Her biography seems to be widely known; therefore, I’ll permit myself to speak about it in passing, in a dotted line, emphasizing what seems to me most essentiaclass="underline" nodes of meaning, unsolved (insoluble) problems.
As an epigraph to the first part of After Russia, her last collection of poetry, published in 1928 when the lyrical stream had begun if not to dry up then to change streambeds, Tsvetaeva took a phrase from Vasily Trediakovsky, changing it a bit in her own way: “It does not follow from the fact that the poet is a creator that he is a liar; a lie is a word against reason and conscience, but poetic invention occurs according to reason, such as a thing could and should have been.”
Tsvetaeva’s biography, like those of the majority of people born at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, unfolded precisely in the logic of what should not have been: outside any kind of expectations, against concepts of the possible. Surviving in the conditions presented depended on readiness and ability to change: accommodating oneself to the improper, living in its speedy regimen of kowtowing to the future. For Tsvetaeva, whose deep-rooted virtue was going against the grain (“One out of all—for all—against all!”), and whose heart’s inclination was everything that was departing, conquered, or speaking from under the ground (“What happened in the past is dearest of all”), a natural place was amid the doomed majority. That is, among those who could not or did not wish to usurp the right to speech on behalf of the future. Her natural neighbors in history were not the doers, but the livers: women, old people, the cast of characters in minor history—and the easy victims of major history.
Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow on October 8 (September 26, Old Style—Russian September, as she herself said1), 1892. She spent the whole rest of her life looking into her own early childhood, digging deep into it, as if into a treasure chest, choosing what was needed and leaving the rest to lie on the bottom as an untapped capital, a gold reserve of exemplars—answers to all questions. The Spartan childhood of a Moscow girl from a professor’s family, with a father who looked over their heads at the portrait of his late first wife, and a mother who looked over the piano at her own quickly approaching death, with a Tarusa summer house and Moscow winter, was arranged in an elevated and fairly harsh mode: at the intersecting lines of prohibitions and self-restraints. It was, apparently, by right of any childhood, quite happy—enough that “yearning for my life up to the age of seven” remained the one place where Marina Tsvetaeva felt at home for her whole life, while the wish to erect a monument to that life before seven is one of her main creative volitions, carried out and unrealizable. “I agree to 2 years (I’m honest!) of solitary confinement […] NB: with a yard, where I can walk, and with cigarettes—during which two years I’ll take it upon myself to write a splendid thing: my early childhood (up to seven—Enfances)—‘take upon myself’ isn’t right!—I won’t be able not to” (from her notebook, 1932).
Her mother, Maria Aleksandrovna Meyn, died when the Tsvetaeva sisters, Marina and younger Asya, were thirteen and eleven years old. Her death knocked the framework of the family arrangement crooked at once. In place of unwilling hours at the piano came willing hours, with Napoleon’s portrait placed in the icon frame instead of the religious image; the mother’s “so it must be” was swiftly replaced by the daughter’s “I have the right.” What’s interesting here is not the external outline of a youthful breakaway, one and the same in all eras—switching through several high schools in a year, skipping class, binge reading in the unheated attic, her first literary acquaintances, the first—also predictably literary—love. What’s characteristic is something else: how the exaggeratedly old-fashioned, intentionally childish selection of Tsvetaeva’s preferences breaks out of a general (“fashionable”) repertoire. Napoleon—Marie Bashkirtseff—Edmond Rostand—Lydia Charskaya’s novels—all these books and heroes of very young years, already then passing into the institution of the antique or maidenly. Some change or break in Tsvetaeva’s circle of reading could be expected with the start of her literary life—about which we have yet to speak. But neither her acquaintance with Ellis (a pseudonym of Lev Kobylinsky), a Symbolist poet from Andrei Belyi’s circle, nor her sudden and ardent friendship with Maximilian (Max) Voloshin, prevent (they sooner force) her to stand up for and assert what was her own: the literature of the phrase, of the cloak and rapier, with which heroica was linked for her then: ideals of the life-by-truth, on a high note, inherited from her mother.
This impulse (the choice and confirmation of her own, going against what was commonly accessible and/or trending) defined the beginning of her literary fate—and, as it became clear later, also a lasting strategy—of separateness, standing against any curly brackets, any milieu, literary or everyday, out of those that life offered her. And insofar as life was hard indeed, that static standing against quickly became an open (or closed—locked up for long decades in Tsvetaeva’s archive) confrontation—shooting at a moving target. This credo was one she was already proclaiming in a youthful letter in 1908: “Against the Republic for Napoleon, against Napoleon for the Republic, against capitalism in the name of socialism […], against socialism, once it’s brought to life, against, against, against!” Tsvetaeva stepped back from this credo only once, in the mid-1920s, when for a moment her work turned out or seemed to be topical—written into a literary context rather than breaking out of it—but that didn’t last long.
For a long time consistent assertion of her own otherness also seemed necessary because at first Tsvetaeva saw the external frame of her own fate as insufficiently dramatic, overly fortunate, “too rosy and youthful”—just like her own young rosiness, just like the glasses she quickly and permanently abandoned—despite her extreme nearsightedness. What would some years later, during her Berlin meeting with Andrei Belyi, become a catchword of their shared near and dear past (“You’re the daughter of Professor Tsvetaev. Whereas I’m the son of Professor Bugaev. You’re a professor’s daughter, and I’m a professor’s son. You’re a daughter, I’m a son”), was at first a mark of what was hatefully typical: a Moscow miss from a decent family, “with demands” and with “verses.” Tsvetaeva recognized her own people and things by their stamp of solitariness and separation; in her autobiographical prose “The Devil” (1935), she would write about her half sister: “After the Ekaterininsky Institute she entered the Guerrier Women’s Courses […], and then joined the Social-Democratic Party, and then the teaching staff at Kozlov High School, and then a dance studio—in general she kept on joining up her whole life. Whereas the true token of his [the devil’s, and Tsvetaeva’s too—M.S.] favorites is full dissociation, from birth and from everything—excludedness.”
Tsvetaeva acts—differently, moving away step by step from any societalness or groupness. In 1912: “So far only Gorodetsky and Gumilev, both members of some kind of guild,2 have attacked me. If I were in the guild, they wouldn’t attack me, but I’m not going to be in the guild.” In 1918: “I am really, absolutely, to the marrow of my bones—outside of any estate, profession, rank. A tsar has tsars behind him, a beggar has beggars, I have—emptiness.” In 1920: “My longing for Blok is like the longing for someone I didn’t finish loving in a dream.—And what could be simpler?—Go up to him: I’m so-and-so … If you promise me all of Blok’s love in exchange for it—I won’t go up to him.—That’s how I am.” In 1926: “I haven’t belonged to any literary tendency and do not belong.” In 1932: “No one resembles me and I don’t resemble anyone, therefore it’s pointless to recommend this or that to me.” And—in 1935, a time of penultimate evaluations: “I myself chose the world of non-people, what can I complain about?”