Nina Berberova about Marina Tsvetajeva in the book Italics are mine.
Мне нравится, что Вы больны не мной,
Мне нравится, что я больна не Вами,
Что никогда тяжелый шар земной
Не уплывет под нашими ногами.
1915
MARINA Tsvetaeva's SONGS IN POP CULTURES TODAY
While, like the last Gutenbergians, you read the text from paper, scan the QR code if you want to listen to Marina Tsvetaeva's version of the song "I like, что Вы больны не мной" according to which 1975. Mikael Tariverdiyev wrote the music, which was first performed by Russian pop diva Alla Pugacheva in the film "Irony of fate"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prWgGy6NBs4&list=RDprWgGy6NBs4&start_radio=1
In 1921, when Marina Tsvetaeva's longtime friend Ilya Ehrenburg brought a letter from Sergi Efron, which she had been waiting for for three and a half years, she, having sold off her remaining belongings in Moscow and obtained the necessary papers with the help of Narcompros (People's Commissar for Education) Anatoly Lunacharsky, left for Berlin with her daughter Alya on May 11, 1922. There, on May 19, she already read poetry at the Russian House of Arts, which was located in the "Prager Dile" cafe on Kurfurstenstrasse in the Tiergarten district.
Although she was an admirer and connoisseur of German romantic poetry, a devotee of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Heinrich Heine and studied Nietzsche's work on the birth of tragedy from the spirit of music, during the short period in Berlin in 1922 she mostly moved in the so-called "Russian Berlin". At that time, prominent Russian emigrant writers Ilya Ehrenburg, Vladislav Khodasevich, Mark Slonim and others were there. She visited Andrej Belog on Stubenstraße in Cosen (Brandenburg). To Abram Višnjak, the owner of the publishing house "Helikon", she wrote nine letters filled with declarations of love, but received only one in response. The cycle of poems "Zemaljski znaci" was born from this.
During 1922, two of her notable books were published, Separation i Songs to Blok in which one verse translated by Danilo Kish reads "Your name is in the hand of a bird..."
HARLECINE'S LOVE
On July 10, 1922, Marina moved from Berlin, where, as she says in one song, "the rain put the pain to sleep", to Prague, which, again, judging by the second verse, "carved into her heart". Sergei Efron, who took his philosophy exams there, met Konstantin Boleslavovich Rodzevich, who, like him, was evacuated to Gallipoli in 1920 with Wrangel's Whites, and from there he went to Prague in 1921, where he enrolled at Charles University.
photo: marina cvetajeva archiveKONSTANTIN RODZEVICH: Friend, Harlequin, adventurer and perhaps the most turbulent passion in Marina Tsvetaeva's life
This refined Don Juan, younger than Marina, of small stature, was her friend, Harlequin, Adventurer, her night and perhaps the most turbulent passion in her life (“Мой Арлекин, мой Авантюрист, моя ночь, моя страсть…”). She intended for him Song of the mountain i The song of the end. Rodzevich was not interested in her poetry and did not even read it. It was Marina who ended the relationship.
Maria Sergeevna Bulgakov, the priest's daughter whom the "cunning and gentle Harlequin" married after his "romance" with Tsvetaeva, she gave or chose with her the veil under which she would get married - with all her poison in that gift, as her daughter Alya would write.
Sergei was patient and waited for Marina to end the "romance" with his wartime comrade, describing her temperament as a "hurricane of passion" in a letter to the poet Voloshin, with which she feeds her poetry like a wood stove.
Marina and Sergej lived on a grant from the Masaryk government in a village near Prague, where on February 1, 1925, Marina gave birth to a son, Georgy Sergejevich Efron, who was affectionately called Mur in the family. In the émigré milieu at the time, and in publicist texts decades later, it was debated whether Moore resembled Efron or Rodzevich.
"In this matter, Marina was probably wrong. She definitely never told me. Maybe she didn't want to impose responsibility on me... The period of my life with Marina is very dear to me. And at the same time, my conscience bothered me a little: Moore, and all that...", Rodzevich will say to writer Veronika Loska in one of the rare confessions.
EMOTIONAL HURRICANE
Veronika Loskaja writes that her interlocutors who remembered the suffering, stubborn and turbulent nature of Marina Tsvetaeva listed the names of her poetic, platonic, epistolary, real or fictional "novels" and "love at a distance of a hundred kinds". The list is long enough to understand how difficult it is to separate myth from reality, whose dialectic of the time eludes the power of understanding of descendants. One can only reproduce, writes Loskaja, what different people said about these people at that time. The rest will remain a secret of each person's personal life:
Konstantin Rodzevich, Mandelshtam, Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke... And then Maximilian Aleksandrovich Voloshin, the poet of the Crimean circle in whose house she met her husband who understood her emotional eruptions, and she was devoted to him in return; Prince Sergei Mikhailovich Volkonsky, a director, whom Marina befriended in November 1920 when she worked in the Theater Department of the People's Commissariat of Education in Moscow; Konstantin Balmont, the translator of Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde, a philanthropist and cadet who in emigration wrote verses in which pearls sparkle around the letter "K", which begin with the surnames of the assassin of Lenin, the Kaplanovs and the assassin of a Chekist, the poet Kenningser, in whose house she fell in love with Mandeljstam at a literary dinner. Prince Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky and Baron Anatoly Sergeevich Steiger, poet of the first Russian Parisian generation, then Arseniy Alexandrovich Tarkovsky, master of classical verse, father of the famous film director Andrei Tarkovsky...
"And time will pass, the basis for gossip will disappear, insults and malice will be forgotten, the little things of everyday life will go down in history, without offending anyone's memory. And the songs," concludes Veronika Loskaja, "have become public property."
A century later, some young soul still sings: "I love that I am not your pain ... and that you are not my pain".
When a collection of prose texts by Marina Cvetajeva was printed in Belgrade in 1973, the translator Petar Vujačić noted that until then men had written most deeply about women, and that only Cvetajeva showed what unsuspected layers exist in, as he says, a woman's psyche, layers that future women's literature has yet to reveal to us. Not female because it would be written by women or because it would be intended for women, but literature in which a woman would have the courage to think like a woman and write like a woman, and to reveal to us what has so far remained undiscovered.
EPISTOLARY LOVE OF CVETAJEV, PASTERNAK AND RILKEA
photo: marina cvetajeva archiveBORIS PASTERNAK: His correspondence with Tsvetajev belongs to one of the most exciting dialogues in the history of literature
In 1926, Marina Tsvetaeva maintained an intensive correspondence with Boris Pasternak and Rainer Maria Rilke. According to some, it is one of the most exciting dialogues in the history of literature between three strong poetic minds with a distinctly elevated tone.
"What you write about yourself, I can write about myself: love, love, love from all sides. And that doesn't make me happy... Suddenly they discovered America: me. No, you discover America for me!" she wrote to Pasternak on May 22, 1926.
For Tsvetajeva, Rilke is the embodiment of poetry itself - not a poet, but a natural phenomenon, like the sea or the wind, a height after which there is no further, only silence or a fall... Rilke wrote to her on May 10, 1926: "Do you feel, poetess, how powerfully you conquered me, you and your ocean, which I read so beautifully with you? I write like you, and like you I descend from a few steps below, into the twilight of brackets, where sentences vault so strongly they press and the smell of the roses that once bloomed remains". She never met Rilke, and she experienced a real shock when she learned that the letter she sent to him at the end of 1926 arrived at his address when he was already lying dead.
Marina Tsvetayeva, then in difficult material and psychological circumstances, pushed to the margins of Russian Parisian emigrant life, expected the meeting with Boris Pasternak in Paris in 1935 to be on the "absolute" level from the letters, and she described it as a "non-meeting"...
"NE MEETING" MARINA CVETAJEVA AND BORIS PASTERNAK DURING THE ANTI-FASCIST CONGRESS OF WRITERS FOR THE DEFENSE OF CULTURE
On the night of June 20, 1935, a car arrived in Zagoryanka, near Moscow, where Boris Pasternak was on vacation. His alarmed wife was informed that Boris Leonidovich had been ordered to be taken to the writers' studio, where a tailor from the Literary Fund was to make his suit immediately. At night? Yes, at night. That was an order. Pasternak already knew why there was such a rush: the government was sending him to Paris for the anti-fascist Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture, and he had nothing to wear. Sewing a suit in one day turned out to be much easier than preparing for a congress. During the past six months, there were many reasons, both objective and subjective, for Pasternak, who was in a deep psychological and creative crisis, to fall into a state of depression.
The assassination of Sergei Kirov, the head of the Leningrad party organization, was followed by arrests of prominent figures, ideological persecution in the newspapers and calls for increased vigilance. On the other hand, in the mid-1930s, in response to the spread of fascism's influence, all communist parties that were members of the Comintern were ordered to form coalitions with political parties that were willing to oppose fascism. This replaced the previous directive on the basis of which communists called socialists and social democrats social fascists.
