The Voice Over

By the mid-1930s, Tsvetaeva’s lyric poetry had already become completely superfluous to the milieu of readers, too. If in 1921–1925 she had managed to put out ten poetic books, the next collection of verse was published with difficulty only in 1928, and it was the last book published in her lifetime. As time passed, publishing only got more complicated; a great, if not the greater, part of what Tsvetaeva wrote in emigration remained unread. After the publication of her article “The Poet on the Critic(ism),” which sharply departed from the accepted literary etiquette of the time, literary society’s sympathies turned out not to be on Tsvetaeva’s side. Over time there were fewer and fewer publications willing to collaborate with her, while the frameworks of that collaboration were ever more narrow. They asked not for new poems, but for some “understandable to the reader,” that is, hopelessly out-of-date for the author. They did print her prose (written “for earnings: reading aloud, that is in a forcedly articulate and explanatory mode […] for one-year-old children”), but reluctantly, with cuts that hopelessly distorted the author’s conception. In some cases, Tsvetaeva for various reasons had to refrain from publishing her work, which meant for her not only the impossibility of being heard but also a misfortune of a wholly everyday character: loss of the means for existence. Given the extreme poverty in which the Efron family lived, this impossibility of getting accommodated to life acquired a tragic character. Tsvetaeva was unsuited to other kinds of work; simply—she couldn’t do anything else (all the more so since in her own, verbal domain she could do everything and was very well aware of it). “I’m not a parasite, because I work, and I don’t want to do anything but work: but—my work, not someone else’s. Forcing me to do someone else’s work is pointless, for I’m incapable of doing any other than my own and menial labor (hauling weight, etc.). For I’ll do it in such a way that they’ll throw me out,” she wrote in her notebook in 1932. Against that background it seemed to those close to her, and sometimes she herself felt, too, that the place commensurate for her, the milieu in which she could sound forth to her full ability (and her full power) would have to be Soviet Russia with its multimillion population of new readers.

For Sergei Efron the choice was already made by the mid-1930s. The theme of a possible return to Russia stands above Tsvetaeva’s correspondence of the final years like a cloud (“I live under the stormcloud—of departure”). Everything, it would seem, was pushing her out, nudging her: the growing Sovietness of her husband and daughter, tightly connected with the Paris “Union of Return to the Homeland”—an organization directed and financed by the Soviet intelligence agencies (the GPU, then NKVD); the sense “that strength is over there,” as she wrote in a letter welcoming Mayakovsky; the airlessness of her own life, which was quickly turning into a vacuum.

Yet, nevertheless, Tsvetaeva once again takes a stand in opposition—this time not only to the logic of life, but to her own family, too: to her husband, her daughter, her son Georgy (nicknamed Mur), who is growing by the hour. “Horror at a self-satisfied Soviet unchildlike Mur—with his mouth full of programmatic clichés” is only a shadow of her everlasting horror before the kingdom of the victorious majority that she would be compelled to love: she is soberly aware of the impossibility of being an individual there. “I’m interested in everything that interested Pascal, and I’m not interested in anything that did not interest him. I’m not to blame for being so truthful, it would cost nothing to answer the question: ‘Are you interested in the future of the people?’ with ‘Oh, yes.’ But I answered: No, because I am sincerely uninterested in any kind of or any person’s future, which is for me an empty (and threatening!) place.”