The Voice Over

From the point of death (as if in a dream—from the point of waking), a human life casts back toward its beginning and acquires a final meaningfulness and clarity of structure, only now manifested. In Tsvetaeva’s case, the structure—the stubborn and destructive intention of fate—is so visible that it’s possible for that to obscure everything else. What we recognize first (“what is borne in the air,” as her mother says of Napoleon, in her prose)—is the dyad of poetry and suicide. It would seem to be an ordinary matter—dramatic biographies always cast a clear shadow, which makes them suitable for mass utilization (Pushkin—the duel; Mandelstam—death in the camps; Brodsky—exile, the Nobel Prize). But in Tsvetaeva’s posthumous fate, her suicide by far supersedes the poems, and sometimes it crowds them out. Mikhail Gasparov once wrote about that: “Today’s readers receive the myth about Tsvetaeva first of all, then afterward her poems as an optional appendix.” That seems to be true; and this particularity of Tsvetaeva’s case (which irritates many people) requires interpretation.

In essence, we have two texts in our hands, which complement and comment on each other—more than that, they don’t exist in isolation: “creative work” (her books of lyric poems, verses, long poems, plays, prose)—and “life,” where what Tsvetaeva herself wrote (the enormous archive of letters, rough drafts, diary entries) comprises barely a third. Other voices (witnesses and contemporaries) have an honorary and ungrateful mission—they step forward willy-nilly like the reasonable interlocutors of the Biblical Job: sympathizing or judging, but inevitably representing the side of order in the conversation—the way of things that they did not establish. They are the surface she was unable to cling to; the natural course of events for which she was a hindrance. Strictly speaking, they’re us ourselves,

intending to live in the circumstances defined by this or that era; and by virtue of kinship we can’t avoid sympathizing with them, just as we can’t help sympathizing with Pasternak, who said of Tsvetaeva after her death, “She couldn’t wash a plate without Dostoevskian convulsions.”

Her biography seems to be widely known; therefore, I’ll permit myself to speak about it in passing

, in a dotted line, emphasizing what seems to me most essential: nodes of meaning, unsolved (insoluble) problems.

As an epigraph to the first part of After Russia, her last collection of poetry, published in 1928 when the lyrical stream had begun if not to dry up then to change streambeds, Tsvetaeva took a phrase from Vasily Trediakovsky, changing it a bit in her own way: “It does not follow from the fact that the poet is a creator that he is a liar; a lie is a word against reason and conscience, but poetic invention occurs according to reason, such as a thing could and

should have been.”

Tsvetaeva’s biography, like those of the majority of people born at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, unfolded precisely in the logic of what should not have been: outside any kind of expectations, against concepts of the possible. Surviving in the conditions presented depended on readiness and ability to change: accommodating oneself to the improper, living in its speedy regimen of kowtowing to the future

. For Tsvetaeva, whose deep-rooted virtue was going against the grain (“One out of all—for all—against all!”), and whose heart’s inclination was everything that was departing, conquered, or speaking from under the ground (“What happened in the past is dearest of all”), a natural place was amid the doomed majority. That is, among those who could not or did not wish to usurp the right to speech on behalf of the future. Her natural neighbors in history were not the doers, but the livers: women, old people, the cast of characters in minor history—and the easy victims of major history.