This year marks the 130th anniversary of the birth of the Russian Silver Age poet Marina Tsvetaeva. The world of her poetry is complete and multifaceted, and her poems are like flickering sparks, and the current penetrates people's whole body. Tsvetaeva wrote poetry and smoked, firmly believing that "literature is driven by passion, strength, dynamism and preference."
01
Face the goodbye
It's time to remove the amber
It's time to exchange dictionaries
It's time to turn off the hanging
Lantern above the gate
- Tsvetaeva
In 1940, six months after writing these poems, Marina Tsvetaeva ended her life. The leading Russian poetess of the 20th century seems to have already revealed her thoughts in poetry, as it has always been, poetry is a part of her life.
In 1892, Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow into a Kochi family, her mother was a musician, her father was a famous scholar of philology and literature at Moscow University, she had extensive knowledge of ancient Greece, the Middle East, Slavic and other cultural fields, and the family environment laid the literary background of Tsvetaeva - at the age of 7, she was already familiar with Russian, French, German and other Chinese, she once said, "Before the age of 7, I knew everything about the world." ”
02
The poet of precociousness
Tsvetaeva began "composing poems" at the age of 6 and published her first poem at the age of 16. A few years later, she published two collections of poems, "The Twilight Commemorative Album" and "The Divine Lamp", but kept it a secret from her family. After 1912, she 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".
To talk about Tsvetaeva 130 years ago, in the view of Tian Hongmin, a scholar of Russian literature, as Nabokov said, "We want to go back to the end of the 19th century." Because she accompanied her mother to see a doctor, the young Tsvetaeva traveled daily to Prague, Berlin, and Paris, leaving poems everywhere she went. In contrast to her contemporaries, she could write poetry in any language, and in this sense she was a literal cosmopolitan poet.
Neither Tsvetaeva nor her father thought much of the beginning of "writing poetry." Her outstanding talent in the field of poetry writing, her busy father did not even notice, until a friend praised him for Marina's poetry. Tsvetaeva's travels through European literary salons quickly attracted the attention of her Russian counterparts, and the famous poet Voloshin published a lengthy review in a Moscow literary journal, thus establishing the young Tsvetaeva's decisive position as a representative poet of the 20th century.
03
Describe sweetness in bitterness
Tsvetaeva is widely known for her bobo head with bangs and a cigarette from time to time, an image that lasted until her death. Whether published in Russian, English, or Chinese, the cover will focus on her eyes—as Tolstoy described Anna as "a pair of gray, deep eyes."
If you want to use the female poets of the same era as a contrast, the female poet Akhmatova is very concerned about her poet identity, she knows how to convey to others "I am a poet", she changed her surname with all the opening sounds, because when reading the opening voice, the facial expression is the most prominent, which also makes her name sound particularly loud. Akhmatova knew early on, "I am the moon of Russian poetry."
And this is not in Marina, she feels that this is a part of herself and does not need to be expressed. "She's more rebellious, and there's a lot of playfulness and satire in her poetry that female poets don't have, and it's impossible to describe in words how powerful she is." Tian Hongmin commented, "Just as there was a poet who described her as 'always entering from the high c, but never breaking the tone', she never looks back on the past and is always full of power for the future." ”
Q&A
Tian Hongmin
Scholar of Russian literature
What do you think of women's literature and women writers?
Personally, I think that what makes women's writing fascinating is the feeling of being in it. In the literary world, from the early days of writing to today, the strength of women's writing seems to be that we can't find any so-called strength between the lines. There is a feeling that after reading it from beginning to end, I think it is wonderful, but I can't say where it is good.
Russian literature is very recognizable, can you talk about it from a female perspective?
It may not be appropriate to say this, but in Russian literature it seems that women are always praised, without the slightest pejorative meaning. It is as if Russian literature, from its inception, has not had that kind of evil to human nature, or something as extreme as Dante's Divine Comedy. Like Tolstoy once proudly said, Anna had an 8-year-old child, she was divorced, but everyone loved her, whether it was a man or a woman, even a woman who was jealous of her.
If you look at it from a personal point of view, how will it be biased to describe it?
It is similar to "individual self-consciousness", as if female writers have an attitude of no concern, and writing is their life, very natural. I have seen Yan Lianke have a sentence describing "potatoes thrown into potatoes", which is very wonderful, the same is "women in women".
"Reading Tsvetaeva" book list
"To You A Hundred Years Later"
Translated by Su Hang
Guangxi Normal University Press
《New Year Greetings》
Translated by Wang Jiaxin
Flower City Press
The Devil in Me
Translated by Sun Zhili and Zhou Ye
Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House
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The image comes from the Internet