Ilya Ehrenburg, a poet, novelist and essayist who spent many years in Belgium, Germany and France, played an important role in Soviet cultural diplomacy in the promotion of Bolshevik Europeanism. Other Soviet writers were occasionally sent abroad: Isaac Babel, Vladimir Mayakovsky... Peter N. Tolstoy, who returned to Russia from exile in 1923, regularly traveled to Germany, Italy (1932), France, England, Czechoslovakia, England, France, Spain (1935–1937).
At that time, Ilya Ehrenburg, as the initiator of the congress, whose platform was supposed to be in line with the policy of gathering anti-fascists in the People's Front, considered that Boris Pasternak was a good choice for this purpose: a real poet, a non-party suspect to the Moscow ideologues, but known in the West for the originality of his artistic style, he spoke European languages fluently and stood out from the mainstream of socialist realism.
A complicated atmosphere of conflict on the left awaited him in Paris. A week before the opening of the congress, on June 14, 1935, a minor incident took place that illustrates this. On that rainy Parisian evening, a small group of Prague avant-garde artists, among them the poet Vítěslav Nezvall, headed to the popular bohemian Café Clozery des Lilas, on the corner of Montparnasse and Saint-Michel boulevards. Among them was the founder of surrealism, the fiery poet Andre Breton, prone to scandals. At that moment, Ilya Ehrenburg came out of the Closery de Lille, having just finished dinner, and one of the Czech artists who had known him since their earlier meetings in Prague, said his name. Andre Breton was shaking: "Where is he?"
Arriving at Ehrenburg, he stopped him in the middle of the boulevard and, exclaiming "Sir, the hour of reckoning has come!", hit him hard in the face. The reason for this outburst of anger was Ehrenburg's article entitled "Surrealists", published two years earlier, on June 17, 1933, in the Moscow "Literature Gazeta". In it, Ehrenburg accused the surrealists of masking themselves with Marx's ideas, and that their real program was "onanism, pederasty, fetishism, exhibitionism, and even bestiality."
Pasternak's presentation at the Congress was in agreement with Ehrenburg. Pasternak claimed to have uttered the sentence that avant-garde writers in the age of revolution did not need an organization, because the writer is alone and free, but it did not appear in the minutes or in Andre Marlowe's translation.
When he met Marina after the Anti-Fascist Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in the Age of Conflict on the Left, to which he had been sent suddenly, Pasternak was lost, confused and frightened. He didn't even answer her question about whether to return to Russia. He got up, went to get cigarettes and disappeared.
Some chroniclers interpreted that meeting as lustration of intolerance between writers in emigration and writers who remained in Russia. In the specific case it was not like that, but it was at that time.
"DEAR MAYAKOVSKY... HERE ARE YOUR MILUKOVS, HERE I AM, HERE YOU ARE... "
The coexistence of the pre-revolutionary messengers of the new age of different ideological and aesthetic orientations after the civil war in emigration turned into hostility. Marina Tsvetajeva was close to Vladimir Mayakovsky in terms of the flow of words and the dynamics of the verse, as well as the revolutionary nature of the form. She met him in the winter of 1918 in the circle of hooligans of that time, singled him out, felt him, even though it was difficult and she was always faithful to that love for him, writes Loskaja.
And in Paris in 1928, cadet Pavel Milyukov broke off cooperation with Marina Tsvetaeva because of an article in the magazine "Will of Russia" about Vladimir Mayakovsky, whom she had met for the first time: "Dear Mayakovsky... Here you are Milyukova, here you are with me, here you are. Assess the explosive power of your name..."
A POET OF MANY VARIETY AND ALONE
When in 1925 Marina Tsvetaeva went to Paris, the new intellectual capital of the Russian diaspora between the two wars, she lived miserably from writing, mostly prose, which was paid more. Sometimes she knitted hats with her daughter and sold them. Sergei Efron was ill, he didn't have a permanent job, he was engaged in publishing, he did all kinds of things. Among other things, he played cameo roles in films - once as a prisoner being shot by the Red Army - which turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the beginning, there was a "Committee to Help Marina Tsvetaeva" in Paris, which included well-known Russian emigrants, such as the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. Ivan Bunin considered her "unruly", although he set aside a certain amount of money from the Nobel Prize to help her. She read poetry during literary evenings at the house of the writer Leonid Andreyev and Anna Ilinichna in Clamart, a suburb of Paris where a small circle of advocates of the Russian Eurasian idea gathered, and Sergei Prokofiev sometimes played.
