The Voice Over

One of the points of divergence with her era was Tsvetaeva’s principled utilitarian and even condescending attitude to language: as an obedient instrument—or a part of her own body not requiring ceremonious handling. (This is fairly rare in the poetry of that time with its cult of quality—and in today’s as well, which in many ways exists within coordinates that Brodsky suggested, where language represents a self-regulating machine, recruiting authors of its own will to perform a certain type of work.) For Tsvetaeva, language is used or overcome as a material—the external membrane of the essence that alone is important. Disregarding externality in the name of meaning was so natural for Tsvetaeva that she was invariably bewildered by critical articles that spoke of her poems as toys, performed in this or that style, describing the surface while not reaching the internal task. Her belief in the extra-linguistic power of meaning explains the effort Tsvetaeva expended to make her poetry accessible in French. The titanic labor—translation of her own long poem The Swain into French, which never did find a response, was an attempt to let the piece be realized anew in one of the languages native to her (“German more native than Russian / To me, Angelic is most native of all!”). In émigré literature, obsessed with the idea of preserving the Russian language as a shared safe conduct, Russia in a traveling bag, this position (“For a poet there is no native language. Writing poetry is in itself re-wording”) was unique—and deeply alien.

It was her relationship with Pasternak that, for Tsvetaeva, happened to be her primary bet on life of that time. Their internal mutual commitment “to live up to each other” was a streambed along which Tvetaeva’s thought flowed for years, flooding the underwater rocks of the inevitable affairs and infatuations, which in their shallowness and finiteness only confirmed the correctness of the main choice. But how finite that choice, too, turned out to be! Their correspondence, which began in 1922—starting at once on the highest note—was meant from the beginning to be something much more than a literary friendship: a meeting of equals (Siegfried and Brunhilde, Achilles and Penthesilea), doomed by the power of things to each other and to a shared stand against the world, back-to-back, on the boulder of the word “we.”⁷ In Tsvetaeva’s private mythology, where poetry’s source is impersonal and supra-personal, all poets (starting with herself and all the way to Orpheus) comprise something like a caste of translators-ferrymen from the angelic language into the one they were given at birth. Speaking with Rilke’s words, which she could have considered her own, “One poet only lives, and now and then / Who bore him, and who bears him now, will meet.”⁸ The meeting with one of her own caste became in her consciousness an event that could justify an entire life and explain all the earlier failures and disappointments as stemming from a disparity of species—the general human with her own, particular kind. More than that: only the meeting and equality of that higher order could knock loose the predetermined march of time of her fate, render harmless the active myth of her eternal bond with Efron.

Pasternak’s appearance and presence in Tsvetaeva’s “days” (“in full purity of heart, the first poet in my whole life”), the feeling they both admitted of “relatedness along the whole front”—of a gift, of a human dimension and of that same other species—in and of itself summoned to life amorous connotations, a dream of complete coincidence and union. They both lived in rays of that union, now hurrying, now deferring a future meeting, until the early 1930s, when Pasternak’s new marriage made the daydream of their devotion to each other meaningless for Tsvetaeva. (“Well then I’ll refuse to look for my organic rhyme in this world, here. While there—everything rhymes!”—she wrote to him.) His choice and turn toward the masses (which Tsvetaeva did not notice before his “you’ll come to love the collective farms,” directed to her in 1935, in Paris, at the long-awaited meeting that so disappointed her) was a still worse refusal—now not just of her, but also of his direct predestination. “You don’t understand anything, Boris (oh, liana that has forgotten Africa!)—you’re Orpheus, devoured by beasts—they’ll chew you up.” The Africa of lyrics, which Pasternak had “forgotten” in the name of a faceless multitude and a beautiful woman as a representative of that multitude, now remained in her sole possession—an inheritance needed by no one, which she couldn’t share with anyone.