"Be like children" - this means: love, pity, kiss - everyone!
I am not a woman, not an Amazon, not a child. I am a creature!
Therefore, no matter how you fight! - everything is allowed to me. And a deep - basic - feeling of innocence.
Changing myself (for the sake of people - always for the sake of people!) I never succeed - to change myself - i.e. completely change yourself. Where I have to think (because of others) about an act, it is always purposeless - it is begun and not finished - it is inexplicable, not mine. I remembered A for sure and I don't remember B, - and immediately instead of B - my hieroglyphs, inexplicable to anyone, clear only to me.
Boris Chaliapin Portrait of M.I. Tsvetaeva 1933
***
Alya: “There is silence, sadness, severity, courage in your soul. You can climb such peaks that no one can climb. You are some kind of burned out. I can’t think of a suitable word for you. ”
***
Alya: “Mom, you know what I'll tell you? You are the soul of poetry, you yourself are a long verse, but no one can read what is written on you, neither others, nor you yourself - no one ”
***
Ah, I understand that more than anything in the world I love myself, my soul, which I throw into the hands of everyone I meet, and the skin I throw into all the cars of the 3rd class - and nothing is done to them!
***
What am I?
Silver rings all over the arm + hair on the forehead + brisk gait +++ ..
I am without rings, I am with an open forehead, plodding at a slow pace - not me, the soul with the wrong body, it does not matter, like a hunchback or a deaf-mute. For - I swear to God! - nothing in me was a fad, everything - every ring! - a necessity, not for people, for your own soul. So: for me, who hates to draw attention to myself, always hiding in the darkest corner of the hall, my 10 rings on my hands and a cloak in 3 capes (no one wore them then) was often a tragedy. But for each of these 10 rings I could answer, for my own low heels I cannot answer.
***
Yesterday I read Fortuna at the Palace of Arts (52, Povarskaya, Sologub's house - my former - first! - service). I was greeted well, of all those who read-one-with applause. I read well. At the end, I stand alone, with random acquaintances. If they had not come, alone. Here I am as alien as among the tenants of my house, where I have been living for 5 years, as in the service, as once in all 5 foreign and Russian boarding schools and gymnasiums where I studied - as always, everywhere.
***
Grey hair.
A day later, at Nicodemus, Charles exclaimed: “Marina! Where did you get your gray hair? "
-By the way, my hair is light, light blond-golden. Wavy, cropped, like boys in the Middle Ages, sometimes curly (side and back, always). Very thin, like silk, very alive - all of me. And from the front - I noticed this spring - one - two - three - if you push apart - and more - ten hairs - completely gray, white, also curling at the end. - So strange. I am too young to assert out of pride that I like it, I am really glad of them, as proof that some forces in me are mysteriously working - not old age, of course! - and maybe my - tirelessly - working head and heart, all this passionate, hidden under a carefree shell, creative life. - As proof that iron laws of the spirit were found for such an iron health as mine.
***
About the rudeness of their nature:
I was never happy with flowers as a gift, and if I ever bought flowers, then either in the name of someone else (violets-Parma-Duke of Reichstadt, etc.) or immediately, without reaching home, brought it to someone.
Flowers in a pot must be watered, worms removed from them, there is more dirty trick than joy, flowers in a glass - since I will certainly forget to change the water - give off a disgusting smell and, thrown into the stove (I throw everything into the stove!), Do not burn. If you want to make me happy, write me letters, give me books about everything, rings - whatever you like - only silver and large! - a calico on a dress (better than a pink one) - only, gentlemen, not flowers!
***
I practice what is most difficult for myself: living in strangers. A piece does not go down the throat - it doesn't matter whether it is with friends, or, as it is now, in a dirty village, with rude peasants. Cannot be eaten, not readable, not written. One cry: "Home!"
***
When they love me, I bow my head, they don't love me, I raise! I feel good when they don't love me! (more-i)
***
While waiting for the train along the platform, I thought about the fact that everyone has friends, relatives, acquaintances. Everyone comes up, greets, asks about something - some names - plans for the day - and I'm alone - and everyone doesn't care if I don't sit down.
