Therefore, her fate is so electrified by posthumous readerly interest, while conversation about her almost inevitably runs in the mode of a comrades’ court. Any biographical twists of Pasternak, Kuzmin, or Daniil Kharms still keep the reader at a distance, remaining in full measure the author’s private business. When we speak about Tsvetaeva, we’re speaking about ourselves—and not only because her life bears the mark of that horror about whose existence we know thanks to our own worst misgivings. Her story is an important chapter in the invisible book of collective experience; and, unlike in many, here we receive the information straight from the horse’s mouth. Everything in this family chronicle is documented in the most detailed manner; the progress (and outcome) of this life may be recreated by the day and by the week—every movement of the soul is recorded and analyzed; letters and notebooks keep a detailed enumeration of misfortunes and grievances. Here we must remember once again the mechanism of a reality show—and it grips you as if your own fate were at stake, even though we know how it ended. It’s not a matter of the (always real and always fictive) conflict of the exception and the rule, the poet and the crowd; it’s just that in what Tsvetaeva talks about and what she insists on everyone is a poet, a suffering exception to all the rules, no matter how thick the crowd from which he looks out. This voice, the childlike voice of pure godforsakenness, of final despair, of eternally trampled right, is familiar to everyone—because we all share it. At that depth where every person is Job, presenting his lonely account to God, he speaks in Tsvetaeva’s voice; and this speech still offends the imagination and the hearing, like the “howl of great longing” in Baratynsky’s poem “Autumn.”
To stand facing the wall of one’s own death cell is a pretty excruciating business. It’s more natural to prefer poetry that helps us turn away, better yet forget about the cell’s existence. There are authors who suggest that we look out the window (“Which century is it outside, my dears?”5) or take a close look at moving pictures. Tsvetaeva is in a different group, among those who represent memento mori here and nothing else. There are few of that kind—therefore her testimony is worth its weight in gold.
For her, emigration meant the necessity for the first time in her life to become a professional writer—that is, to earn her bread with literary labor. If she had existed earlier outside of ranks and contexts, publishing or not publishing according to her own wishes, now she had to fit herself into circumstances already inhabited by everyone else, to switch her natural regimen of non-participation and non-joining from external to internal, though that made it no less obvious to everyone. In the mid-1920s, it seemed she had succeeded in this and become one of the authors who occupied a strong position with regard to the times. She briefly, unintentionally turned out to be what she had always shunned: one who expresses the aspirations of the epoch, the banner of a certain generation; more accurately, one of two banners—the other was Boris Pasternak. In those very years the two of them joyfully explored the potential and range of their rhymedness, the internal affinity they both acknowledged. In readers’ perception, they represented the most up-to-date contemporaneity, a word and concept that was deeply alien to Tsvetaeva, who was interested only in things that didn’t age—or else in things that had aged once and for all. Both Tsvetaeva and Pasternak, although their first books had come out before the Revolution, entered the orbit of broad readership only at the start of the 1920s—and their new brand of poetry, unmuddied by political engagement like Mayakovsky’s, and not seeming to contemporaries archaic, museum-like, as Mandelstam’s poems did at that time, suggested the possibility of a new literature—not Soviet, not émigré, different: clearing the throat and the vision. This didn’t last long. As Tsvetaeva’s poetic idiom changed from (relative) conservatism and general comprehensibility toward obvious complicatedness, its novelty began to acquire a distinctly negative hue in the eyes of the literary milieu; and that milieu itself was becoming more and more rarefied, while the possibility of selling a manuscript6 grew ever more unrealistic.
One of the points of divergence with her era was Tsvetaeva’s principled utilitarian and even condescending attitude to language: as an obedient instrument—or a part of her own body not requiring ceremonious handling. (This is fairly rare in the poetry of that time with its cult of quality—and in today’s as well, which in many ways exists within coordinates that Brodsky suggested, where language represents a self-regulating machine, recruiting authors of its own will to perform a certain type of work.) For Tsvetaeva, language is used or overcome as a material—the external membrane of the essence that alone is important. Disregarding externality in the name of meaning was so natural for Tsvetaeva that she was invariably bewildered by critical articles that spoke of her poems as toys, performed in this or that style, describing the surface while not reaching the internal task. Her belief in the extra-linguistic power of meaning explains the effort Tsvetaeva expended to make her poetry accessible in French. The titanic labor—translation of her own long poem The Swain into French, which never did find a response, was an attempt to let the piece be realized anew in one of the languages native to her (“German more native than Russian / To me, Angelic is most native of all!”). In émigré literature, obsessed with the idea of preserving the Russian language as a shared safe conduct, Russia in a traveling bag, this position (“For a poet there is no native language. Writing poetry is in itself re-wording”) was unique—and deeply alien.
It was her relationship with Pasternak that, for Tsvetaeva, happened to be her primary bet on life of that time. Their internal mutual commitment “to live up to each other” was a streambed along which Tvetaeva’s thought flowed for years, flooding the underwater rocks of the inevitable affairs and infatuations, which in their shallowness and finiteness only confirmed the correctness of the main choice. But how finite that choice, too, turned out to be! Their correspondence, which began in 1922—starting at once on the highest note—was meant from the beginning to be something much more than a literary friendship: a meeting of equals (Siegfried and Brunhilde, Achilles and Penthesilea), doomed by the power of things to each other and to a shared stand against the world, back-to-back, on the boulder of the word “we.”7 In Tsvetaeva’s private mythology, where poetry’s source is impersonal and supra-personal, all poets (starting with herself and all the way to Orpheus) comprise something like a caste of translators-ferrymen from the angelic language into the one they were given at birth. Speaking with Rilke’s words, which she could have considered her own, “One poet only lives, and now and then / Who bore him, and who bears him now, will meet.”8 The meeting with one of her own caste became in her consciousness an event that could justify an entire life and explain all the earlier failures and disappointments as stemming from a disparity of species—the general human with her own, particular kind. More than that: only the meeting and equality of that higher order could knock loose the predetermined march of time of her fate, render harmless the active myth of her eternal bond with Efron.