The great silence of abandonment, the bewilderment of culpability are the same here as in a short note from 1920: “Why does nobody love me? Isn’t the fault—in me?” The long-lasting farewell, beginning in her youth, to the potential—those subjunctive possibilities that youth offers a person—becomes final, humiliating in its forcedness. A straight perspective turns out to be impossible, the time comes for reverse perspective.
The only home that remained to Tsvetaeva, who did not accept what the present offered her as such and regarded any future with justified suspicion, became the unchangeable and never-betraying time of eternal stasis, which she fell into as if going back home. In her last years, she began to use the longing for the past that accompanied her all her life as a refuge. The past became not only a synonym for solitude in one’s chest, but also a model of a better world, and the mere fact of belonging to it testified to the good quality of a person or phenomenon. She perceived what had passed away as a nature preserve, the last place where one could still find things and qualities that she had received from there and uncharacteristic of the new epoch: both the “round-robin of goodness,” and “scorn for the temporary garment of flesh.” Turning to face her own and other people’s yesterdays, she sought and found a living support in them: “Only little Marcel relieves my suffering from the lack of sensitivity in the surrounding world, being of a different generation where every man gave up his seat to a woman, whether or not she was pretty, where no one remained seated when a woman was standing, and—oh, especially this!—where no one talked to you with their feet up on a chair.”10
The mention of Proust here is no accident: his manner of textually resurrecting the past turned out to be the key to new writing for several Russian writers left without a place by the epoch that had arrived (besides Tsvetaeva, here we might also recall Kuzmin, who in 1934 arranged his final, experimental diary “according to Proust”). Tsvetaeva’s corpus of retrospective prose (to call it memoirs would be a very big stretch), written in her last years, seems to have been intended to carry out a purely magic action: resurrecting (or at least preserving, placing in the fireproof safe of verbal eternity) everything and everyone she had loved, extending their being—and standing beside them: there and that way, as she herself wished. “The more I bring you to life, the more I myself die, perish from life—toward you, into you—I die. The more you are here, the more I am—there. As if the barrier between the living and the dead is already removed, and both these and those move freely through time and space—and through their opposite. My death is payment for your life.”
By the time of her departure from France this payment was complete. “How many lines gone by! I don’t write anything down. That—is finished.”
Instead of describing everything that happened to Marina Tsvetaeva next—her meeting with her family, life locked up in an NKVD dacha, her daughter’s arrest, her husband’s arrest, dragging through lines outside prisons and writers’ organizations, the first days of the war, the catastrophe of evacuation from Moscow, her extreme solitude and her solitary suicide, I shall copy here—letter by letter—at least part of the open letter she wrote for an émigré children’s magazine in winter 1937–38, which remained unpublished at the time. It’s that very same farewell voice of common sense, which may also be called heavenly truth: the truth of higher courtesy and genuine (not trying to be that)—poetry; I think it is that kind of voice.
Dear children,
I’ve never thought of you separately: I’ve always thought that you are people or non-people (like us).
But they say that you’re a special breed that’s still susceptible to influence.
Therefore:
—Never pour out water for nothing, because at that moment a person is dying in the desert for want of this drop.
“But he won’t get this water if I don’t pour it out!”
“He won’t get it, but there will be one senseless crime fewer in the world.”
—For the same reason, never throw bread away, and if you see some on the street, underfoot, pick it up and put it on top of the nearest fence, for there’s not only a desert where people die without water, but also slums where they die without bread. Besides that, maybe someone hungry will notice that bread, and will feel less bad taking it that way, rather than from the ground.
Never be afraid of a funny thing, and if you see a person in a silly situation: 1) try to get him out of it, and if that’s not possible—jump in to join him as if into water, with two people a silly situation is divided in half: half of it for each—or else, at worst, don’t notice it.
Never say that everyone does it that way: everyone always does it badly, if people are so eager to refer to them […] 2) everyone has a second name: no one, and has no face at alclass="underline" a blank haze. If they say to you: no one does that (dresses, thinks, etc.), answer: “But I am someone.” […]
Don’t say “not fashionable,” always say: not honorable. It both rhymes, and it sounds and works better.
Don’t be too angry at your parents—remember that they used to be you, and that you will be them. Besides, for you they’re parents, but for themselves they’re each—I. Don’t limit them to their parenthood.
Don’t condemn your parents to death before (you are) forty. And then—you won’t dare lift a hand!
2010
Translated by Sibelan Forrester
Conversations in the Realm of the Dead
(Lyubov Shaporina)
1.
In one of her diaries—and she kept them, day after day, year after year, from 1898 to 19671 (not counting the years of her female life, when she experienced all the things that make up the eternal material of novels: youth, falling in love, marriage, children, hurt feelings, rejection of any kind of hope)—Lyubov Shaporina, née Yakovleva, recalled an incident with her classmate. It was in Naples, in 1905; her friend had wound up there without friends, without acquaintances, without money, in a filthy and frightening hostel, and she waited to be rescued, having barricaded the door with a dresser. “When I went into her room, she threw herself into my arms with sobs. […] After she had calmed down a bit, she said, ‘I kept thinking: what was going to happen next? Is this just a bad joke, or would it be for my whole life?’ And that’s what I think all the time, too. Many people have died that way, without an answer to their question.” Shaporina wrote this in Leningrad, in December 1943, in the heart of a bad joke that would end, for her, only with her life.
The role she was fated to play, the work of a common monument builder, and in a certain sense of the observer of a common graveyard, would have surprised her. The diary began as private, she thought of it that way, and the main engine that drove her through the years and pages was perhaps the energy of hurt feelings, the power of resistance that originated in the circumstances of everyday life and wasn’t extinguished even after fifty years. The hurt feelings had a simple plot: she wasn’t loved, and as you first read that seems inexplicable. Her life is the exemplary, purebred life of a good person, which if abbreviated easily fits on a hagiographic template. Decades of loneliness: her husband, the Soviet composer Shaporin, went through mistresses with funny last names; her son, the spit and image of his father, grew (and lived) farther and farther from her; her beloved daughter, born late, died at twelve, and the burning longing for her only became stronger over the years; her grandchildren grew up and disappointed her. Decades of self-sacrifice: in 1937, Shaporina, whose own life was unsettled, took in and raised as her own the two daughters of an acquaintance who had been executed (one of them, when she got older, would successfully sue to take Shaporina’s room). At the same time, there was nothing stoic in Shaporina’s loneliness: bypassed once and for all by what the Soviet dialect she hated called happiness in personal life, she continued (according to her own codex, which allowed neither weakness nor deviation) to accomplish feats to the glory of faithfulness and to hope in vain for a symmetrical response. The objects of her devotion would change, disappear, move into the background; the logic of self-immolation never changed.