The Voice Over

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow on October 8 (September 26, Old Style—Russian September, as she herself said¹), 1892. She spent the whole rest of her life looking into her own early childhood, digging deep into it, as if into a treasure chest, choosing what was needed and leaving the rest to lie on the bottom as an untapped capital, a gold reserve of exemplars—answers to all questions. The Spartan childhood of a Moscow girl from a professor’s family, with a father who looked over their heads at the portrait of his late first wife, and a mother who looked over the piano at her own quickly approaching death, with a Tarusa summer house and Moscow winter, was arranged in an elevated and fairly harsh mode: at the intersecting lines of prohibitions and self-restraints. It was, apparently, by right of any childhood, quite happy—enough that “yearning for my life up to the age of seven” remained the one place where Marina Tsvetaeva felt at home for her whole life, while the wish to erect a monument to that life before seven is one of her main creative volitions, carried out and unrealizable. “I agree to 2 years (I’m honest!) of solitary confinement […] NB: with a yard, where I can walk, and with cigarettes—during which two years I’ll take it upon myself to write a splendid thing: my early childhood (up to seven—Enfances)—‘take upon myself’ isn’t right!—I won’t be able not to” (from her notebook, 1932).

Her mother, Maria Aleksandrovna Meyn, died when the Tsvetaeva sisters, Marina and younger Asya, were thirteen and eleven years old. Her death knocked the framework of the family arrangement crooked at once. In place of unwilling hours at the piano came willing hours, with Napoleon’s portrait placed in the icon frame instead of the religious image; the mother’s “so it must be” was swiftly replaced by the daughter’s “I have the right.” What’s interesting here is not the external outline of a youthful breakaway, one and the same in all eras—switching through several high schools in a year, skipping class, binge reading in the unheated attic, her first literary acquaintances, the first—also predictably literary—love. What’s characteristic is something else: how the exaggeratedly old-fashioned, intentionally childish selection of Tsvetaeva’s preferences breaks out of a general (“fashionable”) repertoire. Napoleon—Marie Bashkirtseff—Edmond Rostand—Lydia Charskaya’s novels—all these books and heroes of very young years, already then passing into the institution of the antique or maidenly. Some change or break in Tsvetaeva’s circle of reading could be expected with the start of her literary life—about which we have yet to speak. But neither her acquaintance with Ellis (a pseudonym of Lev Kobylinsky), a Symbolist poet from Andrei Belyi’s circle, nor her sudden and ardent friendship with Maximilian (Max) Voloshin, prevent (they sooner force) her to stand up for and assert what was her own: the literature of the phrase, of the cloak and rapier, with which heroica was linked for her then: ideals of the life-by-truth, on a high note, inherited from her mother.

This impulse (the choice and confirmation of her own, going against what was commonly accessible and/or trending) defined the beginning of her literary fate—and, as it became clear later, also a lasting strategy—of separateness, standing against any curly brackets, any milieu, literary or everyday, out of those that life offered her. And insofar as life was hard indeed, that static standing against quickly became an open (or closed—locked up for long decades in Tsvetaeva’s archive) confrontation—shooting at a moving target. This credo was one she was already proclaiming in a youthful letter in 1908: “Against the Republic for Napoleon, against Napoleon for the Republic, against capitalism in the name of socialism […], against socialism, once it’s brought to life, against, against, against!” Tsvetaeva stepped back from this credo only once, in the mid-1920s, when for a moment her work turned out or seemed to be topical—written into a literary context rather than breaking out of it—but that didn’t last long.