The Fate of the Poet: Marina Tsvetaeva

Tsvetaeva (Марина Ивановна Цветаева, 1892.10.8~1941.8.8-1941.8.31) was a famous Russian poet, essayist and playwright. Tsvetaeva died on August 31, 1941, marking the 80th anniversary of her death this year.

The Fate of the Poet: Marina Tsvetaeva

| Mark Slovin translated | Pu Limin Liu Feng

The genius girl Tsvetaeva

The poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), very different from the poetry of Mandelstam and Akhmatova, occupies a unique place in the Russian twentieth-century literary scene. The daughter of an art history professor and director of the Moscow Museum, Marina grew up in a highly cultured environment for scholars and artists; she accompanied her sick mother, an excellent musician, abroad, attended schools in Switzerland, and was fluent in French and German. According to her memoirs, she began "composing poems" at the age of six and published her first poems at the age of sixteen. A few years later, she published two books of poetry, but kept it a secret from her family. The two collections of poetry, The Twilight Remembrance (1911) and the Divine Lamp (1912), attracted the attention of only a few poets and connoisseurs at the time. After 1912, Tsvetaeva wrote many sensational poems that reflected her passionate temperament and astonishing skill. In 1922, the Moscow State Publishing House published two books by Tsvetaeva: the poetic folktale "The Maiden" and "Milestones" (Pasternak said that he was completely captivated by the lyrical power of this thin pamphlet). In 1912, she married university student Sergei Evron and bore him a daughter, Ariadna, whom people called Aria. Later she gave birth to a daughter. But during the revolutionary period when Marina was living a miserable and impoverished life, the daughter died of malnutrition; her husband was fighting the anti-Communist army in the South. After the victory of the war, Marina was allowed to leave the country; in 1922 the family was reunited in Berlin. At this time, Russian books were very popular in Germany, and Tsvetaeva published three pamphlets, namely The Parting Collection, Poems dedicated to Brock and Psuchych, and a collection of poems entitled The Craft Collection, which established her reputation as the first-rate poet among exiles. Her family later moved to Prague. In 1925, Tsvetaeva gave birth to another boy (named Georgy, mother named him Murr). Subsequently, the family settled in France, where they lived on the outskirts of Paris from 1926 to 1939.

From the unfortunate exile to the greatest poet

Tsvetaeva came to Europe at the heyday of her creation. During seventeen years in exile, she composed her best poems and essays. The years of her stay in Czechoslovakia were the most exuberant period of her creativity and confirmed that she was a poet of innovative genius. Her two long poems, "The Mountain Poem" and "The End Poem", are both about love, the intricacies of love, the contrast of different emotions, and the pain of suffering from separation. They are worded violently, emotionally profoundly, ornately eloquently, and the seventy-five-page poetic story "The Flute Bearer in a Flower Dress" (i.e., "The Mousetraper") is undoubtedly the finest work of Twentieth-century Russian poetry. The Piper is based on a medieval mythological story, part of which ruthlessly exposes the narrow-minded, bland, despicable and selfish state of mind of the freedmen of the small German town of Hammaine, which was plagued by rats. The other part is a romantic story about a mysterious young piper and uses him as a symbol of poetry and magic. The rats left the town with the sound of the flute; the piper demanded to marry the mayor's beautiful daughter, Greta, in return. He was reprimanded and insulted; in revenge he abducted the children of the town with the sound of a charming flute. The piper leads the children to a paradise of fantasy, where they happily drown in a mysterious lake.

This form, which Tsvetaeva calls a "lyrical satire," is unique. Its continuous use of rigid and rapid prosody, the poem's many aphorisms, often compressed into one word, shows her exquisite skill in using language, which combines concise interpretation with sharp proverbs. The Piper was published in full in 1926 in the Russian monthly magazine "Russian Will" in Prague. But the exiled critics of the time did not appreciate its unparalleled ingenuity. Forty years later, the Florist was reprinted in 1965 in a collection of Tsvetaeva's poems, published in Moscow with slight edits by censors.

