In her prose memoir “A Living Word About a Living Man,” dedicated to the memory of Max Voloshin, Tsvetaeva recalls their daydreams of shared literary mystifications—unrealized, as she says, only due to her Germanic honesty, “the ruinous pridefulness of signing everything that I write.”
“Marina! You harm yourself with abundance. You have the raw materials for ten poets, and all of them—marvelous! But wouldn’t you like (cajolingly) to publish all your poems about Russia, for instance, as some him, say a Petukhov? […] And then (already entirely out of breath) […] there’ll be twins, poetic twins, the Kriuchkovs, let’s say, a brother and sister. We’ll create something that has never existed, that is, twin geniuses. They’ll write all your romantic poems.”
“Max!—and what will be left for me?”
“For you? Everything, Marina. All that you are yet to be!”
A conversation worth remembering: Tsvetaeva’s creative work would exist under the sign of this temptation (or this choice)—to be ten poets at once (but keeping for herself the right of signature)—for many years more. The romantic metaphors of her juvenile poems (“I crave all roads—at once!”) are realized here with literal exactness, and what’s more not only in the process of writing, in the selection of these or those speech masks, important for the “pre-emigration” Tsvetaeva. Some of the poetic collections Tsvetaeva published in her lifetime would be composed according to this (“Voloshinian”) scheme: the Gypsy poems (Mileposts II), the “White Army” ones (Demesne of the Swans), the “romantic” ones (Psyche, the plays), the “Russian” ones (Sidestreets, The Tsar-Maiden). It’s characteristic that the real (internal) chronology of Tsvetaeva’s oeuvre, whose stages she describes in 1935 in a letter to Yuri Ivask, has no place for the greater part of these books: the tasks that inspired their publication were too external. On the other hand, by the mid-1910s all the tasks Tsvetaeva was solving were already both broader and narrower than purely literary ones.
In particular, her logic at that time (“craving all roads,” the desire to experience everything and for everyone) had an everyday flip side, which was only indirectly related to literature, but which determined a great deal in the life of Tsvetaeva’s family. “My one conviction is that I have a right to absolutely everything, droit de seigneur. If life challenges that—I don’t resist, I’m just deeply astonished, and I won’t lift a hand out of fastidiousness,” Tsvetaeva wrote to her sister-in-law during the war in autumn 1916. The palpable, dazzling sunniness of her inner state and existence then is also linked to the fact that no one close to her would have even thought to challenge that right-to-everything, including her attempts to speak with several voices and to live several lives at once. The sense of things going slightly out of focus, of the overheating, as when air thickens over the asphalt in summer and starts to ripple, emerges from the Efrons’ family correspondence: an inexpert but still domestic life with cares about their little daughter Alya, with literary gossip, negotiations about firewood and nannies, keeps thinning out, letting us see Tsvetaeva’s next object of interest in the series. There seem not to be many (Sofia Parnok, Mandelstam, Tikhon Churilin, Petr Efron, Nikodim Plutser-Sarna)—at least their presence produces no impression of “Homeric debauchery.” Their names flicker in Tsvetaeva’s and Efron’s correspondence with his sisters as inevitable circumstances of the time. The fact that against that background Efron goes away, first as a male nurse to the front and then into military service, may be explained by his perpetual willingness to endure self-sacrifice—but a vague whiff of a looming breakdown appears in the story. The Revolution made the unnamed possibility of separation a reality, imposed from outside; it brought about a stony hopelessness with which it was impossible to make peace. Over the course of several years Tsvetaeva and Efron, who was fighting on the Don, in the Volunteer Army, had no news of each other—yet clung all the stronger to the memory of their life together. The fact that they both survived and made it through to a new meeting made their union unshakable: that is, in equal measure sacred and fatal.
The conditions of Tsvetaeva’s life in Moscow in the four years after the Revolution (she left Russia on May 11, 1922) may be considered simply typical, if only because all of Moscow and all of Russia wound up the same. Her reaction to them was also typical in its way: remaining in her emptied Moscow home—without money (her mother’s estate, on whose interest the Tsvetaeva sisters had been living, was confiscated in 1918), with no help from outside (the paid help left along with the money), with two small daughters, Tsvetaeva tried to continue living as before. The turn this life had taken could have frightened her, if not for her habit of embedding her biography in an elevated series of literary models. She tended to treat everything that happened to her in those first revolutionary winters as an Adventure—like dramatic chapters from Hugo novels: the growing poverty, and the apartment that quickly turned into a shell of its former self, and the attempts to sell everything that could have even the least value; the extreme disorder of everyday life—and, despite all that, the triumphant ceaselessness of higher being.
The quantity written in those years is impressive. What’s more, she had never written so much: eighty-seven poetic texts in the year 1917, a hundred and fifty-two in 1918, a hundred in 1919, a hundred and eleven in 1920, a hundred and eight in 1921, eighty-nine in 1922. We’re looking at a lyrical machine, producing—in the Stakhanovite mode, as it would be called later—unthinkable quantities of high-quality product, working independent of external circumstances or even in inverse dependence—producing more as things got harder for the person operating it. That same machine is revved up in her notebooks at this time—to process the living raw material of her heart’s and soul’s life. And inasmuch as the highest virtue of authorship is exactitude, this inevitably leads here to ethical maximalism of the soul, which doesn’t want to take into account what the body is doing at the moment, reduces the body to the function of experimental object—and lucky if not taking it to the anatomical theater. An extreme, uncompromising scrupulosity of analysis and a harshness of conclusions obtained remain in the notebooks, while the heart and the body keep on doing what they want, obeying their own caprices—and, therefore, providing new material for the notebooks.
Three constants are present in Tsvetaeva’s new life: the independent, autonomous work of the poetic machine; an endless series of half-accidental affairs, accounted for in the department of caprices or extravagances, but in actual fact essential for keeping the machine in working order; and the hateful necessity of existing “in days,” which Tsvetaeva was less and less capable of managing. In hindsight, she herself recollected the junkyard of amorous relationships that she worked through in those four years, the mash of human lives she tried to make use of in propelling her own historical drama, as a bad dream. Many things may be explained here only if we keep in mind Tsvetaeva’s persistent need to look upon her everydays as a text of which she wasn’t the (sole) author—evidently, unconsciously also keeping in mind that the laws of plot construction ensure any darkness comes to an end, that in sum everything should straighten out by itself—without her own participation, obedient to the authorial sense of measure and justice.
As we know, that didn’t happen either then or later; one lesson Tsvetaeva learned herself and was ready to share with others was that “in life […] no-thing is permitted—nichts—rien.” In November 1919, tempted by rumors of a wonderful children’s shelter where there was no end to the chocolate (and, apparently, hoping for a breather, free time for the notebook, her soul, and her heart), she registered both her daughters there—seven-year-old Ariadna (Alya) and two-year-old Irina. Here again the theme of Adventure arises: “the great Adventure of your childhood is unfolding,” as Tsvetaeva tries to ease the separation for herself and her older daughter. There’s famine in the shelter; both girls get sick, but for some reason their mother is slow to bring them home; this drags on until mid-January, when Alya’s condition becomes threatening and she’s quickly taken away. Little Irina remains in the shelter and dies on February 2 or 3 (Old Style). She’s buried somewhere there, in an unmarked mass grave. Tsvetaeva did not attend the funeral.