object of guesswork to the same degree that Rilke's life was its object. That is, the expression "your death" proves to be just as inapplicable and meaningless as "your life." But Tsvetaeva goes a bit further, and here we have the beginning of what we can call an "upward estrangement" and Tsvetaeva's confession.
I have long put life and death in quotes
Like known-to-be-empty gossip/fabrications.
The literal meaning of these lines—and Tsvetaeva should always be taken first of all not figuratively but literally— just as the Acmeists should be, for instance—is as follows: to the author "life" and "death" seem like an unsuccessful attempt by the language to adjust to the phenomenon, and, what is more, an attempt that debases the phenomenon with the sense which usually is invested in these words: "known-to-be-empty gossip/fabrications." That is, the life of So-and-so is not yet Being, with all the consequences that this entails for the death of So-and-so, too. Splyoty is either an archaic form for "gossip," or a vernacularism for "plexus" (of circumstances, relationships, etc.); in either case "known-to-be-empty/ a priorily hollow" is an extremely fitting epithet. The key word here is davno ("long"), for it indicates the repetitive, mass character of the splyoty ("gossip," "fabrications") that compromises "life" and "death" and makes them inapplicable to Rilke.
Apart from everything else, the lyrical heroine of "Novogodnee" is Tsvetaeva herself, the poet; and as poet she gives prejudiced treatment to these two words, which have been emasculated not only by the meaning imparted to them for so long and by so many, but also by her own extremely frequent use of them. And this is precisely what compels her to stop short in the middle and put her finger to her lips:
Sh! . . . A slip of the tongue. Out of habit.
This is one of the many rebellions of the poet against herself that are typical of Tsvetaeva's lyric poems. These rebellions are prompted by the same striving to achieve realistic effects that is responsible for her combining of lexical planes. The purpose of all these devices—or: movements of the soul—is to rid her speech of poetic a priority, to demonstrate the presence of common sense. In other words, to make the reader maximally dependent on what has been said. Tsvetaeva doesn't play egalitarian games with the reader: she places herself on his level—lexically, logically, and only far enough to make it possible for him to follow her.
Life and death I utter with a hidden Smirk . . .
she adds farther on, as if carefully enunciating for the reader the meaning of the previous lines. For the same reasons, and also because at the beginning of the poem a visitor suggests that she "do a piece," Tsvetaeva resorts to the intonation^^r mask^^f a journalist conducting an interview:
Now—how was the trip? How was the heart tearing and not torn Apart? As on Orlov trotters, · Not lagging, you said, behind eagles, Was it breathtaking—от more? Sweeter?
The euphemistic quality of this ''how was the trip?" (to the "new place," i.e., to heaven, paradise, and so forth),
· Bred by Count Orlov, whose name is derived from the Russian word for eagle.
as well as the subsequent periphrasis from Rilke himself, are attempts to contain the emotions about to get out of control several lines earlier as she replies to "Shall I tell you what I did when I learned of . . ,":
I did nothing, but something Was done that does without Shadow and echo!
Now—how was the trip?
Tsvetaeva resorts here to a graphic intemiption emphasizing both a breaking off of the previous intonation and a physical breaking away of the content—upward (in the reader's consciousness) because it is downward (on paper). At this point the poem begins to move only in that direction, and if it stands still at times for lyrical digression or for lowering of tone, it occurs in spheres so high that topographical differentiation seems meaningless. In part, this is what Tsvetaeva herself has in mind when, instead of answering her own question ". . . more?/ Sweeter?" she remarks: