The Voice Over

The mention of Proust here is no accident: his manner of textually resurrecting the past turned out to be the key to new writing for several Russian writers left without a place by the epoch that had arrived (besides Tsvetaeva, here we might also recall Kuzmin, who in 1934 arranged his final, experimental diary “according to Proust”). Tsvetaeva’s corpus of retrospective prose (to call it memoirs would be a very big stretch), written in her last years, seems to have been intended to carry out a purely magic action: resurrecting (or at least preserving, placing in the fireproof safe of verbal eternity) everything and everyone she had loved, extending their being—and standing beside them: there and that way, as she herself wished. “The more I bring you to life, the more I myself die, perish from life—toward you, into you—I die. The more you are here, the more I am—there. As if the barrier between the living and the dead is already removed, and both these and those move freely through time and space—and through their opposite. My death is payment for your life.”

By the time of her departure from France this payment was complete. “How many lines gone by! I don’t write anything down. That—is finished.”

 

Instead of describing everything that happened to Marina Tsvetaeva next—her meeting with her family, life locked up in an NKVD dacha, her daughter’s arrest, her husband’s arrest, dragging through lines outside prisons and writers’ organizations, the first days of the war, the catastrophe of evacuation from Moscow, her extreme solitude and her solitary suicide, I shall copy here—letter by letter—at least part of the open letter she wrote for an émigré children’s magazine in winter 1937–38, which remained unpublished at the time. It’s that very same farewell voice of common sense, which may also be called heavenly truth: the truth of higher courtesy and genuine (not trying to be that)—poetry; I think it is that kind of voice.

Dear children,

 

I’ve never thought of you separately: I’ve always thought that you are people or non-people (like us).

But they say that you’re a special breed that’s still susceptible to influence.

Therefore:

—Never pour out water for nothing, because at that moment a person is dying in the desert for want of this drop.

“But he won’t get this water if I don’t pour it out!”

“He won’t get it, but there will be one senseless crime fewer in the world.”

—For the same reason, never throw bread away, and if you see some on the street, underfoot, pick it up and put it on top of the nearest fence, for there’s not only a desert where people die without water, but also slums where they die without bread. Besides that, maybe someone hungry will notice that bread, and will feel less bad taking it that way, rather than from the ground.

Never be afraid of a funny thing, and if you see a person in a silly situation: 1) try to get him out of it, and if that’s not possible—jump in to join him as if into water, with two people a silly situation is divided in half: half of it for each—or else, at worst, don’t notice it.

Never say that everyone does it that way: everyone always does it badly, if people are so eager to refer to them […] 2) everyone has a second name: no one, and has no face at all: a blank haze. If they say to you: no one does that (dresses, thinks, etc.), answer: “But I am someone.” […]

Don’t say “not fashionable,” always say: not honorable. It both rhymes, and it sounds and works better.

Don’t be too angry at your parents—remember that they used to be you, and that you will be them. Besides, for you they’re parents, but for themselves they’re each—I. Don’t limit them to their parenthood.

Don’t condemn your parents to death before (you are) forty. And then—you won’t dare lift a hand!

2010

Translated by Sibelan Forrester

Conversations in the Realm of the Dead

(Lyubov Shaporina)

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