***
When I am with people who do not know that I am I, I apologize with all my being for the fact that I exist - to somehow redeem! Here is the explanation for my eternal laughter with people. I can't - I can't stand - I forbid you to think badly of me!
***
I perfectly understand Ali and Seryozha's attraction to me. The lunar and water beings, they are attracted to the solar and fiery in me. The moon looks out the window (loves one), the sun looks out into the world (loves everyone).
The moon seeks - inward, the sun goes on the surface, dances, splashes, does not sink.
***
All of me is in italics.
Marina Tsvetaeva. Drawing. 1931 g.
***
Idleness is the most gaping emptiness, the most devastating cross. Therefore, I - maybe - do not like the countryside and happy love.
***
Will I ever find a person who will love me so much that he will give me potassium cyanide, and will recognize me so much that he will understand, will be convinced that I will never use it ahead of time. - and therefore, having given, he will sleep peacefully.
***
I don't need someone who doesn't need me. Superfluous to me the one to whom I have nothing to give.
***
What is not in me, that they love me so little?
Too 1st grade? - in spite of everything verbal in the 18th century. you will not take by the chin!
Therefore: in the 3rd grade - 1st grade! (needed: in the 3rd-4th, then it's fun!)
Well, and for the "noble"?
Hypocrisy is what I lack. I’m right away: “I understand very little in painting”, “I don’t understand sculpture at all”, “I am a very bad person, all my kindness is adventurism,” and they believe in their word, they take it at their word, not considering that I am I’m talking to myself. But one thing should be noted: never had anyone with me - not a tinge of familiarity. Maybe: my - ahead - surprised, serious, incomprehensible eyes
M. I. Tsvetaeva. Portrait by M. Nachman. 1915 g.
***
I don’t like me at all, people just blame my “earthly signs”. The backbone, not the leather belt, pushes back, the rib, not the belt around, the forehead, not the hair above, the hand, not the ring on. I repulse my impudent ability to rejoice at a belt, bangs, a ring outside the reflection in their views, my complete disregard for this repulsion, I repulse I.
***
Unsuccessful encounters: weak people. I always wanted to love, I always frenziedly dreamed of obeying, trusting, being out of my will (self-will), being in reliable and gentle hands. Weakly held, that's why she left. They didn't love, that's why they left.
***
I had a name. I had an appearance. Attracting attention (they all said to me: "the head of a Roman", Borgia, Prague boy-knight, etc.) and, finally, although I had to start with this: I had a gift - and all this, taken together - and I probably forgot something else! - did it not serve me, hurt, did not bring me half? and a thousandth part of that love, which is achieved by one naive woman's smile.
Marina Tsvetaeva V. Syskov 1989
***
I did not know a person more timid than I was born. But my courage turned out to be even greater than my timidity. Courage: resentment, delight, sometimes just reason, always-heart. So I, not knowing the most "simple" and "easy" things - the most difficult and difficult - could.
***
In the face of a cold window. I seem to have loved most of all in my life - comfort. He is irrevocably gone from my life.
***
I, loving nature, it seems, more than anything else, managed without its descriptions: I only mentioned it: a vision of a tree. She was all a background - to my soul. Also, I used to say it allegorically: birch silver. The streams are alive!
******
Oh my God! A whole minute of bliss! But is this not enough even for the whole human life?
L. Levchenko (Eremenko) M.I. Tsvetaeva. (Pencil)
***
You can only give a very rich person.
***
Resolved, Marina! I'm getting married - in blue, I'm lying in a coffin - in a chocolate one!
***
How many prejudices have already disappeared! - Jews, high heels, peeled nails - clean hands! - shampooing every other day .... only the letter and corset remain
***
The male! What anxiety in the house! Perhaps worse than a nursing baby ..
Writing
... to my poems, like precious wines,
It will be its turn. M. Tsvetaeva
Marina Tsvetaeva is a poet of great talent and tragic fate. She always remained true to herself, to the voice of her conscience, to the voice of her muse, who has never “betrayed goodness and beauty”.
She begins to write poems very early, and of course, the first lines about love:
We were not separated by people, but by shadows.
My boy, my heart! ..
There was not, there is no and there will not be a replacement,
My boy, my heart!
The recognized master of Russian poetry M. Voloshin wrote about her first book "Evening Album": "Evening Album" is a wonderful and direct book ... " on life itself in all its fullness:
Who is made of stone, who is made of clay -
And I am silver and sparkle!
My business is treason, my name is
Marina,
I am the mortal foam of the sea.
In Tsvetaeva's poems, like colored shadows in a magic lantern, there are: Don Juan in a Moscow blizzard, young generals of 1812, the “oblong and hard oval” of a polka grandmother, “mad ataman” Stepan Razin, passionate Carmen.
Most of all, perhaps, I am attracted to Tsvetaeva's poetry by her emancipation and sincerity. She seems to hold out her heart in the palm of her hand, confessing:
I love you with all my insomnia
I will heed you with all my insomnia ...
Sometimes it seems that all of Tsvetaeva's lyrics are a continuous declaration of love for people, for the world and for a specific person. Liveliness, attentiveness, the ability to be carried away and captivate, a warm heart, a burning temperament - these are the characteristic features of Tsvetaeva's lyric heroine, and at the same time herself. These character traits helped her maintain a taste for life, despite the frustrations and difficulties of the creative path.
Marina Tsvetaeva put the work of the poet at the head of her life, despite the often impoverished existence, everyday troubles and tragic events that literally haunted her. But life was conquered by being, which grew out of stubborn, selfless labor.
The result is hundreds of poems, plays, more than ten poems, critical articles, memoir prose, in which Tsvetaeva said everything about herself. One can only bow before the genius of Tsvetaeva, who created a completely unique poetic world and sacredly believed in her muse.
Before the revolution, Marina Tsvetaeva published three books, having managed to retain her voice among the motley polyphony of literary schools and trends of the “Silver Age”. She is the author of original works, accurate in form and thought, many of which stand next to the heights of Russian poetry.
I know the truth! All the old truths are gone.
There is no need for people to fight people on earth.
Look: evening, look: night is coming soon.
What are poets, lovers, generals about?
Already the wind is spreading. The earth is already in dew,
Soon a blizzard will find a starry storm in the sky,
And under the earth we will soon fall asleep,
Who on earth did not let each other fall asleep ...
The poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva requires an effort of thought. Her poems and poems cannot be read and read in between times, thoughtlessly sliding through the lines and pages. She herself defined the “co-creation” of the No. of the writer and the reader as follows: “What is reading - if not solving, interpreting, extracting the secret left behind the lines, beyond the words ... Reading - first of all - co-creation ... Tired of my thing , - means, read well and - read well. The reader's fatigue is not devastated fatigue, but creative. "
Tsvetaeva saw Blok only from afar, did not exchange a single word with him. Tsvetaev's cycle “Poems to Blok” is a monologue of falling in love, gentle and quivering. And although the poetess refers to him as "you", but the epithets assigned to the poet ("gentle ghost", "knight without reproach", "snow swan", "righteous", "quiet light") say that Blok is for her this is not a real person, but a symbolic image of Poetry itself:
Your name is a bird in your hand
Your name is a piece of ice on your tongue
One single lip movement.
Your name is five letters.
How much music is in these amazing four lines and how much love! But the object of love is unattainable, love is unrealizable:
But my river - yes with your river,
But my hand - yes with your hand
Will not converge. My joy, while
Do not overtake the dawn - dawn.
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, with her characteristic aphorism, formulated the definition of a poet: “Equality of the gift of the soul and the verb is the poet”. She herself happily combined these two qualities - the gift of the soul (“The soul was born winged”) and the gift of speech.
I am happy to live in an exemplary and simple way:
Like the sun - like a pendulum - like a calendar.
To be a secular hermitage of slender stature,
Wise - like any creation of God.
To know: Spirit is my companion, and Spirit is my guide!
To enter without a report, as a ray and as a glance.
Live as I write: exemplary and concise, -
As God commanded and friends do not order.
