Pasternak’s appearance and presence in Tsvetaeva’s “days” (“in full purity of heart, the first poet in my whole life”), the feeling they both admitted of “relatedness along the whole front”—of a gift, of a human dimension and of that same other species—in and of itself summoned to life amorous connotations, a dream of complete coincidence and union. They both lived in rays of that union, now hurrying, now deferring a future meeting, until the early 1930s, when Pasternak’s new marriage made the daydream of their devotion to each other meaningless for Tsvetaeva. (“Well then I’ll refuse to look for my organic rhyme in this world, here. While there—everything rhymes!”—she wrote to him.) His choice and turn toward the masses (which Tsvetaeva did not notice before his “you’ll come to love the collective farms,” directed to her in 1935, in Paris, at the long-awaited meeting that so disappointed her) was a still worse refusal—now not just of her, but also of his direct predestination. “You don’t understand anything, Boris (oh, liana that has forgotten Africa!)—you’re Orpheus, devoured by beasts—they’ll chew you up.” The Africa of lyrics, which Pasternak had “forgotten” in the name of a faceless multitude and a beautiful woman as a representative of that multitude, now remained in her sole possession—an inheritance needed by no one, which she couldn’t share with anyone.
By the mid-1930s, Tsvetaeva’s lyric poetry had already become completely superfluous to the milieu of readers, too. If in 1921–1925 she had managed to put out ten poetic books, the next collection of verse was published with difficulty only in 1928, and it was the last book published in her lifetime. As time passed, publishing only got more complicated; a great, if not the greater, part of what Tsvetaeva wrote in emigration remained unread. After the publication of her article “The Poet on the Critic(ism),” which sharply departed from the accepted literary etiquette of the time, literary society’s sympathies turned out not to be on Tsvetaeva’s side. Over time there were fewer and fewer publications willing to collaborate with her, while the frameworks of that collaboration were ever more narrow. They asked not for new poems, but for some “understandable to the reader,” that is, hopelessly out-of-date for the author. They did print her prose (written “for earnings: reading aloud, that is in a forcedly articulate and explanatory mode […] for one-year-old children”), but reluctantly, with cuts that hopelessly distorted the author’s conception. In some cases, Tsvetaeva for various reasons had to refrain from publishing her work, which meant for her not only the impossibility of being heard but also a misfortune of a wholly everyday character: loss of the means for existence. Given the extreme poverty in which the Efron family lived, this impossibility of getting accommodated to life acquired a tragic character. Tsvetaeva was unsuited to other kinds of work; simply—she couldn’t do anything else (all the more so since in her own, verbal domain she could do everything and was very well aware of it). “I’m not a parasite, because I work, and I don’t want to do anything but work: but—my work, not someone else’s. Forcing me to do someone else’s work is pointless, for I’m incapable of doing any other than my own and menial labor (hauling weight, etc.). For I’ll do it in such a way that they’ll throw me out,” she wrote in her notebook in 1932. Against that background it seemed to those close to her, and sometimes she herself felt, too, that the place commensurate for her, the milieu in which she could sound forth to her full ability (and her full power) would have to be Soviet Russia with its multimillion population of new readers.
For Sergei Efron the choice was already made by the mid-1930s. The theme of a possible return to Russia stands above Tsvetaeva’s correspondence of the final years like a cloud (“I live under the stormcloud—of departure”). Everything, it would seem, was pushing her out, nudging her: the growing Sovietness of her husband and daughter, tightly connected with the Paris “Union of Return to the Homeland”—an organization directed and financed by the Soviet intelligence agencies (the GPU, then NKVD); the sense “that strength is over there,” as she wrote in a letter welcoming Mayakovsky; the airlessness of her own life, which was quickly turning into a vacuum.
Yet, nevertheless, Tsvetaeva once again takes a stand in opposition—this time not only to the logic of life, but to her own family, too: to her husband, her daughter, her son Georgy (nicknamed Mur), who is growing by the hour. “Horror at a self-satisfied Soviet unchildlike Mur—with his mouth full of programmatic clichés” is only a shadow of her everlasting horror before the kingdom of the victorious majority that she would be compelled to love: she is soberly aware of the impossibility of being an individual there. “I’m interested in everything that interested Pascal, and I’m not interested in anything that did not interest him. I’m not to blame for being so truthful, it would cost nothing to answer the question: ‘Are you interested in the future of the people?’ with ‘Oh, yes.’ But I answered: No, because I am sincerely uninterested in any kind of or any person’s future, which is for me an empty (and threatening!) place.”
At first she decides not to travel into that empty place, the country of the victorious future (“mainly—because of Mur,” she writes to Pasternak in 1933); later, “mechanically, passively, by the will of things,” she begins to move closer and closer to the edge. In 1937, after her daughter’s departure and the sudden, secret flight of her husband, who was entangled in a political assassination the NKVD had carried out abroad, Tsvetaeva had no ground left to stand on. She was living in Paris under surveillance, possibly also on NKVD money, feverishly sorting her archive, trying to stash manuscripts that would clearly not pass Soviet censorship with people she knew (“half of them—I can’t bring!”)—in fact, taking care of her own posthumous life, doing the external work of an archivist and commentator. The departure forced by circumstances didn’t have even a shadow of personal volition: she was leaving “like a dog,” not resisting—and that was all. On June 12, 1939, in Le Havre, Tsvetaeva boarded the steamship Maria Ulyanova, which took her and her son to Leningrad. “I’ll snap my own neck—looking back: at you, at your world, at our world …”—she writes to Anna Tesková on June 7, a few days before the final letter of farewell.
This already final turn toward that world and herself within it, the decisive summing-up, would become Tsvetaeva’s final task long before the threat of departure became real. Time after time the notebooks and letters of the 1930s analyze a riddle that didn’t cease tormenting her until the very end: the repeated failure of her earthly/female life. Some of the notes are in French: the language of a conversation with herself, assuming no other reader and interlocutor. Enumerating everything that had been given to her (name, external appearance, gift), Tsvetaeva tries to and is unable to solve the equation that resists her:
They approach, get frightened, disappear. […]
Sudden and total disappearance. He—gone without a trace. I—remain alone.
And it’s always one and the same story.
They abandon me. Without a word, without a “good-bye.” They used to come visit—they don’t come any more. They used to write—they don’t write any more.
And here am I in a great silence, which I never break, mortally wounded (or—cut to the quick—which is the same thing)—without ever understanding anything—neither for what, nor why.9