· Rai-—pronounced the same way as the Russian word rai, meaning "paradise." ikhnim ("their barroom sort"), immediately foUowing (although this expression can also be viewed simply as a mannerism). The technique of wailing, lamenting, hysterical babbling is most apparent, however, in the lines "if you, such an eye, are dimming, I Life's not life and death's not death. The meaning I Vanishes." One should not be misled by the rationality associated with the verb yest' ("is"), for even if the statements are regarded as formulas, their effectiveness is nullified by the subsequent "The meaning I Vanishes" as well as by the reference to the specific dates in parenthesis.
That parenthesis is a breathtaking lyrical breakthrough of Tsvetaeva's. The generosity of soul invested in
... What a lark then for the 'twenty-seven, Coming, and for the departing 'twenty- Six—to start with you and to be ending With you).
is beyond calculation, for it itself is given in the amplest units—in categories of time.
Starting with this envy—almost jealousy—of time, with this sobbing Kakoye shchaste ("what a lark"), which slips (because of the shift to a non-standard stress on the first syllable in toboi—"with you") into a vernacular pronunciation of "o" as "aw" in the next line, Tsvetaeva begins to speak of love almost overtly. The logic of this transition is both simple and touching: time, after all, the year, was luckier than the heroine. And hence the thought of time— all time—in which she is not to be together with "him." The intonation of this parenthesis is the intonation of a lament for one's betrothed. More important, however, is the role of separative force assigned to time, for here one can detcct a tendency to objectify and animate time. The truth is that at the heart of every tragedy lies the undesirable version of time; this is most obvious in classical tragedies, where the time (the future) of love is replaced by the time (the future) of death. And the content of the standard tragedy, the reaction of the hero or heroine remaining on stage, is a denial, a protest against an unthinkable prospect.
But no matter how high-pitched such a protest may be, it is always a simplification, a domestication of time. Tragedies, as a rule, are composed by ardent young people when the trail is still hot, or by elders who have substantially forgotten what it was all about, anyway. In 1926 Tsvetaeva was thirty-four, the mother of two children, and the author of several thousand lines of verse. Behind her was the civil war and Russia, love for many, and the death of many, including those she loved. Judging by the parenthesis (as well asby the entire sum of her work, for that matter, starting from 1914-15), she already knew something about time which not many of the classics, the Romantics, or her contemporaries had an inkling of. Namely, that life has much less of a relation to time than death (which is longer), and that from the standpoint of time, death and love are the same: the difference can be discerned only by a human being. That is, in 1926 it was as if Tsvetaeva were on an equal footing with time, and her thought did not try to adjust time to it but was trying to adjust itself to time and its frightening needs. "What a lark then ... I ... to start with you, and to be ending I With you" is said in the s^e tone she would have used to thank time, had time granted her a meeting with Rilke. In other words, the degree of her soul's generosity is but an echo of time's possible generosity toward her—undemonstrated but no less possible an account of all that.
Moreover, she also knew something else about Rilke himself. In a letter to Boris Pasternak dealing with their joint plans for a trip to visit Rilke she writes: "... and yet I'll tell you that Rilke is overloaded, that he needs nothing, no one . . . Rilke is a hermit . . . The ultimate chill of a possessor comes over me from him, in whose possessions I am included a priori. I have nothing to give him: everything's been taken. Yes, yes, despite the ardor of letters, the impeccable ear, and the purity of attunement—he doesn't need me, nor does he need you. He is beyond friends. For me this meeting twists the knife, it's a stab in the heart, yes. Especially since he is right (the chill is not his but that of the protective deity in him!), since I in my best highest strongest most detached hours—am like that myself ..."
And "Novogodnee" is that very best highest strongest most detached hour, and that is why Tsvetaeva yields Rilke to time, with which both poets have too much in common to avoid the semblance of a triangle. Intrinsic to both of them, at least, was a high degree of detachment, which is the main property of time. And the whole poem (as, essentially, her oeuvre in general) is a development, an elaboration of this theme—better still, of this state, i.e., of drawing nearer to time—expressed in the only palpable spatial categories: height, the next world, paradise. To put it more simply, "Novogodnee" justifies its title first of all because it is a poem about time, one of whose possible embodiments is love, and another death. Both poets, in any case, associate themselves with eternity, which is merely a fraction of time and not, as is commonly held, vice versa. That is why we hear no resentment in this parenthesis.
^bat's more, knowing the content of the passage from the letter quoted above, one may assume with certainty that had the projected meeting taken place, the parenthesis would have been retained. Time would have remained the object of jealousy and/or of the author's generosity of soul, for the happiest, i.e., the most detached, love is still inferior to the love for detachment instilled in the poet by time. Time is literally an after-word to everything in the world, and the poet, who constantly deals with the self-generating nature of language, is the first to know this. This equation— of language and time—is precisely that "third, new aspect" which the author hopes to "grasp when we shall meet," on account of which "the meaning vanishes" for her, and, postponing the shedding of the scales, she shifts registers and switches on her vision:
Across the table I look at your cross. How many spots—out of town, and how
much room Out of town! And to whom else if not us— Does a bush beckon? Spots—specifically ours And no one else's! All the leaves! All the needles/ Spots of yours with me (of yours with you). (We could have rendezvoused— Just to chat.) Never mind places/ Think of the
months! And weeks! And rainy suburbs Without people/ And mornings! And everything
altogether Not yet launched into by nightingales!
The field of vision restricted to a cross on a grave or in the hand underscores the ordinariness—the almost mass character of the described sentiment; and the landscape encompassed by this field is, in tum, an ordinary, middle- class landscape. The neutrality, the semi-legality of suburbia, is the typical background of Tsvetaeva's lyric love poetry. In "Novogodnee" Tsvetaeva resorts to it not so much for the sake of lowering the pitch, i.e., for antiroman- tic reasons, as from the inertia created by her other, longer poems ("Poem of the Hill" and "Poem of the End"). In essence, the addressless and cheerless character of suburbia is universal if only because it corresponds to the intermediate position occupied by a human being himself between total artificiality (the city) and total naturalness (nature). At any rate, an author of modern times, if he wants to be convincing, will not choose either a skyscraper or a glade as a backdrop for his drama or pastoral. It would most likely be a spot out of town, with all three meanings with which Tsvetaeva endows the word "spot": railroad station ("How many spots—out of town"); area, i.e., space ("room I Out of town"); and a trvsting place ("Spots— specifically ours I And no one else's!"). The last meaning is made even more specific by the exclamations "All the leaves! All the needles!" in which we see a citv dweller in the midst of nature looking for a spot to sit or lie down in. Stylistically, this is still a lamentation, but now the rustic, peasant diction yields at this point to "blue-collar" diction— both in vocabulary and in intonation: