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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
In examining the development of Tsvetaeva's lyric verse, it is possible to discern a recurrent thematic strain: a rejection by the poet of the conventional roles imposed on the individual by society, particularly certain characteristics of the feminine role. I will try to show that Tsvetaeva, in the process of rejecting, via her poetry, this key ingredient in a person's self-concept—namely, the sex role as defined by society—along with a rejection of other limiting social norms, developed images of the self that transcend social roles. Moreover, the working out of this poetic identity is not continuous but falls into several chronological stages.
In discussing a poet's self, critical method prescribes that a distinction be maintained between the individual and the poetic persona. Without negating this methodological stricture, it is important to keep in mind that for some poets an adequate interpretation requires one to perceive that the persona is an elaborate poetic projection and mythologization of the individual.
1. “Role, ” “self-concept, ” and “identity” are used in their commonsense meaning in ordinary discourse, rather than in the more specialized terminological senses established in the fields of psychiatry and sociology. Similarly, when speaking of the evolution of these aspects of an individual in Tsvetaeva's verse, I have made inductive observations about the themes and images in her poetry, rather than proceeding from a particular psychological or sociological model of the life cycle. This is not to say that appropriate models from the social sciences could not be fruitfully applied to explicate the work of some poets. I have found that my literary-critical description of the development of a poetic self-concept in the work of Tsvetaeva has interesting parallels to psychiatric and sociological models as formulated by Erik. H. Erikson, Carl Jung, Erving Goffman, and Ralph H. Turner. I am indebted to Norma Shosid for drawing my attention to Chad Gordon's enlightening study, “Role and Value Development Across the Life Cycle, ” in Role, ed. J. A. Jackson (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 65-105, which integrates several models of role, identity, and the life cycle.
After completing this paper, I became aware of the studies of the evolution of the poetics of Adrienne Rich and Rich's own observations on the subject contained in the volume Adricnne Rich's Poetry : Texts of the Poems. The Poet and Her Work, Reviews and Criticism, selected and edited by Barbara Charles worth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York, 1975). Rich's and Tsvetaeva's “poetics of change, ” nearly half-a-century and worlds apart, are instructive in their similarities and differences. Another recent study “fusing the making of literature and the formation of personality” is Helene Moglen's psychoanalytically oriented Charlotte Bronte : The Self Conceived (New York, 1976).
2. Brown, Edward J., Mayakovsky, A Poet in the Revolution (Princeton, N.J., 1973), pp. 6–7.Google Scholar
3. Taubman, Jane Andelman, “Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova : Two Female Voices in a Poetic Quartet,” Russian Literature Triquarterly, no. 9 (Spring 1974), p. 362.Google Scholar
4. Aleksandr, Bakhrakh, “Pis'ma Mariny Tsvetaevoi (Okonchanie),” Mosty (Munich), 6 (1961) : 329.Google Scholar
5. Ibid., p. 334.
6. Marina, Tsvetaeva, Ncisdannye pis'ma (Paris, 1972), p. 28–29.Google Scholar
7. Tsvetaeva, M. I., “O Germanii (Vyderzhki iz dnevnika 1919 goda),” Nesobrannye proisvedeniia (Munich, 1971), p. 469.Google Scholar