Tsvetaeva's tragedy begins after the 1917 revolution. She does not understand and does not accept her, she finds herself alone with two small daughters in the chaos of post-October Russia. It seems that everything collapsed: the husband does not know where, those around him are not up to poetry, but what is a poet without creativity? And Marina in despair asks:
What am I to do, edge and fishing
Singers! - like a wire! Tan! Siberia!
By your obsessions - like over a bridge!
With their weightlessness
In the world of weights.
Never, not in the terrible post-revolutionary years, or later in emigration; - Tsvetaeva did not betray herself, she did not betray herself, the person and the poet. Abroad, it was difficult to get close to the Russian emigration. Her unhealed pain, open wound - Russia. Do not forget, do not throw it out of the heart. (“It is as if they had killed my life ... life is running out.”)
In 1939, Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva returned to her homeland. And the last act of the tragedy began. The country, crushed by the leaden fog of Stalinism, seemed to prove - over and over again that it did not need a poet who loved her and yearned for his Motherland. Striving, as it turned out, to die.
In the godforsaken Elabuga on August 31, 1941 - a noose. The tragedy is over. Life is over. What's left? Strength of spirit, rebellion, incorruptibility. Remained Poetry.
Opened the veins: unstoppable,
Life gushes irreparably.
Substitute bowls and plates!
Any plate will be small.
The bowl is flat.
Over the edge - and past -
Into the black earth, nourish the reeds.
Unrecoverable, unstoppable
The verse gushes irreparably.
About Tsvetaeva, about her poems, I can write endlessly. Her love lyrics are amazing. Well, who else could define love in this way:
Scimitar? Fire?
More modest - where so loud!
Pain as familiar as a palm to the eyes,
Like lips -
The name of your own child.
In Tsvetaeva's poems, she is all rebellious and strong, and in pain she continues to give herself to people, from tragedy and suffering she creates Poetry.
I am the Phoenix Bird, I sing only in the fire!
Support my high life!
I burn high - and burn to ashes!
And may the night be bright for you!
Today Marina Tsvetaeva's prophecy has come true: she is one of the most beloved and widely read contemporary poets.
And always one and the same -
Let the hero love in the novel!
All women lead to the fogs.
The ghetto of chosenness. Shaft. Moat.
Do not expect mercy.
In this most Christian world
Poets are Jews.
If you were born winged -
What a mansion to her - and what a house to her!
I know everything that was, everything that will be,
I know all the deaf and dumb secret
What's on the dark, on the tongue-tied
Human language is called - Life.
And if the heart is breaking
Removes stitches without a doctor, -
Know that there is a head from the heart,
And there is an ax - from the head ...
To the Emperor - the capitals,
Drummer - snow.
To some without crookedness -
Life is given dearly.
Do not love, rich - poor,
Do not love, scientist - stupid
Do not love, ruddy - pale,
Do not love, good - harmful:
Gold - a copper half!
Don't be ashamed, country Russia!
Angels are always barefoot ...
Let the young not remember
About hunched over old age.
Let the old ones not remember
About blissful youth.
Heart - of love potions
The potion is the truest of all.
Woman from the cradle
Someone's mortal sin.
The whole sea needs the whole sky
A whole heart needs all God.
And the indifferent - God will punish!
It is scary to tread on the soul of a living.
The ship cannot sail indefinitely
And do not sing a nightingale.
I bless the daily work,
Bless the nightly sleep.
The Lord's mercy - and the Lord's judgment,
A good law is a stone law.
There is sadness in the world. God has no sadness!
... Forever in blind man's buff
Playing with reality is harmful.
All along the same road
Dragged by the droves -
In the early, late hour.
Woe, woe, salty sea!
You will feed
You will get me drunk
You will spin
You will serve!
Bitterness! Bitterness! Eternal smack
On your lips, about passion! Bitterness! Bitterness!
Eternal ordeal -
The final fall.
Hussar! - Not finished with dolls yet,
- Ah! - in the cradle we are waiting for the hussar!
Children are the world's tender riddles,
And the answer lies in the riddles themselves!
Valor and virginity! This union
As ancient and wondrous as death and glory.
Friend! Indifference is a bad school!
It hardens the hearts.
There are more important things in the world
Passionate storms and love exploits.
There is an hour - like a discarded clutch:
When we tame our pride.