However, her poetics and her behavior were too different from the habits of the Parisian group of Russian émigré poets, which was then ruled by Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius, Vladislav Khodasevich and Ivan Bunin. Hodašević highly valued her songs, while melancholic acmeists of the "Paris school" did not like her. Vladimir Pavlovich Smirnov, professor of philological sciences from the Moscow Literary Institute, writes in the Moscow "Literaturna Gazeta" that at the age of 17, Marina Tsvetayeva entered the literary scene in the pre-revolutionary era when literature was dominated by the poets of the Silver Age, above all the Symbolists, but that it cannot be said that this significantly determined her diverse poetic profile, which was an amalgam of the avant-garde (sometimes with futuristic elements), folklore, mythology, emotionality, elusive girlish charm and discordant musicality.
In her article "Marina Tsvetaeva, Poet of Tragic Infinity", the Russian literary critic Jelena Pogorelaia notes that Tsvetaeva inherited the musicality of poetic speech from the Symbolists; from acmeism, meticulous attention to everyday details; and from futurism, a recognizable rhythm of speech, freedom and tendency towards neologisms and unexplored possibilities of language. Petar Vujičić says that she searched for new meanings in the legacy of folk poetry, both epic and lyrical, even in despised fragments, in the sordid layers of witchcraft and conspiracies, in civil romance; in the entire wealth of changes that the Russian language went through in its historical phases, from Letters about Igor's Campaign, through the poets of the 18th century, to Pushkin, Akhmatova and Alexander Blok.
Tsvetaeva also defined herself as a "poet of history", and her neoclassical tragedies in verse Ariyadna (1927) and Fedra (1928) have a mythological basis. In 1922, Mandeljstam, who was once dear to her, wrote in the newspaper "Knjizhevna Moskva" that "the worst thing about literary Moscow is women's poetry", and that "for Moscow, they are the saddest sign of the handiwork of Marina Tsvetaeva", whose "pseudo-national and pseudo-Moscow" poems about Russia are characterized by "bad taste and historical falsity". Tsvetaeva wrote from exile in the essay "My Answer to Osip Mandelshtam" (1926): "This is what 10 years of exile means. I forgot not only Mandelshtam, but also Russia..." Until her death from heart failure in the Sev-vostlag transit camp in Vladivostok on December 27, 1938, just before her 48th birthday, Mandelshtam did not write publicly about her again.
Loskaja notes that Marina Tsvetayeva showed pathos, not despair but suffering, because she was a poet. She says she was ready to suffer and die for the truth, but it was impossible to define that truth. "They bite me, but that's normal, after all, I'm a poet, and poets are hated and persecuted."
The word "poet" meant everything to her. She often said that the poet was doomed; she felt her connection with the great poets: Pushkin, Lermontov, Yesenin, Mayakovsky, but she recognized that their fate was tragic.
Joseph Brodsky said that Tsvetaeva is an extremely sincere poet, perhaps the most sincere in the history of Russian poetry of the 20th century. Her sincerity is the "sincerity of sound", like a cry of pain.
"PLASTER? I DON'T KNOW. MAYBE. VULGARIAN? NEVER! "
She gave the impression of a very cheerful and brave woman with short hair and a "Breton" appearance. Although short-sighted, due to narcissism, she was often without glasses.
She smoked: in Russia - cigarettes that she rolled herself; abroad - strong, masculine cigarettes, half a cigarette in a simple cherry branch mouthpiece.
She was proud (Marina's notorious pride).
And she had a difficult character, she behaved arrogantly.
Outraged by the fact that the leading critic Adamovič did not appreciate her, she said: "Adamovič will feed on my excrement"...
She once quoted the influential Ahmetist poet Georgy Ivanov: "Beautiful and vulgar Tsvetaeva...", only to say: "Beautiful? I don't know. Maybe. Vulgar? Never!"
It will continue in next issue
• About mucus on the eyes
• Eurasia, or the repentance of the White Guard
• Liquidation of resident traitors
• Ariadne and Sergey Efron in Moscow
• Marina alone among her own in a foreign country
• In Leningrad, after 17 years
• A long goodbye, too many tears...
• Letter to Beria
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