With the help of her friends, Tsvetaeva published a full volume of poetry in Paris in 1928, After Leaving Russia, the last work she published during her lifetime, and this time the exile's press paid no attention to this literary event (of course, it was not mentioned at all in the Soviet Union). It was one of the typical events in her tragic fate. In the Soviet Union, her works were banned from publication for thirty years. When she was in exile in Europe, her work was appreciated only by a small number of novice readers. Worse still, she had to write under extremely difficult material conditions. During these seventeen years, she was constantly threatened by poverty and had to fight for survival. She had to take care of her two children and her frail husband. In addition to cooking, laundry and nursing at home, Marina also has to support her family. For months, the family's income was largely dependent on her meager remuneration and the occasional financial support from a few friends. In a letter from 1932, she wrote: "You can't imagine how poor I lived. I have no other way to make money than writing. We are struggling on the line of starvation and death. ”

But the financial difficulties were not yet Tsvetaeva's greatest misfortune, and there was loneliness and loneliness; she was painfully aware that very few people appreciated her work. She never doubted the value of her work, but she was indignant that neither the exiles nor the Russians valued her. Meanwhile, her daughter Alia decided to return to Russia; in addition, her husband Sergei, due to political changes, not only fell to communism, but also involved him in the assassination of ignacy Reiss, a former Communist party official and secret Agent of the Soviet Union, in 1937. Marina knew nothing about it, and Efron's flight from France to Moscow was nothing short of a thunderbolt for her. She stayed in Paris with her thirteen-year-old son. The son also eagerly asked his mother to return to his homeland. Her situation among the exiles was almost untenable; she eventually had to return to the Soviet Union with her husband and daughter. Although she considered it her duty to do so, she left France with a heavy heart and no illusions. She once said to a friend, "I'm a superfluous person here." It would be unthinkable to go over there; here I had no readers; over there, though there might be thousands of readers, I could not breathe freely; that is, I could not write and publish poetry. But what happened to her in Moscow far exceeded her original terrible predictions.

From her return to the Soviet Union in 1939 until her death, all she was able to publish was an early poem and could only translate the works of a few foreign poets. A few months later, her husband, daughter and sister were all arrested. Alya spent sixteen years in prison, concentration camps, and exile in Siberia. She was "rehabilitated" in 1956 and lived in Tarusa near Kaluga until her death in 1975. We still don't know the exact date of Efron's execution: it could have been in 1940, or it could have been at the outbreak of war.

In 1941, as the Germans advanced toward Moscow, Tsvetaeva and her son Moore retreated to Yegabra, a village on the banks of the Kama River in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. There were writers who lived near her, but she asked them for help and was met with a cold reception. The only job she could find was working as a cook in a restaurant. Her son was burly and asked to join the volunteer army; at this time she felt completely alone, and everything around her was cold or hostile to her. She felt that everything had collapsed in a worldwide catastrophe. On August 31, 1941, she committed suicide by hanging herself from a beam and was buried in a cemetery. No one attended her funeral.

Twenty years after Tsvetaeva's death, it was only in the fifties and sixties that she gained praise both inside and outside the Soviet Union and among exiles. I have been working on the work that prompted the publication of her work since 1923. In 1952, I publicly expressed this view: "Rediscover Tsvetaeva's works and re-evaluate them." And the day of giving it its rightful place is coming. In 1957, Pasternak wrote in his Man and Things: "The publication of her work will be a great victory and a great discovery for Russian poetry, and this long-overdue gift will surely be immediately enriched and shake the Russian poetry scene in one fell swoop." By that time, her manuscript of the Psalms would surely arouse the enthusiasm of the Russian youth for reciting her poems. New poets competed to emulate Tsvetaeva and hail her as their master. Her reputation and influence were growing incredibly, and many of her poems had been reprinted in the Literary Yearbook, her selected poems published in 1961, and four years later a collection of poems of various annotations, up to eight hundred pages long, with appendices of papers, memoirs, and reviews. Whether in the East or the West, it is widely believed that Tsvetaeva was one of the greatest Russian poets of this century.

