The Voice Over

For a long time consistent assertion of her own otherness also seemed necessary because at first Tsvetaeva saw the external frame of her own fate as insufficiently dramatic, overly fortunate, “too rosy and youthful”—just like her own young rosiness, just like the glasses she quickly and permanently abandoned—despite her extreme nearsightedness. What would some years later, during her Berlin meeting with Andrei Belyi, become a catchword of their shared near and dear past (“You’re the daughter of Professor Tsvetaev. Whereas I’m the son of Professor Bugaev. You’re a professor’s daughter, and I’m a professor’s son. You’re a daughter, I’m a son”), was at first a mark of what was hatefully typical: a Moscow miss from a decent family, “with demands” and with “verses.” Tsvetaeva recognized her own people and things by their stamp of solitariness and separation; in her autobiographical prose “The Devil” (1935), she would write about her half sister: “After the Ekaterininsky Institute she entered the Guerrier Women’s Courses […], and then joined the Social-Democratic Party, and then the teaching staff at Kozlov High School, and then a dance studio—in general she kept on joining up her whole life. Whereas the true token of his [the devil’s, and Tsvetaeva’s too—M.S.] favorites is full dissociation, from birth and from everything—excludedness.”

Tsvetaeva acts—differently, moving away step by step from any societalness or groupness. In 1912: “So far only Gorodetsky and Gumilev, both members of some kind of guild,² have attacked me. If I were in the guild, they wouldn’t attack me, but I’m not going to be in the guild.” In 1918: “I am really, absolutely, to the marrow of my bones—outside of any estate, profession, rank. A tsar has tsars behind him, a beggar has beggars, I have—emptiness.” In 1920: “My longing for Blok is like the longing for someone I didn’t finish loving in a dream.—And what could be simpler?—Go up to him: I’m so-and-so … If you promise me all of Blok’s love in exchange for it—I won’t go up to him.—That’s how I am.” In 1926: “I haven’t belonged to any literary tendency and do not belong.” In 1932: “No one resembles me and I don’t resemble anyone, therefore it’s pointless to recommend this or that to me.” And—in 1935, a time of penultimate evaluations: “I myself chose the world of non-people, what can I complain about?”

Her literary debut already demonstrates the directness and harshness of this—forever unbending—contour. Tsvetaeva’s first, half-childish book An Evening Album was published at her expense in a print run of five hundred copies—a gesture that at the time meant about the same thing it does today: either the author’s extreme naïveté, or else a similarly extreme degree of provocation—disregard for the accepted mechanisms of literary growth, rejection of or indifference to possible professional evaluation. A gesture that in those times was all the more radical because it was rare for people in her circle of literary acquaintances and connections.

The new step that followed logically after that one was disregard for literature, departing into private life (more exactly—not leaving her private life). That was one more gesture of magnificent scorn. “How can I really be a poet? I simply live, rejoice, love my cat, cry, dress up—and write poetry. Now Mandelstam, for instance, now Churilin, for instance, they are poets. This kind of attitude caught on: therefore I got away with everything—and no one had any consideration for me. […] Therefore I am and will be without a name.” In 1923, writing this letter to Pasternak, Tsvetaeva retrospectively gave this recollection a tint of bitterness already habitual to her—but ten years before such a position (“a haughty head”) seemed natural. Life had joyfully tossed her such an opportunity.

In that same year, 1923, Tsvetaeva wrote in her diary:

Personal life, that is, my life in life (i.e. in days and places), has not worked out. That must be understood and accepted. I think—30 years of experience (because it didn’t work out immediately) is sufficient. Several reasons. The main one is that I am I. The second: an early meeting with a person from among the splendid—utterly splendid, which should have been a friendship, but was realized in a marriage. (Simply: a marriage too early with someone too young. [Remark from] 1933.).

In the drafts of Theseus there’s a note that rhymes with this one: “A marriage where both are good is valorous, voluntary and reciprocal torment (-ing).”