The Voice Over

In her prose memoir “A Living Word About a Living Man,” dedicated to the memory of Max Voloshin, Tsvetaeva recalls their daydreams of shared literary mystifications—unrealized, as she says, only due to her Germanic honesty, “the ruinous pridefulness of signing everything that I write.”

“Marina! You harm yourself with abundance. You have the raw materials for ten poets, and all of them—marvelous! But wouldn’t you like (cajolingly) to publish all your poems about Russia, for instance, as some him, say a Petukhov? […] And then (already entirely out of breath) […] there’ll be twins, poetic twins, the Kriuchkovs, let’s say, a brother and sister. We’ll create something that has never existed, that is, twin geniuses. They’ll write all your romantic poems.”

“Max!—and what will be left for me?”

“For you? Everything, Marina. All that you are yet to be!”

A conversation worth remembering: Tsvetaeva’s creative work would exist under the sign of this temptation (or this choice)—to be ten poets at once (but keeping for herself the right of signature)—for many years more. The romantic metaphors of her juvenile poems (“I crave all roads—at once!”) are realized here with literal exactness, and what’s more not only in the process of writing, in the selection of these or those speech masks, important for the “pre-emigration” Tsvetaeva. Some of the poetic collections Tsvetaeva published in her lifetime would be composed according to this (“Voloshinian”) scheme: the Gypsy poems (Mileposts II), the “White Army” ones (Demesne of the Swans), the “romantic” ones (Psyche, the plays), the “Russian” ones (Sidestreets, The Tsar-Maiden). It’s characteristic that the real (internal) chronology of Tsvetaeva’s oeuvre, whose stages she describes in 1935 in a letter to Yuri Ivask, has no place for the greater part of these books: the tasks that inspired their publication were too external. On the other hand, by the mid-1910s all the tasks Tsvetaeva was solving were already both broader and narrower than purely literary ones.

In particular, her logic at that time (“craving all roads,” the desire to experience everything and for everyone) had an everyday flip side, which was only indirectly related to literature, but which determined a great deal in the life of Tsvetaeva’s family. “My one conviction is that I have a right to absolutely everything, droit de seigneur. If life challenges that—I don’t resist, I’m just deeply astonished, and I won’t lift a hand out of fastidiousness,” Tsvetaeva wrote to her sister-in-law during the war in autumn 1916. The palpable, dazzling sunniness of her inner state and existence then is also linked to the fact that no one close to her would have even thought to challenge that right-to-everything, including her attempts to speak with several voices and to live several lives at once. The sense of things going slightly out of focus, of the overheating, as when air thickens over the asphalt in summer and starts to ripple, emerges from the Efrons’ family correspondence: an inexpert but still domestic life with cares about their little daughter Alya, with literary gossip, negotiations about firewood and nannies, keeps thinning out, letting us see Tsvetaeva’s next object of interest in the series. There seem not to be many (Sofia Parnok, Mandelstam, Tikhon Churilin, Petr Efron, Nikodim Plutser-Sarna)—at least their presence produces no impression of “Homeric debauchery.” Their names flicker in Tsvetaeva’s and Efron’s correspondence with his sisters as inevitable circumstances of the time. The fact that against that background Efron goes away, first as a male nurse to the front and then into military service, may be explained by his perpetual willingness to endure self-sacrifice—but a vague whiff of a looming breakdown appears in the story. The Revolution made the unnamed possibility of separation a reality, imposed from outside; it brought about a stony hopelessness with which it was impossible to make peace. Over the course of several years Tsvetaeva and Efron, who was fighting on the Don, in the Volunteer Army, had no news of each other—yet clung all the stronger to the memory of their life together. The fact that they both survived and made it through to a new meeting made their union unshakable: that is, in equal measure sacred and fatal.