8. M. I. Tsvetaeva, Nesobrannye proisvedeniia, p. 15.
9. Ibid., p. 35.
10. Ibid., p. 46. In this edition, the word prialka in the first stanza is misprinted as priadka.
11. Ibid., p. 34.
12. Anastasiia, Tsvetaeva, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1971).Google Scholar
13. M. I. Tsvetaeva, Nesobrannye proisvedeniia, p. 11.
14. Ibid., p. 31.
15. Marina, Tsvetaeva, Versty (Moscow, 1922), p. 26–27.Google Scholar
16. Ibid., p. 56
17. Marina, Tsvetaeva, Isbrannye proisvedeniia (Moscow, 1965), p. 129.Google Scholar See also the pejoratively phrased stereotypical notion that philosophizing about abstract matters is as unnatural in a woman as singing would be for a fish in an April 1918 poem in Marina, Tsvetaeva, Lcbcdinyi stem, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1922), p. 51.Google ScholarPubMed
18. See Simon, Karlinsky, Marina Cvetaeva : Her Life and Art (Berkeley, 1966), p. 224 Google Scholar. The play Prikliuchenie is based on the memoirs of Casanova. Karlinsky describes how Tsvetaeva “changed and adapted … Casanova's characterisations, particularly that of [the heroine] Henriette” (ibid., p. 249). Karlinsky concludes by saying : “This ambiguous, almost hermaphroditic character is the most frank embodiment of Cvetaeva's indistinct dream of love and intimacy based on personal worth, which would exceed the limitations of one particular sex” (ibid., p. 249). He adds : “The same tendency can be discerned in the cycles 'Uchenik’ in Remeslo, ‘Brat'ja’ in Psixeja, the poem ‘Klinok’ in Poslc Rossii, and in some of the episodes of ‘Povest’ o Sonechke.'” Considerations of space preclude discussion of the latter, but it provides revealing autobiographical material about Tsvetaeva's capacity for infatuation with young women as well as men.
19. Karlinsky, Cvetaeva, p. 248.
20. Ibid., p. 211.
21. M. Tsvetaeva, Isbrannye proisvedeniia, p. 346.
22. Ibid., p. 353.
23. Ibid., p. 356.
24. Ibid., p. 358; see also p. 362 : Pod voennoi da pod veskoi stopoi/chut’ ne tresnul ves’ chelnok skorlupoi.
25. Ibid., p. 354.
26. Ibid., p. 363.
27. Ibid., p. 364.
28. Anya M. Kroth, paper presented at the Seventh National Convention of the AAASS, Atlanta, October 8-11, 1975.
29. M. Tsvetaeva, Izbrannye proizvcdeniia, pp. 364-65.
30. Ibid., p. 365.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., p. 441. The imagery of armor harks back to the poem “Ruan” written in 1917, whose speaker has a prevision of reenacting the martyrdom of Joan of Arc; Tsvetaeva, M. I., Ncizdannoe : Stikhi, tcatr, prosa (Paris, 1976), p. 110.Google Scholar
33. Translation by Simon Karlinsky, Cvctaeva, p. 209. The final “no” is to be read as an assent to the knight's query.
34. Readers who are misled by the topic of this paper into thinking that Tsvetaeva lacked maternal affection can find a corrective in the poem “Dve ruki, ” written on the occasion of Irina Efron's death; see M. Tsvetaeva, Isbrannye proizvcdcniia, pp. 155-56.
35. Ibid., p. 157.
36. Ibid., p. 162.
37. Ibid., p. 163.
38. Ibid., p. 165.
39. Ibid.
40. Marina, Tsvetaeva, Remeslo (Berlin, 1923), p. 7 Google Scholar. An early (1913) poem anticipates the sex-reversal as well as the paradoxical imagery of gentle and strong femininity (see M. Tsvetaeva, Isbrannye proizvcdcniia, p. 59).
41. M. Tsvetaeva, Remeslo, pp. 39-50.
42. An earlier allusion appears in a 1915 poem (M. I. Tsvetaeva, Nciadannoe, p. 89). A later one appears in Posle Rossii, in the poem “Dvoe, ” discussed in the next paragraph. Tsvetaeva's attraction to the image of the Amazon is especially evident in the rhapsodic description of Antiope, the Amazon mother of Hippolytus, in Fedra, discussed below, p. 252 and footnote 67.
43. M. Tsvetaeva, Remeslo, p. 86.
44. Tsvetaeva, M. I., Poslc Rossii (Paris, 1928), p. 129.Google Scholar
45. Ibid., p. 130. This poetic cycle is discussed by Jane Taubman, “Between Letter and Lyric : The Epistolary-Poetic Friendships of Marina Tsvetaeva” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1972), pp. 98-102.
