The Voice Over

The early meeting and the early marriage, which predetermined the whole subsequent course of Tsvetaeva’s life and, possibly, its conclusion, were a gift of gifts—but, as usual, with a double bottom. Sergei Efron, whom the eighteen-year-old Tsvetaeva met in Voloshin’s Koktebel and at once chose as her husband “in eternity—not on paper” was a person of exceptional internal beauty and nobility; he bore those traits, like stigmata, through his whole life full of circumstances that went poorly with beauty and nobility.

The way Tsvetaeva told their shared story to herself and others picked out as its main trait the inevitability, their doomedness to one other. The fates of two children, who met on the beach in Koktebel, folded into one like halves of a puzzle: loneliness, early orphanhood, their birthday, which they celebrated on the same day.³ In the series of Tsvetaeva’s love affairs (as time passed, more and more one-sided, and, as they say, virtual), it’s hard not to notice the underpinning of active pity, maternal concern (from the older to the younger)—what she herself called an inclination: “desired—pitied—piteous!” She departed from this logic, it seems, only once—in her epistolary dialogue with Boris Pasternak, where from the very start there was a sense of equality: possessing the power of an equal essence. But the appeal of female seniority, which made her choose people and relationships that could be stylized in that key, calling her peer Rodzevich a boy, and the younger ones (Bachrach—Gronsky—Shteiger) little sons (or “my wee one”) was insurmountable for her; she herself understood this, as always, more clearly and caustically than anyone—and she summed it up in 1936, in the epigraph to her poetic cycle Poems to an Orphan:

A little child went down the street,

Blue with cold and shaking all over.

An old woman was walking along that way,

Took pity on the little orphan.⁴

The high-schooler Sergei Efron was the first, if not the decisive one, in that series, and in Tsvetaeva’s eyes, his life (youth, tuberculosis, the recent double suicide of his mother and his younger brother) made him a task: a call of duty to be fulfilled.

But in 1912 the two-fold theme of predestination and doom connected in Tsvetaeva’s heritage with Efron’s name was showing only its front, rainbow, side. Their triumphal young affinity opens a new register of meaning for Tsvetaeva (“I also used to think it was silly to be happy, even indecent! It’s silly and indecent to think that way—that’s my today,” she writes to Voloshin.) The time of exultation begins: of superlative degrees, of exaggerated (“that is—at full height,” as she would write in Poem of the End) admiration of herself and her surroundings. It’s at this time, in fact, that her poems become recognizably Tsvetaevan, while her voice acquires ultimate freedom—the gutta-percha obedience of an intelligent instrument.

 

The change toward happiness meant a great deal for Tsvetaeva; among other things, it meant her juvenile, preverbal “I have the right” acquired the right to speech and began to be called “such craving to live!” Life and texts are flooded with earthly signs (the title of the would-be book of diary prose she planned in the 1920s). She took her mother’s and grandmother’s old-fashioned dresses out of trunks, which—decades later—surface as her farewell gift in The Tale of Sonechka; she and Efron choose and purchase a gramophone, they arrange their own living space, with an “underwater” blue lamp in it and a door that opens out onto the roof. This purely private life, intentionally led as separate from her (not-led) literary life, was meant to be splendid: congenial to poetry, which in turn was meant to bear witness to life: “Write it down as accurately as possible! Nothing is unimportant! Speak about your room: is the ceiling high or low, and how many windows are there, and what kinds of curtains are on them, and is there a carpet, and what kind of flowers are on it?” Here as before, in the semi-diary Evening Album, we face what won’t allow us to speak about Tsvetaeva outside the contours of her biography—a resolute will that compels us to seek the features of authorial presence above (or perpendicular to) the texts. What she apparently had in mind from the very beginning—something like a reality show with natural scenery—began to acquire genuine dimensions (replete with living life). Over the years the action began to resemble a live court trial, in the light of conscience, where the author took turns being present now on the defendant’s bench, now as the prosecutor. But the beginning, the happy Tsvetaeva years, gave her a brief opportunity to concentrate on the external and, from among all the options, to choose—all at once.