No heights are there, or descents For one who has flown on real Russian Eagles.
In other words, for a person who has had the experience of living in Russia, who has experienced the metaphysical Russian roller coaster, any landscape, including an otherworldly one, seems ordinary. And further, with the bitterness and pride of the patriot, Tsvetaeva adds:
. . . We have a blood tie with the next world: Who has ever been to Russia has beheld the
next world /n this one.
This is not flag-waving patriotism or even a liberal variety that, as a rule, is tinged with sardonic tones; it is a metaphysical patriotism. "Who has ever been to Russia has beheld the next world/In this one." These words are prompted by a clear awareness of the tragic nature of human existence as a whole—and by an understanding of Russia as the most perfect approximation of it.
This line totally dispels the idiotic contentions that Tsvetaeva never accepted the Revolution. Of course she didn't: for to "accept" human slaughter, regardless of the ideals in whose name it is carried out, means to become an accomplice and a betrayer of the dead. To "accept" such a thing is tantamount to the assertion that the dead are worse than those who have remained alive. Such an "acceptance" is a position of superiority held by the majority (of the living) with regard to the minority (of the dead)—i.e., the most repulsive form of spiritual debauchery. For any human being who has been brought up on Christian ethical standards, such an "acceptance" is unthinkable, and accusations of political blindness or of failure to understand historical processes, manifested in the refusal to accept these things, tum into praise of the individual for his moral clearsightedness.
"Who has ever been to Russia has beheld the next world/ In this one" is not so far, after all, from "All of you, my native land,/ the King of Heaven traversed/in the guise of a slave, giving his blessing," or from "Russia one must simply believe in."^ This line of Tsvetaeva's is evidence that she did something more substantial than not accepting the Revolution: she grasped it fully. As an absolute baring—to the bone—of the core of existence. And this is probably what prompts the use of the verb "has been," which alludes not so much to Rilke's visits to Russia (in 1899 and 1900) as to Tsvetaeva herself, who found herself outside Russia. It is also probable that the exclamation "Smooth switch!" that follows "In this one," that is, the ease of the relocation from this world to the next, is in part an echo of trigger- happy revolutionary justice. And all the more natural is what immediately comes after "switch":
Life and death I utter with a hidden Smirk—[you]'ll touch it with your own/ Life and death I utter with a footnote, An asterisk ...
The accumulating didactic mass of "you'll touch it with your own" finds vent in high lyricism, for the identity of the author's views on "life and death" with those of her addressee is presented here in the form of a certain overlapping of two hidden smiles—this existential kiss, the tenderness of which is euphonically conveyed by the whisper-like kosnyosh'sya ("[you]11 touch"). The omitted personal pronoun ty ("you") in "[youjl touch it with your own" increases the sensation of intimacy that penetrates the next line as welclass="underline" "Life and death I utter with a footnote,t/ An asterisk"—since "footnote" sounds less dramatic than
· Lines by Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-73). t Zhizn' i smert' proiznoshu so snoskoi.
"quotes" or even "smirk." While still conveying^^r developing—the author's feeling that "life and death" are compromised, "footnote" (snoskoi), owing to the diminutive, almost hypocoristic quality of its sound, shifts the speech to a purely personal plane and seems to equate the addressee with itself by becoming "an asterisk." For Rilke is already a star or among the stars, and then what follows in parentheses are two and a half lines of pure poetry:
(the night which I plead for: Instead of a cerebral hemisphere— A stellar one!)
These parentheses are all the more remarkable because they are, in some sense, a graphic equivalent of the image they enclose. As for the image itself, its additional charm lies in the identification of consciousness with a page consisting solely of footnotes to Rilke—that is, stars. In tum, the archaic word chayu ("I plead for") bears within it all possible tenderness and the impossibility of realizing such a desire, so that an immediate change of register is required. Therefore, after the parentheses close we hear speech that is distinguished from the preceding segment by its outwardly businesslike tone. This tone, however, is only a mask; the emotional content is the same as before:
The following, my friend, Shouldn't be forgotten: that if Rustian Letters are running on now instead of German— It's not because nowadays, they claim, Anything will do, that a dead ^n (beggar) will wolf anything—
Won't bat an eye! · . .
Camouflaged by the intentional bureaucratic tone of "the following," that content makes itself felt in the very meaning of the passage: its subject is no more and no less than the author's request to Rilke that he forgive her for writing the poem in Russian instead of German. By no means is this request an expression of coyness; Tsvetaeva had been in correspondence with Rilke since 1926 (started, by the way, on Boris Pasternak's initiative), and that correspondence had been conducted in German. The emotional basis of the request lies in the author's awareness that by using Russian—not Hilke's native language—she is distancing herself from the addressee, more than she already was distanced by the fact of his death; and more than she would have been had she taken the trouble of writing in German. Moreover, this request serves the function of creating distance from the "pure poetry" of the preceding lines for which Tsvetaeva virtually reproaches herself. In any case, she realizes that achievements of a purely poetic nature (like the contents of the previous parentheses), in their turn, remove her from Rilke; that she can get carried away—she, that is, and not her addressee. In the vulgar bravura of "if Russian/Letters are running on now instead of German . . ." one can detect a note of slight contempt for herself and her work. And then she starts to justify herself in the same jaunty, marketplace tone: "It's not because nowadays, they claim, I Anything will do, that a dead man (beggar) will wolf anything— I Won't bat an eye!" This tone, however, is only a supplementary form of self- flagellation. The raffishness of this "... a dead man (beggar) will wolf anything— I Won't bat an eyel"—worsened by a mixture of proverb and folkloric synonym for a deceased person, "blinker" (zlunurik)—is present here not as a means of characterizing the addressee but as a touch added to the author's psychological self-portrait: as an illustration of the possible extent of her debasement. Precisely from here, from the very bottom, Tsvetaeva begins her self-defense, yielding a result that is all the more believable the worse the point of departure:
—but because the next world, Ours—Ы thirteen, in Novodevichy [monastery] I understood—is not tongueless but all-tongues.
This, again, is staggering, because the preceding lines have not prepared us for anything of the sort. Even a fairly experienced reader of Tsvetaeva, someone accustomed to her stylistic contrasts, often enough finds himself unprepared for these take-offs from the gutters into the empyrean. For in Tsvetaeva's poems the reader encounters not the strategy of the verse-maker but the strategy of ethics—to use her own formulation, art in the light of conscience. On our part let us add: the complete overlapping of art and ethics. It is precisely the logic of conscience (or rather conscientiousness), the logic of guilt for being among the living while her addressee is dead, the awareness that the deceased's oblivion is inevitable and that her own lines are paving the way toward that oblivion—it is precisely all this that prompted her request that she be forgiven for an additional flight from the reality of his—the addressee's— death: for a poem in Russian, or for a poem at all. The argument Tsvetaeva makes to vindicate herself—"because the next world ... is not tongueless but all-tongues"—is remarkable above aU because it oversteps the psychological threshold at which nearly everyone stops: the interpretation of death as an extralingual experience that rids one of any linguistic pangs. "Not tongueless but all-tongues" goes much further, taking conscience back to its source, where it is relieved of the burden of earthly guilt. These words have a feeling, it seems, of arms stretched wide and the festiveness of a revelation available perhaps only to a child —"at thirteen, in Novodevichy."