An hour of apprenticeship - it is in everyone's life
Solemnly inevitable.
Woman from the cradle
Someone's mortal sin.
For the prince - the clan, for the seraphim - the host,
Behind each - thousands of people like him,
So that, staggering, - on a living wall
I fell and knew that - thousands to replace!
A den for the beast,
To the wanderer - the road,
The dead are dear.
To each his own.
Know one thing: that tomorrow you will be old.
Forget the rest, baby.
And her tears - water, and blood -
Water, - in blood, washed in tears!
Not a mother, but a stepmother - Love:
Do not expect judgment or mercy.
And so the moons will melt
And melt the snow
When this young man rushes by
Adorable age.
Every verse is a child of love
Beggar bastard
Firstborn - on the track
To bow to the winds - put.
Some go to the sand, some go to school.
To each his own.
On human heads
Leisya, forget!
Who did not build a house -
Unworthy of the earth.
Who doesn't owe friends -T
from hardly generous to girlfriends.
Lighter than a fox
Hide under clothes,
Than hide you
Jealousy and tenderness!
Love! Love! And in convulsions and in a coffin
I am alert - I am seduced - I am embarrassed - I will rush.
People, believe me: we are alive with longing!
Only in melancholy are we victorious over boredom.
Will everything change? What is flour?
No, better with flour!
We sleep - and now, through the stone slabs
Heavenly guest in four petals.
O world, understand! Singer - in a dream - open
Star law and flower formula.
Do not love, rich - poor,
Do not love, scientist - stupid,
Do not love, ruddy - pale,
Do not love, good - harmful:
Gold - a copper half!
One half of the window disappeared.
One half of the soul showed up.
Let's open it - and that half,
And that half of the window!
Olympians ?! Their look is sleeping!
Celestials - we - sculpt!
Hands that are not needed
Darling, they serve - the World.
... Love washes away the best blush.
Poems grow like stars and like roses
How beauty is unnecessary in the family.
Already the evening is spreading, the earth is already in dew,
Soon a starry blizzard will freeze in the sky,
And soon we will all fall asleep underground,
Who on earth did not let each other fall asleep.
I love women, that they were not shy in battle,
Those who knew how to hold a sword and a spear, -
But I know that only in captivity of the cradle
Ordinary - feminine - my happiness!
In a dialogue with life, it is not her question that is important, but our answer.
You can joke with a person, but you cannot joke with his name.
Women talk about love and are silent about lovers, men - vice versa.
Love in us is like a treasure, we know nothing about it, the whole point is in the case.
To love is to see a person the way God intended him and his parents did not fulfill him.
For complete coherence of souls, coherence of breathing is needed, for what is breath if not the rhythm of the soul? So, in order for people to understand each other, it is necessary that they walk or lie side by side.
There are meetings, there are feelings when everything is given at once and there is no need to continue. Continue, because this is to check.
Every time I find out that a person loves me, I am surprised, does not love me, I am surprised, but most of all I am surprised when a person is indifferent to me.
Love and motherhood are almost mutually exclusive. Real motherhood is courageous.
Love: in winter from cold, in summer from heat, in spring from the first leaves, in autumn from the last: always - from everything.
Betrayal already indicates love. You can't betray a friend.
The body in youth is an outfit, in old age - a coffin from which you are torn!
Goddesses married gods, gave birth to heroes, and loved shepherds.
Our best words are intonation.
Creativity is a common cause, performed by the solitary.
The future is the realm of legends about us, just as the past is the realm of fortune-telling about us (although it seems the other way around). The present is only a tiny field of our activity.
Life should rejoice in a happy person, encourage him in this rare gift. Because happiness comes from being happy.
The wings are freedom only when they are open in flight, behind the back they are heaviness.
How delightful is the preaching of equality from princely lips - so disgusting of the janitors.
Favorable conditions? They are not for the artist. Life itself is an unfavorable condition.
In the Orthodox Church (temple), I feel a body going into the ground, in the Catholic Church - a soul flying into the sky.
A woman who does not forget about Heinrich Heine the minute her lover enters, loves only Heinrich Heine.
