Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva ({{lang-ru|??????? ????????? ?????????}}) (October 9, 1892 – August 31, 1941) was a Russian poet and writer.

Her work

From a poem she wrote in 1913, in which she displays her propensity for prophecy:

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:Scattered in bookstores, greyed by dust and time,

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:Unseen, unsought, unopened, and unsold,

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:My poems will be savoured as are rarest wines -

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:When they are old.

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Conversely, her poetry was much admired by poets such as Valery Bryusov, Maximilian Voloshin, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Anna Akhmatova. Today, that recognition is sustained by the poet Joseph Brodsky, pre-eminent among Tsvetaeva's champions. Tsvetaeva is primarily a poet-lyricist, since her lyrical voice remains clearly audible in her narrative poetry.

Related Topics:
Valery Bryusov - Maximilian Voloshin - Osip Mandelstam - Boris Pasternak - Rainer Maria Rilke - Anna Akhmatova - Joseph Brodsky

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Her lyric poems fill ten collections; the uncollected lyrics would add at least another volume. Her first two collections indicate their subject matter in their titles: Evening Album (Vechernii al'bom, 1910) and The Magic Lantern (Volshebnyi fonar', 1912). The poems are vignettes of a tranquil childhood and youth in a professorial, middle-class home in Moscow, and display considerable grasp of the formal elements of style.

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The full range of Tsvetaeva's talent developed quickly, and was undoubtedly influenced by the contacts which she had made at Koktebel, and was made evident in two new collections: Mileposts (Versty, 1921) and Mileposts: Book One (Versty, Vypusk I, 1922).

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Three elements of Tsvetaeva's mature style emerge in the Mileposts collections. First, Tsvetaeva dates her poems and publishes them chronologically. The poems in Mileposts: Book One, for example, were written in 1916 and resolve themselves as a versified journal. Secondly, there are cycles of poems which fall into a regular chronological sequence among the single poems, evidence that certain themes demanded further expression and development. One cycle announces the theme of Mileposts: Book One as a whole: the "Poems of Moscow." Two other cycles are dedicated to poets, the "Poems to Akhmatova" and the "Poems to Blok", which again reappear in a separate volume, Poems to Blok (Stikhi k Bloku, 1922). Thirdly, the Mileposts collections demonstrate the dramatic quality of Tsvetaeva's work, and her ability to assume the guise of multiple dramatis personae within them.

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The collection entitled Separation (Razluka, 1922) was to contain Tsvetaeva's first long verse narrative, "On a Red Steed" (Na krasnom kone). The poem is a prologue to three more verse-narratives written between 1920 and 1922. All four narrative poems draw on folkloric plots. Tsvetaeva acknowledges her sources in the titles of the very long works, The Maiden-Tsar: A Fairy-tale Poem (Tsar'-devitsa: Poema-skazka, 1922) and "The Swain", subtitled "A Fairytale" (Molodets: skazka, 1924). The fourth folklore-style poem is entitled "Byways" (Pereulochki, published in 1923 in the collection Remeslo), and it is the first poem which may be deemed incomprehensible in that it is fundamentally a soundscape of language.

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The collection Psyche (Psikheya, 1923) contains one of Tsvetaeva's best-known cycles "Insomnia" (Bessonnitsa) and the poem The Swans' Encampment (Lebedinyi stan, Stikhi 1917-1921, published in 1957) which celebrates the White Army.

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Subsequently, as an emigré, Tsvetaeva's last two collections of lyrics were published by emigré presses, Craft (Remeslo, 1923) in Berlin and After Russia (Posle Rossii, 1928) in Paris. There then followed the twenty-three lyrical "Berlin" poems, the pantheistic "Trees" (Derev'ya), "Wires" (Provoda) and "Pairs" (Dvoe), and the tragic "Poets" (Poety). "After Russia" contains the poem "In Praise of the Rich", in which Tsvetaeva's oppositional tone is merged with her proclivity for ruthless satire.

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In 1924, Tsvetaeva wrote "Poem of the End", which details a walk around Prague and across its bridges; the walk is about the final walk she will take with her lover Konstantin Rodzevitch. In it everything is foretold: in the first few lines (translated by Elaine Feinstein) the future is already written:

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:A single post, a point of rusting

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::tin in the sky

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:marks the fated place we

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::move to, he and I

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Again, further poems foretell future developments. Principal among these is the voice of the classically-oriented Tsvetaeva heard in cycles "The Sibyl," "Phaedra," and "Ariadne." Tsvetaeva's beloved, ill-starred heroines recur in two verse plays, Theseus-Ariadne (Tezei-Ariadna, 1927) and Phaedra (Fedra, 1928). These plays form the first two parts of an incomplete trilogy entitled Aphrodite's Rage.

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The satirist in Tsvetaeva plays second fiddle only to the poet-lyricist. Several satirical poems, moreover, are among Tsvetaeva's best-known works: "The Train of Life" (Poezd zhizni) and "The Floorcleaners' Song" (Poloterskaya), both included in After Russia, and The Rat-catcher (Krysolov, 1925-1926), a long, folkloric narrative. The target of Tsvetaeva's satire is everything petty and petty bourgeois. Unleashed against such dull creature comforts is the vengeful, unearthly energy of workers both manual and creative. In her notebook, Tsvetaeva writes of "The Floorcleaners' Song": "Overall movement: the floorcleaners ferret out a house's hidden things, they scrub a fire into the door... What do they flush out? Coziness, warmth, tidiness, order... Smells: incense, piety. Bygones. Yesterday... The growing force of their threat is far stronger than the climax."

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The poem which Tsvetaeva describes as liricheskaia satira, The Rat-Catcher, is loosely based on the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The Rat-Catcher, which is also known as The Pied Piper, is considered by some to be the finest of Tsvetaeva's work. It was also partially an act of hommage to Heinrich Heine's poem Die Wanderatten.

Related Topics:
Pied Piper of Hamelin - Heinrich Heine

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The Rat-Catcher appeared initially, in serial format, in the emigré journal Volia Rossii in 1925-1926 whilst still being written. It was not to appear in the Soviet Union until after the death of Stalin in 1956. Its hero is the Pied Piper of Hamelin who saves a town from hordes of rats and then leads the town's children away too, in retribution for the citizens' ingratitude. As in the other folkloric narratives, The Ratcatcher's story line emerges indirectly through numerous speaking voices which shift from invective, to extended lyrical flights, to bathos.

Related Topics:
Stalin - 1956 - Pied Piper of Hamelin

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Tsvetaeva's last ten years of exile, from 1928 when "After Russia" appeared until her return in 1939 to the Soviet Union, were principally a "prose decade", though this would almost certainly be by dint of economic necessity rather than one of choice.

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