The Voice Over

Yet the poems in the book Craft, written still in Moscow, in 1921–1922, and published in Berlin in 1923, already reflect a sharp shift in style—they are sung, as in a Russian folktale, with a new, reforged throat. Here it’s not a question of her no longer liking the “old style”: in a notebook in 1929 she remembers 1920 with a kind word, “when I was already writing well!” She wanted to change not her manner but her fate; the new poems reject (shake off) the old way of thinking and living. The multitude of speech masks, verbal foam, the extraordinary, swaggering omni-possibility of Tsvetaeva’s lyrics at once begins to subside. The place of ten poets (in letters she also names a second number—seven) gives way to the one-and-only. The manner of seeing that Tsvetaeva had adopted in her juvenile poetry—the embellishing glance of admiration, which magnifies several times over the dimensions of the chosen object—gives way to a different one. The degree of magnification is the same, but the lighting is much harsher: we see before us an unsleeping, unclosing X-ray eye of severe, analytical knowledge of herself and the world, penetrating the surface in search of the structure. Critics contemporary to Tsvetaeva took this turn correctly: with bayonets drawn. “There are no lively pictures and bright images here, it is as if the visible and palpable world disappears, and we are plunged into something immaterial and almost formless,” wrote Evgeny Znosko-Borovsky about Craft in The Will of Russia (Volia Rossii). (I’m intentionally choosing one of the most ingenuous reviews, i.e., one that understood what was happening straightforwardly and simply.) The turn and overturn experienced by Tsvetaeva’s creative mechanism became conclusive, while the position she chose—seeing any thing with ultimate eyes, in light of the Last Judgment, with posthumous ethical directness—acquired its final fixedness. This position turns out to be exceedingly uncomfortable both for the author and for her readers; that particularity has stayed with it until the present day.

Let’s imagine a classical shouter: an unpleasant person who loudly complains about the crush in an overcrowded bus, in a line—about its length, and in the sun—about its heat. His demands provoke no sympathy, they seem tactless or unfounded. How is he different from the majority who keep quiet? In his knowledge, true or false, of how “a thing could and should have been.” In certainty of his inborn right to that “as it ought to be.” In his determination to make the injustice audible. What we consider his fault or misfortune is for this person the highest virtue: it’s an unwillingness to adapt to circumstances; it’s a fateful inability to get accustomed to injustice; it’s faith in the complaint book—“the Last Judgment of the word.” Tsvetaeva provokes in many people a similar kind of dislike.

All this is too easy to understand in the framework of a funny story: “Ooh, see, we’re so sensitive!” At the turn of the last century, demanding special conditions and brand new ethical scales was typical for people in the arts: as Akhmatova put it, “Sins don’t stick to poets at all.” In that sense, the case of Tsvetaeva, of a person who is unable and unwilling to handle the weight of days that had fallen onto her, becomes general, indicative: she’s a soldier in an army that remains unknown; behind her stand hundreds and thousands of people who could not adapt to the new reality and had no voice to make their own “no” audible. As a rule, we have to deal with history written by the ones who managed: who welcomed the arrival of the new (like Nina Berberova); who considered it necessary to be like everyone and “in concert with law and order” (like Pasternak); who chose a place apart and lived long enough for that to become a place of power (like Akhmatova). But the crowds that fell out into the cracks of the ultra-new time have neither the right to a voice nor an intercessor. Despite her own wishes, that intercessor was Marina Tsvetaeva, who insisted all her life on the exclusivity of her own case, until it became almost universal.