Letters from Vienna #92
“Beyond the boundaries of the soul” Marina Tsvetayeva
“I don’t love life as such…” Marina Tsvetayeva (1892-1941) once stated “If I were to be taken beyond the ocean, into Paradise, and forbidden to write, I would refuse the ocean and Paradise.”[1]
“A poet” she wrote in 1926 “is first of all someone who has gone beyond the boundaries of the soul. A poet is beyond the soul…” Of her own art she stated: “I obey something which I hear within me, continuously, but not evenly, at times giving directions, at times commanding. When giving directions, I argue, when commanding I obey. The commanding voice is a primary, immutable, and irreplaceable line, the imminent essence of the poem. (Most often it is the last two lines, towards which the rest later grow.) The voice giving directions is the aural path to the line: I hear a melody, I do not hear words. I have to seek for the words.”[2] On another occasion she opined: “…all such poems of mine, all such poems in general, are addressed to God. Not without reason have I never included dedications, and not because of posthumous feminine pride, but because of some kind of final purity of conscience. Over the tops of human heads – they are addressed to God. At least to – the angels.”[3] With such attitudes it’s hardly surprising that she failed to feel at home in Soviet Russia and voluntarily went into exile. Living in Russia, in the wake of the Bolshevik “revolution” (in reality: a brutal, Wall Street financed coup d’état), had truly become a nightmare.
F. A. Stepun related: “The terror grew from day to day, people were persecuted not only for their actions and thoughts, but also for their inactive silent existences. Death sentences were pronounced and carried out not as punishments for crimes, but in order to liquidate material which was foreign, and therefore, not suitable for the creation of socialism. Landowners, bourgeois, priests, kulaks, White officers were liquidated, just as on rationally run farms one breed of cattle is liquidated for the sake of another.”
“Under the threat of this cold-blooded rational terror a process of internal and external repainting in the protective colouring of the Revolution began, which was unprecedented in its dimensions, throughout all of non-proletarian Russia. Thousands and thousands of people who had been forcibly driven from their estates, their city houses and even their modest “intelligentsia” flats by Revolutionary legislation and the arbitrary rule of the masses, discarded their entire cultural baggage and world-view, along with their accustomed property, if only to settle somehow under the saving shelter of Marxist ideology. Crowds of these impoverished, internally lost migrants ended up as employees and even directors of every kind of Soviet bureaucratic department, giving life an elusive illusory and schizophrenic character. Surrounded on all sides by party spies, these newly appeared “comrades” easily became entangled in the spy network, and in order to save themselves they sacrificed others.”
“There can be no doubt that the faceless and omnipresent system of espionage was the most terrible aspect of Bolshevik terrorism. The heart of every man didn’t beat in his own chest, but in the cold hand of an invisible “Chekist”.”[4]
“Every day new decrees appeared on the walls. By one of these Tsvetayeva was deprived of her “unearned income” of 100,000 roubles in the state bank. She herself had always despised money and wealth and in this she was in agreement with the teachings of Communism, but this decree meant she now lost her only means of existence. More painful for her, probably, was the requisition of her house on Borisoglebsky Lane, which was now occupied by proletarian families…”[5]
Unable to cope Tsvetayeva: “placed her daughters in a children’s home in Kuntsevo. Soon after, in February 1920, Alya fell ill with dysentery. Marina took her home, nursed her and learnt, only by accident, that at the same time, the little, weak Irina had died at Kuntsevo.”[6]
“In December 1920 Marina wrote to her sister in Koktebel:
“I am living with Alya in the same place, in the dining room. (The rest is occupied.) The house has been pillaged and is partially in ruins. It is a hovel. We are burning furniture as firewood…”
In 1922 she received a passport and went into exile, first to Berlin, then Prague and, after that to: Paris.
In 1933 she stated: “In the emigration they at first (hotheadedly) published me, before realizing that there was something in me that was not theirs…” Of this Elaine Feinstein commented: “They were not altogether mistaken; Tsvetayeva felt a strong allegiance to some poets in Soviet Russia…(and)…refused to sign” a letter against Mayakovsky.[7]
Her situation in the West became untenable after her daughter, Alya, returned to the Soviet Union, and her husband, Sergey Efron, became entangled in the “Reiss affair” of 1937-38. Once newspapers published his name in connection with the murder of the dissident Ignaz Poretsky (a.k.a. Ignaz Reiss), he was forced to flee. Ironically both Alya and Sergey were both arrested not long after their return to Soviet Russia, where the latter disappeared for good.
Although Pasternak had warned her not to return (he later lamented that his warning hadn’t been forceful enough) Tsvetayeva had little choice but to do so. When war came she was turned her into a refugee:
“In August 1941 M. Tsvetayeva” Milica Nikolic related, “came to us an evacuee, and lived in my house. She brought with her two kilos of flour, grain, one kilo of sugar and a few silver spoons. She asked me if I knew of anyone who wanted to buy silver. I did not know of anyone. We often heard how mother and son spoke in a foreign language. It seemed the son often rebuked her for bringing him here, and for the fact that he did not have enough to eat and nothing to wear…We did not know that she also had a daughter. She never spoke of her. And she never spoke about her husband. Once she said she wanted to visit the writer Aseyev, who had been evacuated near Yelabuga. She returned in a very depressed mood. On the following day she said that there was no way she go with us to work (we had to help with the construction of the new airport); so I went alone with her son. In the evening I was the first to come home. I found her hanging by the wall. I immediately informed the police. They came and took away the body.”
“We did not know that she was a writer. She did not tell us this. If we had known we would have gone to her funeral. Her son was also not present at the funeral. So, no one knows where her grave is. After the war people came and looked for the grave, but they didn’t find it.”
“She left behind only one letter to Aseyev. She asked him to look after her son. But he immediately went to the front. He was not yet sixteen. Later I learnt that he was killed.”[8]
“As to the testimony of a high-ranking employee of the Ministry of Security, who did not wish to reveal his identity, there exists in the archives a document in which it stated that one KGB officer went to see Tsvetayeva literally on the eve of her death. The same person confirmed that the fact of this interview as well as the contents were deliberately held in such a way that the poetess was left only one decision – suicide.”[9]
Anna Akhmatova was, sadly, once more proven right: Art is, indeed, a dangerous business.
[1] p. ix Marina Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems, Translated and introduced by Elaine Feinstein
[2] p.192 Marina Tsvetayeva, Maria Razumovsky
[3] p.94 Ibid
[4] p.109 Ibid
[5] p.110 Ibid
[6] p.123 Ibid
[7] p.xi Marina Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems, Translated and introduced by Elaine Feinstein
[8] p.295 Marina Tsvetayeva, Maria Razumovsky
[9] p.313 Ibid