Kinship by blood is coarse and strong, kinship by election is subtle. Where it is thin, there it breaks.
The curve takes out, the straight line drowns.
- Know yourself! - I did. - And this does not in the least make it easier for me to know the other. On the contrary, as soon as I begin to judge a person by myself, I get a misunderstanding after misunderstanding.
I love the rich. I swear and affirm that the rich are kind (because it costs them nothing) and beautiful (because they dress well).
If you cannot be neither a man, nor handsome, nor noble, you must be rich.
Our children are older than us, because they live longer. Older than us from the future. Therefore, sometimes they are alien to us.
The girls of that circle lived almost exclusively by feelings and arts and thus understood more in matters of the heart than our most lively, sober, most enlightened contemporaries. (About Pushkin's time).
Sport is a waste of time, a waste of energy. Below the athlete is only his viewer.
Each book is a theft from one's own life. The more you read, the less you know how and you want to live on your own.
The main thing is to understand - we all live for the last time.
Sometimes you love a person so much that you want to leave him. Sit in silence, mark about him ...
The only one who is not familiar with sadness is God. - M. Tsvetaeva
In children, the past and the future merge into the present, which seems unshakable.
There are other important things in life, not only love and passion.
Tsvetaeva: Sometimes you really want to give your soul for the opportunity to give your soul for something.
The constant play of hide and seek with life does not lead to anything good.
If we take the future of us, then children are getting older than we are, wiser. Because of this, there is a misunderstanding.
Such a strange feeling. If we consider you as dear to me, only pain will remain. If you consider you a stranger - good. But you are neither one nor the other for me - I am with none of you.
Women are often led into fog.
Read the continuation of Marina Tsvetaeva's beautiful quotes on the following pages:
I am in life! - the first did not leave. And in life - how much more God will let me go - I will not go first. I just can not. I always wait for the other to leave, I do everything for the other to leave, because it’s easier for me to leave — it’s easier to cross my own corpse.
I can do without you. I am neither a girl nor a woman, I do without dolls and without men. I can do without everything. But maybe for the first time I wanted to not be able to.
I say all sorts of nonsense. You laugh, I laugh, we laugh. Nothing loving: the night belongs to us, not we to her. And as I become happy - happy because I am not in love, because I can say that there is no need to kiss, simply filled with unclouded gratitude - I kiss you.
Whether to dream together, sleep together, but always cry alone.
Do you ever forget when you love - what you love? I never. It's like a toothache - just the opposite, on the contrary, a toothache, only there it hurts, but here - there is no word.
You need to write only those books, from the absence of which you suffer. In short: your desktop.
Friend! Indifference is a bad school! It hardens the hearts.
I am not needed by anyone, everyone is pleased. "
The most valuable thing in life and in poetry is that which fell through.
Valor and virginity! This union. As ancient and wondrous as death and glory.
“Nobody wants - nobody can understand one thing: that I am all alone.
To love a person means to see him the way God intended him and did not fulfill his parents.
Acquaintances and friends - all of Moscow, but not one who is for me - no, without me! - will die.
The world has a limited number of souls and an unlimited number of bodies.
The ghetto of chosenness. Shaft. Moat.
Do not expect mercy.
In this most Christian world
Poets are Jews.
If the soul was born winged -
What a mansion to her - and what a house to her!
I know everything that was, everything that will be,
I know all the deaf and dumb secret
What's on the dark, on the tongue-tied
Human language is called - Life.
And if the heart is breaking
Removes stitches without a doctor, -
Know that there is a head from the heart,
And there is an ax - from the head ...
To the Emperor - the capitals,
Drummer - snow.
To some without crookedness -
Life is given dearly.
Do not love, rich - poor,
Do not love, scientist - stupid
Do not love, ruddy - pale,
Do not love, good - harmful:
Gold - a copper half!
Don't be ashamed, country Russia!
Angels are always barefoot ...
Let the young not remember
About hunched over old age.
Let the old ones not remember
About blissful youth.
Heart - of love potions
The potion is the truest of all.
Woman from the cradle
Someone's mortal sin.
The whole sea needs the whole sky
A whole heart needs all God.
And the indifferent - God will punish!