She wants to express the natural force that is moving and never quiet

Anyone who knows Marina Tsvetaeva, like this writer, remembers her as a slender, upright young woman with blond hair, a dignified, self-respecting face, often radiant by her wonderful smile and a pair of large myopic eyes. Her personality and her art (Pasternak praised her art as "unparalleled in skill") appealed equally. Fundamentally, she is a romantic, and she seems to embody and express the natural force that is moving and never quiet, a wave that breaks through the cage of the human world and is always upward. In essence, it is an idealistic tendency, similar to the spirit of Hölderlin and other German poets during the "Wild Movement", but it is devoid of weakness, sadness or melancholy. Some commentators have talked about her "heroism". Despite the large number of lyrics she wrote about love, she did have a kind of vitality, an excitement and strength that seemed to be disproportionate to her feminine appearance, shyness and grace.

Like all true poets, she is committed to idealizing reality and turning the smallest of things into exciting events, into something exhilarating and often mythical. She expanded on objective facts, feelings, and thoughts: whatever was taking over her thoughts and hearts at the time, she expressed them in a very intense way, in poetry or simpler dialogue, so that her readers and listeners could concentrate on them. She speaks wittily and appreciates interlocutors who are proficient in fast conversational games. This kind of dialogue resembles a tennis match, with words like tennis balls flying back and forth. She is an intelligent and quick-witted woman who combines a sense of humor with the ability to navigate abstract concepts without losing her understanding of concrete reality. She reads extensively the literature of countries around the world, with keen judgment and an astonishing memory—evident in her essays and essay-style memoirs. Although she was far removed from metaphysics and left the problem of God to the theologians (she did not like Dostoevsky). But she tried to find the divine spark in the earthly world, in man, and in nature. This search is excessive, just as her passion for poetry, for the imagination of creation, or for the great people of the past is excessive. At various times of her life she had idolized Napoleon or Goethe; and she would suddenly place some of her isolated contemporaries in a respectable position, and then suddenly push them to the ground; she would often go from exaggerated praise to extreme disappointment. She never remained neutral or indifferent, but always obsessively loved or hated works of art or individuals. One of her favorite maxims is: "Literature is driven by passion, strength, dynamism, and preference." "She realized that her excessive enthusiasm and hatred prevented her from adapting to the routines of everyday life." In this world of incorruptibles. What should I do if I am overly emotionally excited? She lamented in a highly revealing poem.

She left a peculiar and unique image in the literary world of exiles, where the ideas that had previously dominated were either conservatism or the traditional ideas of symbolism and Akméism. Tsvetaeva also occasionally used symbolist metaphors, and she also liked Brock and Bere, but she was neither a member of their faction nor belonged to any other genre. The whole gist of her work and her bold linguistic experiments brought her close to Khlebnikov and Pasternak, and sometimes to Mayakovsky; generally speaking, she belonged to the avant-garde of the twenties. Her style is precise, clear, and well-defined, she prefers brass instruments to flutes, her poetic talent is characterized by intense, lively, and powerful, and the rhythm of poetry is fast and intense breaks, with strong repetition, scattered words and syllables that are in tune, thus moving from one line or one pair of sentences to another or another (consecutive lines). The poet emphasizes expression and re-reading of words, rather than pleasant tunes. She didn't shout as loudly as Mayakovsky, her poems were exclamations rather than eloquence, and she liked to play percussion instruments rather than trumpets. But her cries were often harsh, almost screaming.

