November 2016
Translated by Maria Vassileva
IV
Over Venerable Graves
Essays (2010–2013)
The Maximum Cost of Living (Marina Tsvetaeva)
Conversations in the Realm of the Dead (Lyubov Shaporina)
What Alice Found There (Alisa Poret)
The Last Hero (Susan Sontag)
From That Side: Notes on Sebald
Over Venerable Graves
The Maximum Cost of Living
(Marina Tsvetaeva)
On May 16, 1941 (that is, as we know from faraway in our own day and year, she still had three and a half months left to live), Marina Tsvetaeva wrote to her daughter in a distant northern labor camp: “We have a radio, we listen every evening, it picks up stations from far away, and I sometimes applaud like a fool—mainly—for statements of common sense, they’re a great rarity, and I notice that I myself am entirely common sense. That’s what POETRY is.”
By that time (and earlier than that, by the time of her return to Russia from emigration), she had already written her everything—(“I’ve written what’s mine. I could write more, of course, but I can easily not”)—with just a few exceptions, which make little difference. As another poet, Mikhail Kuzmin, said before his death, “The main thing’s finished, what remains are details.”
Thus, it’s tempting to consider this fragment from Tsvetaeva’s letter as something like an unintended last will and testament: a final line, drawn in the last minute under the labor of a life that was laborious in itself. It’s hardly worth letting it impress us overmuch: Tsvetaeva’s natural manner of speech and thought is an ascending dotted line of lightning formulas. They’re created “à propos,” as momentary answers to an internal or external demand, and therefore they often turn out to be mutually contradictory, refuting and rejecting one another. It’s better to consider them from a certain distance, in motion, noting the points of convergence and divergence and taking notice of the shared and unchanging center of gravity, toward which all the various utterances are oriented. Besides that, Tsvetaeva’s manner of writing involves constant stops and reboots. Drawing countless final lines under the most various circumstances of her own life and other people’s was a natural fuel for her: a means of picking up speed and transitioning into new texts and circumstances.
Let’s say, in 1939, when on the eve of leaving for the USSR Tsvetaeva copied a poem by her old literary enemy Georgy Adamovich into her notebook, adding below, “someone else’s poem, but which in places could be mine,” that gesture of poetic solidarity doesn’t annul her phrase from a letter three years before (“it turned out that it’s not bread he needs, but an ashtray full of cigarette butts: not me—but Adamovich and Co.”). What is alien remains alien, what’s her own remains her own; each assertion turns out to be totalizing: breaking out from a given sequence, asserting the priority of a dozen heterogeneous heavenly truths faced with the linear earthly truth. What should we consider the final judgment—a 1926 article full of icy (or sometimes boiling) scorn for Mandelstam’s Noise of Time or else “The Story of a Dedication,” a memoir on Mandelstam written in 1931, colored in tones of sisterly or maternal tenderness? Tsvetaeva’s testimony may benefit both the prosecution and the defense; her speech—every phrase taken separately—is something like a hanging bridge cast in haste from a fixed point (where the author is) to the transient subject of description, and invariably clinging to the air. Each phrase is a little model of a large system, a small will and testament, always ready to turn large. The letter from 1941 is one of many.
Yet, all the same, one wants to hold her formulations closer to one’s eyes and look at them against the light—in the end, what is the common sense she speaks of, if not what Tsvetaeva pushed away her whole life: the voice of the multitude she stubbornly scorned, of the triumphant majority? This phrase requires attention—neither the commonality of that commonness, nor the nature of that sense, apparently, are supposed to coincide with everyday—trivial—common sense, accepted wisdom intended for general use. However, in some sense Marina Tsvetaeva’s life and death, despite her desperate resistance, turned out to be nothing but common. Both in the sense of speedy and complete transformation into a literary myth—one of the primary ones of the Russian twentieth century, and also in a more essential sense: the nodal points of Tsvetaeva’s fate consistently turned out to be typical, emblematic, bringing the conditions of existence that were incompatible with life—émigré, Soviet, writerly, womanly—to extreme, white-hot clarity. That is, indicative (“my case is indicative”), and not only for the twentieth century with its wholesale deaths, but, however exaggerated it might sound, for human existence as such.
From the point of death (as if in a dream—from the point of waking), a human life casts back toward its beginning and acquires a final meaningfulness and clarity of structure, only now manifested. In Tsvetaeva’s case, the structure—the stubborn and destructive intention of fate—is so visible that it’s possible for that to obscure everything else. What we recognize first (“what is borne in the air,” as her mother says of Napoleon, in her prose)—is the dyad of poetry and suicide. It would seem to be an ordinary matter—dramatic biographies always cast a clear shadow, which makes them suitable for mass utilization (Pushkin—the duel; Mandelstam—death in the camps; Brodsky—exile, the Nobel Prize). But in Tsvetaeva’s posthumous fate, her suicide by far supersedes the poems, and sometimes it crowds them out. Mikhail Gasparov once wrote about that: “Today’s readers receive the myth about Tsvetaeva first of all, then afterward her poems as an optional appendix.” That seems to be true; and this particularity of Tsvetaeva’s case (which irritates many people) requires interpretation.
In essence, we have two texts in our hands, which complement and comment on each other—more than that, they don’t exist in isolation: “creative work” (her books of lyric poems, verses, long poems, plays, prose)—and “life,” where what Tsvetaeva herself wrote (the enormous archive of letters, rough drafts, diary entries) comprises barely a third. Other voices (witnesses and contemporaries) have an honorary and ungrateful mission—they step forward willy-nilly like the reasonable interlocutors of the Biblical Job: sympathizing or judging, but inevitably representing the side of order in the conversation—the way of things that they did not establish. They are the surface she was unable to cling to; the natural course of events for which she was a hindrance. Strictly speaking, they’re us ourselves, intending to live in the circumstances defined by this or that era; and by virtue of kinship we can’t avoid sympathizing with them, just as we can’t help sympathizing with Pasternak, who said of Tsvetaeva after her death, “She couldn’t wash a plate without Dostoevskian convulsions.”