It is scary to tread on the soul of a living.
The ship cannot sail indefinitely
And do not sing a nightingale.
I bless the daily work,
Bless the nightly sleep.
The Lord's mercy - and the Lord's judgment,
A good law is a stone law.
All along the same road
Dragged by the droves -
In the early, late hour.
Woe, woe, salty sea!
You will feed
You will get me drunk
You will spin
You will serve!
Bitterness! Bitterness! Eternal smack
On your lips, about passion! Bitterness! Bitterness!
Eternal ordeal -
The final fall.
Hussar! - Not finished with dolls yet,
- Ah! - in the cradle we are waiting for the hussar!
Children are the world's tender riddles,
And the answer lies in the riddles themselves!
There is an hour - like a discarded clutch:
When we tame our pride.
An hour of apprenticeship - it is in everyone's life
Solemnly inevitable.
Woman from the cradle
Someone's mortal sin.
For the prince - the clan, for the seraphim - the host,
Behind each - thousands of people like him,
So that, staggering, - on a living wall
I fell and knew that - thousands to replace!
A den for the beast,
To the wanderer - the road,
The dead are dear.
To each his own.
Know one thing: that tomorrow you will be old.
Forget the rest, baby.
And her tears - water, and blood -
Water, - in blood, washed in tears!
Not a mother, but a stepmother - Love:
Do not expect judgment or mercy.
And so the moons will melt
And melt the snow
When this young man rushes by
Adorable age.
Every verse is a child of love
Beggar bastard
Firstborn - on the track
To bow to the winds - put.
Some go to the sand, some go to school.
To each his own.
On human heads
Leisya, forget!
Who did not build a house -
Unworthy of the earth.
Who doesn't owe friends -T
from hardly generous to girlfriends.
Lighter than a fox
Hide under clothes,
Than hide you
Jealousy and tenderness!
Love! Love! And in convulsions and in a coffin
I am alert - I am seduced - I am embarrassed - I will rush.
People, believe me: we are alive with longing!
Only in melancholy are we victorious over boredom.
Will everything change? What is flour?
No, better with flour!
We sleep - and now, through the stone slabs
Heavenly guest in four petals.
O world, understand! Singer - in a dream - open
Star law and flower formula.
Do not love, rich - poor,
Do not love, scientist - stupid,
Do not love, ruddy - pale,
Do not love, good - harmful:
Gold - a copper half!
One half of the window disappeared.
One half of the soul showed up.
Let's open it - and that half,
And that half of the window!
Olympians ?! Their look is sleeping!
Celestials - we - sculpt!
Hands that are not needed
Darling, they serve - the World.
Washes away the best blush Love.
Poems grow like stars and like roses
How beauty is unnecessary in the family.
Already the evening is spreading, the earth is already in dew,
Soon a starry blizzard will freeze in the sky,
And soon we will all fall asleep underground,
Who on earth did not let each other fall asleep.
I love women, that they were not shy in battle,
Those who knew how to hold a sword and a spear, -
But I know that only in captivity of the cradle
Ordinary - feminine - my happiness!
Leaves fell over your grave,
And it smells like winter.
Listen dead, listen honey:
You are still mine.
Laughing! - In the blissful road lionfish!
The moon is high.
Mine is so unmistakable and so immutable
Like this hand.
I'll come up early in the morning with a bundle again
To the hospital doors.
You just left for hot countries,
To the great seas.
I kissed you! I conjured you!
I laugh at the darkness beyond the grave!
I don’t believe death! I am waiting for you from the station -
Home.
Let the leaves crumble, washed away and worn away
Words on the mourning ribbons.
And if you are dead to the whole world,
I'm also dead.
I see, I feel, I smell you everywhere!
- What a ribbon from your wreaths! -
I have not forgotten you and I will not forget you
Forever and ever!
I know of such promises aimlessness,
I know vanity.
- A letter to infinity. - Letter
into infinity-
A letter to the void.
My soul is monstrously jealous: it would not have endured me as a beauty.
Talking about appearance in my cases is unreasonable: the matter is so obvious, and so much - not in her!