The poet, known as the Amazon by her literary rivals, was as strict with herself as she was to others: she hated the half-witted unprofessional and empty rhetoric, and took the time to find the right words and an appropriate tone. She spends a lot of energy on her work like this, but she is a bit like an ascetic. When accused of her egoism being too much, she replied: "Man's only task in the world is to be faithful to himself, and the true poet is always his own prisoner; this fortress is stronger than the Peter-Paul fortress." ”

Tsvetaeva's poems may at first glance seem obscure, but this superficial impression is largely due to her concise, almost telegraphic style. This style is very different from the lengthy, cumbersome, uncertain and stuttering gibberish of the mediocre crappy poet. Her carefully embellished sentences are like flickering sparks that run through people's whole body like an electric current. Often omitting the grammatical connections between phrases, constantly undermining the coherence of words, and at the same time, unrelated words are used as signposts to keep up with the poet's increasing pace. With the exception of her early twenties folktales The Maiden and The Lad, dialects are only part of her extremely rich vocabulary and blend with her beautiful rhymes and linguistic innovations.

She likes to use the method of tracing the roots. She succeeded in revealing the original meaning of various words by removing the prefix, changing the end of the word and one or two vowels or consonants (somewhat like the French Surrealists). She skillfully used phonetics to derive new meanings of words from the proximity of sounds. For example, her long poem "Poem of the Mountains" is based on the similar pronunciation of the Russian words "ropá" and "rópe", from which she surprisingly derives a large number of derivative words. This "phoneme game" does not degenerate into a clumsy trick of pretentiousness and language. This exploration of the "core" and "true feelings" of words not only makes words shine again, but also gives them a deeper meaning, sets off their emotional substance and conceptual value, and thus achieves a unity rare in form and spirit. Her short and powerful lines, rhythms, head rhymes, stormy rhythms, and highly inspiring exclamations express the poet's indomitable, rebellious nature.

Is it outside of history, or is it a deeper representation of the times?

The honor that Tsvetaeva received behind her finally led the authorities to recognize her position after repeated delays. After her sister Anastasia was released from prison, she came to Yegabra in 1960 and erected a simple wooden cross on the cemetery where the poetess's body was believed to be buried, indicating the date of Tsvetaeva's birth and death. This is the only public memorial to this great poet in the SOVIET Union. But her poetry lives in the hearts of millions of people. Tsvetaeva's poetry is very different from the large number of ordinary Soviet poetry, and countless readers value this fact. Contrary to the empty and hypocritical propaganda or slogans, as well as the rhetoric of politics and patriotism, she offers completely real, purely lyrical and unique subjects; they are full of sincere emotions, romantic fantasies, the celebration of independence, the vision of love and nature. Judging from the titles of her entire set of poems, they are also quite novel and unique: "Poetry of the Air", "Trees", "Clouds", "Aphrodite", "Red Horse" and "Ode to Walking". Her plays were dedicated to Casanova and other explorers of the eighteenth century; in her powerful and imaginative essays, including colorful memoirs and inner monologues, she described the writers and artists she knew. Her letters became another important chapter in her writings because of their high literary value. For example, she and Pasternak had platonic love correspondence.

The whole content of Tsvetaeva's work seems completely different to the soviet reader under bondage, because it has nothing to do with the events of the time and the realities of the social, economic, and political environment in Russia. In the early twenties, she praised the "White Army" in her poems "Swan Camp" and "Perekop" (both poems were published abroad after her death), and in 1939 she wrote a series of poems celebrating freedom for the Nazi occupation of her dear Czechoslovakia. But none of her remaining works is related to revolution. She was exposed to life, fantasy and creation outside of history; she was aware of this, once saying, "I lost my century." But it is ironic that the poet, though so far removed from the life around her, used the most revolutionary poetic style and provocative innovations; and therefore represented more truly and profoundly the spirit of her time than the royal poets who tried to master poetry in vain with dogmas and slogans.

| from "To You A Hundred Years Later: Selected Poems of Tsvetaeva", with abridgements