The Voice Over

The Maximum Cost of Living (Marina Tsvetaeva)

Conversations in the Realm of the Dead (Lyubov Shaporina)

What Alice Found There (Alisa Poret)

The Last Hero (Susan Sontag)

From That Side: Notes on Sebald

Over Venerable Graves

The Maximum Cost of Living

(Marina Tsvetaeva)

On May 16, 1941 (that is, as we know from faraway in our own day and year, she still had three and a half months left to live), Marina Tsvetaeva wrote to her daughter in a distant northern labor camp: “We have a radio, we listen every evening, it picks up stations from far away, and I sometimes applaud like a fool—mainly—for statements of common sense, they’re a great rarity, and I notice that I myself am entirely common sense. That’s what POETRY is.”

By that time (and earlier than that, by the time of her return to Russia from emigration), she had already written her everything—(“I’ve written what’s mine. I could write more, of course, but I can easily not”)—with just a few exceptions, which make little difference. As another poet, Mikhail Kuzmin, said before his death, “The main thing’s finished, what remains are details.”

Thus, it’s tempting to consider this fragment from Tsvetaeva’s letter as something like an unintended last will and testament: a final line, drawn in the last minute under the labor of a life that was laborious in itself. It’s hardly worth letting it impress us overmuch: Tsvetaeva’s natural manner of speech and thought is an ascending dotted line of lightning formulas. They’re created “à propos,” as momentary answers to an internal or external demand, and therefore they often turn out to be mutually contradictory, refuting and rejecting one another. It’s better to consider them from a certain distance, in motion, noting the points of convergence and divergence and taking notice of the shared and unchanging center of gravity, toward which all the various utterances are oriented. Besides that, Tsvetaeva’s manner of writing involves constant stops and reboots. Drawing countless final lines under the most various circumstances of her own life and other people’s was a natural fuel for her: a means of picking up speed and transitioning into new texts and circumstances.

Let’s say, in 1939, when on the eve of leaving for the USSR Tsvetaeva copied a poem by her old literary enemy Georgy Adamovich into her notebook, adding below, “someone else’s poem, but which in places could be mine,” that gesture of poetic solidarity doesn’t annul her phrase from a letter three years before (“it turned out that it’s not bread he needs, but an ashtray full of cigarette butts: not me—but Adamovich and Co.”). What is alien remains alien, what’s her own remains her own; each assertion turns out to be totalizing: breaking out from a given sequence, asserting the priority of a dozen heterogeneous heavenly truths faced with the linear earthly truth. What should we consider the final judgment—a 1926 article full of icy (or sometimes boiling) scorn for Mandelstam’s Noise of Time or else “The Story of a Dedication,” a memoir on Mandelstam written in 1931, colored in tones of sisterly or maternal tenderness? Tsvetaeva’s testimony may benefit both the prosecution and the defense; her speech—every phrase taken separately—is something like a hanging bridge cast in haste from a fixed point (where the author is) to the transient subject of description, and invariably clinging to the air. Each phrase is a little model of a large system, a small will and testament, always ready to turn large. The letter from 1941 is one of many.

Yet, all the same, one wants to hold her formulations closer to one’s eyes and look at them against the light—in the end, what is the common sense she speaks of, if not what Tsvetaeva pushed away her whole life: the voice of the multitude she stubbornly scorned, of the triumphant majority? This phrase requires attention—neither the commonality of that commonness, nor the nature of that sense, apparently, are supposed to coincide with everyday—trivial—common sense, accepted wisdom intended for general use. However, in some sense Marina Tsvetaeva’s life and death, despite her desperate resistance, turned out to be nothing but common. Both in the sense of speedy and complete transformation into a literary myth—one of the primary ones of the Russian twentieth century, and also in a more essential sense: the nodal points of Tsvetaeva’s fate consistently turned out to be typical, emblematic, bringing the conditions of existence that were incompatible with life—émigré, Soviet, writerly, womanly—to extreme, white-hot clarity. That is, indicative (“my case is indicative”), and not only for the twentieth century with its wholesale deaths, but, however exaggerated it might sound, for human existence as such.