46. M. Tsvetaeva, Rcmcslo, p. 63. In the second part of “Povesf o Sonechke, ” Tsvetaeva quotes a 1919 poem in which she speaks of herself as the “ancient Sibyl.” Her explanation of the association is that she, at that time, felt infinitely older than the friends whom she describes in the memoir (M. I. Tsvetaeva, Neisdannoe, p. 286).
47. M. I. Tsvetaeva, Posle Rossii, pp. 24-27.
48. In a later poem (ibid., p. 132) Tsvetaeva defines woman as a mysterious keeper of the future.
49. Ibid., pp. 24-25.
50. Ibid., p : 14.
51. In the anthologized “Popytka revnosti, ” as in “Poezd zhizni, ” the speaker is exempted from being an ordinary woman. The drive against the conventional is not without some qualified reversals. In an interesting poem written June 26, 1922 (M. Tsvetaeva, Isbrannyc proisvcdcniia, pp. 197-98), a few weeks or days before Tsvetaeva's anticipated reunion with her husband, we find a pledge of humble earthly service to an earthly lover by a speaker who claims to have shared the properties of the divine. The speaker's erstwhile divinity is expressed in Biblical imagery. The image of the earthly service that is promised is also taken from related desert culture—she will be a brazier providing warmth.
52. M. Tsvetaeva, Posle Rossii, pp. 123-24.
53. Ibid., p. 134. It is important not to interpret this image as an expression of a dislike of the physical. It is rather a statement of the poet's creative and spiritual freedom; see also the remarkable poem, “Zhiv, a ne umer, ” ibid., pp. 147-48.
54. Ibid., p. 52.
55. Ibid., pp. 52-53.
56. See Taubman, Jane Andelman, “Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak : Toward the History of a Friendship,” Russian Literature Triquarterly, no. 1/2 (1971-72), p. 312.Google Scholar See also Hughes, Olga Raevsky, “Pasternak and Cvetaeva : History of a Friendship,” Books Abroad, 44 (Spring 1970) : 218–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Olga R., Hughes, The Poetic World of Boris Pasternak (Princeton, 1974), pp. 105–10.Google Scholar
57. Karlinsky, Cvetaeva, p. 196.
58. Ariadna was begun in October 1923 and completed in October of 1924. The planning of the trilogy and the beginning of Ariadna chronologically overlap the writing of the poems occasioned by the departure of Pasternak for the Soviet Union (for example, “Fedra, “ “Provoda, ” and “Ariadna, ” March/April 1923; “Rasshchelina, ” “Zanaves, ” and “Stroitel'nitsa strun, ” June 1923; “Brozhu, ne dom zhe plotnichat', ” October 1923). All of these, including the poems about Ophelia and Hamlet and Eurydice and Orpheus, also written in this period, share a common theme—the tragic separation of a woman from the man she loves. The story of Ariadne represents abandonment—of Phaedra, rejection—by the beloved.
59. M. Tsvetaeva, Isbrannye proizvcdeniia, p. 647.
60. M, I. Tsvetaeva, Nesobrannye proizvedeniia, pp. 397 and 440.
61. Ibid., p. 432.
62. Ibid., p. 392.
63. Ibid., p. 450.
64. Ibid., p. 440.
65. Ibid., pp. 429-30.
66. Ibid., p. 459.
67. See especially the panegyric description of Hippolytus's mother, the Amazon queen Antiope, in battle (M. I. Tsvetaeva, Ncsobrannyc proisvcdcniia, pp. 429-30). The sensual imagery of the Amazon's physical and emotional oneness with her bow, its string, and its arrows are surely without compare in world literature as a representation of the heroic woman. Equally remarkable is the stark physical imagery in the speech of Phaedra's old nurse (ibid., p. 459). It is a vivid first-person account of the sexual desire of an unlovable old woman.
68. M. Tsvetaeva, Posle Rossii, p. 79.
69. M. Tsvetaeva, Isbrannyc proisvedcniia, p. 309.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., p. 310.
72. Ibid., p. 303. An uncanny twin of Tsvetaeva's image appears in Sylvia Plath's lines : The blood jet is poetry/There is no stopping it (Ariel [New York, 1966], p. 82).
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