The Voice Over

At first she decides not to travel into that empty place, the country of the victorious future (“mainly—because of Mur,” she writes to Pasternak in 1933); later, “mechanically, passively, by the will of things,” she begins to move closer and closer to the edge. In 1937, after her daughter’s departure and the sudden, secret flight of her husband, who was entangled in a political assassination the NKVD had carried out abroad, Tsvetaeva had no ground left to stand on. She was living in Paris under surveillance, possibly also on NKVD money, feverishly sorting her archive, trying to stash manuscripts that would clearly not pass Soviet censorship with people she knew (“half of them—I can’t bring!”)—in fact, taking care of her own posthumous life, doing the external work of an archivist and commentator. The departure forced by circumstances didn’t have even a shadow of personal volition: she was leaving “like a dog,” not resisting—and that was all. On June 12, 1939, in Le Havre, Tsvetaeva boarded the steamship Maria Ulyanova, which took her and her son to Leningrad. “I’ll snap my own neck—looking back: at you, at your world, at our world …”—she writes to Anna Tesková on June 7, a few days before the final letter of farewell.

 

This already final turn toward that world and herself within it, the decisive summing-up, would become Tsvetaeva’s final task long before the threat of departure became real. Time after time the notebooks and letters of the 1930s analyze a riddle that didn’t cease tormenting her until the very end: the repeated failure of her earthly/female life. Some of the notes are in French: the language of a conversation with herself, assuming no other reader and interlocutor. Enumerating everything that had been given to her (name, external appearance, gift), Tsvetaeva tries to and is unable to solve the equation that resists her:

They approach, get frightened, disappear. […]

Sudden and total disappearance. He—gone without a trace. I—remain alone.

And it’s always one and the same story.

They abandon me. Without a word, without a “good-bye.” They used to come visit—they don’t come any more. They used to write—they don’t write any more.

And here am I in a great silence, which I never break, mortally wounded (or—cut to the quick—which is the same thing)—without ever understanding anything—neither for what, nor why.⁹

The great silence of abandonment, the bewilderment of culpability are the same here as in a short note from 1920: “Why does nobody love me? Isn’t the fault—in me?” The long-lasting farewell, beginning in her youth, to the potential—those subjunctive possibilities that youth offers a person—becomes final, humiliating in its forcedness. A straight perspective turns out to be impossible, the time comes for reverse perspective.

The only home that remained to Tsvetaeva, who did not accept what the present offered her as such and regarded any future with justified suspicion, became the unchangeable and never-betraying time of eternal stasis, which she fell into as if going back home. In her last years, she began to use the longing for the past that accompanied her all her life as a refuge. The past became not only a synonym for solitude in one’s chest, but also a model of a better world, and the mere fact of belonging to it testified to the good quality of a person or phenomenon. She perceived what had passed away as a nature preserve, the last place where one could still find things and qualities that she had received from there and uncharacteristic of the new epoch: both the “round-robin of goodness,” and “scorn for the temporary garment of flesh.” Turning to face her own and other people’s yesterdays, she sought and found a living support in them: “Only little Marcel relieves my suffering from the lack of sensitivity in the surrounding world, being of a different generation where every man gave up his seat to a woman, whether or not she was pretty, where no one remained seated when a woman was standing, and—oh, especially this!—where no one talked to you with their feet up on a chair.”¹⁰