- How do you like her externally? - Does she want to be liked outwardly? Yes, I just do not give the right to this - to such an assessment!
I am me: and the hair is me, and my man's hand with square fingers is me, and my humped nose is me. And, more precisely: neither the hair is me, nor the hand, nor the nose: I - I: invisible.
Honor the shell blessed with the breath of God.
And go: love - other bodies!
- Charlemagne - or maybe not Charlemagne - said: “We need to speak with God - in Latin, with the enemy - in German, with a woman - in French ...” (Silence.) And now - sometimes it seems to me - that I speak Latin with women ...
There are things that a man - in a woman - cannot understand. Not because it is below or above our understanding, this is not the point, but because some things can be understood only from within oneself, being.
There were no characters in my story. There was love. She acted - with faces.
To love is to see a person the way God intended him and his parents did not fulfill him.
Not to love - to see a person the way his parents made him.
To stop loving - to see instead of him: a table, a chair.
Do you know what poets exist for? In order not to be ashamed to say the biggest things.
“Each of us, at the bottom of our souls, has a strange feeling of contempt for someone who loves us too much.
(Some kind of "and that's all"? - ie if you love me so much, me, you yourself are not God only knows what!)
Maybe because each of us knows his real worth. "
About time and myself
Tsvetaeva as a prose writer began later than Tsvetaeva as a poet - and still early. Back in her gymnasium years, she wrote her first story "Four" (its text has not survived); she apparently made prosaic sketches even after that (the pages entitled "That which was" appear as early evidence of this). Another thing is more important: Tsvetaeva began keeping her diary from the age of ten and continued to lead her whole life by writing in various notebooks and notebooks. Whether she thought that these recordings would serve as material for her creativity is hard to say. She just could not do without them. And if at times there was no time to get to the notebook, Tsvetaeva wrote down a flashing thought, observation or lines of poetry right on the walls of a room or kitchen.
The essay "October in the carriage", included in our collection, gives a vivid idea of this Tsvetaev's peculiarity. The time of the essay is the autumn of 1917; Tsvetaeva returns from Feodosia to Moscow and on the way finds out that bloody battles have been going on there for several days in a row. In the wonder of a carriage overcrowded with soldiers, under the not too friendly gazes of fellow travelers, realizing perfectly well that a "young lady" who does not eat anything, but does not stop scribbling something in her notebook, looks like a "stranger" - she cannot but write. This is her lifeline, her straw: this is how she soothes the pain of her heart, which was bursting in those hours from anxiety for the fate of her husband ...
In another essay - "Free passage" - we will meet the same thing: completely exhausted by walking around the villages, where she tries to exchange matches and chintz for at least some food, endlessly tired of washing the dishes and the floor in the teahouse, where she huddles in these days - she still will not fall asleep until she writes, almost in the dark, lying on the floor, at least a few phrases in her notebook.
This is not writing, but an almost physiological need; "feather! - otherwise I will suffocate! " - so she said about it once.
But it was from such and such records that Tsvetaeva's prose of the early twenties was born. It is closely connected with the concreteness of a living fact; tenaciously, eagerly, she captures the details of events and feelings carried away - if they are not captured! - the unstoppable and insatiable stream of time. It seems that the author here is just an honest chronicler - not only of events of state significance, but of the private life of a Moscow family caught in the maelstrom of the Bolshevik plague. However, the circumstances of the historical situation are such that soldiers fleeing from the war fronts to their villages, and the Red Army men from the food detachment, requisitioning “surplus” food supplies in the villages, and the Moscow theater people, who gathered at the funeral of their idol, inevitably fall into the field of view of the “chronicler” , and pullets, sighing in a devastated village over a pink calico, and motley colleagues, by chance, gathered in the offices of the People's Commissariat for Nationalities, located in the former mansion of Count Sologub ... So a personal diary turns into document of the era, and the fate of a Muscovite - a woman and a mother who has no "connections" and patrons among those in power, rises to the symbol of the most perishing Russia.
In 1923 Tsvetaeva processed her notes and compiled a book of essays, modestly calling it "Earthly signs".
At that time, she was already living outside Russia, in the Czech Republic, where she left in the spring of 1922 - to her husband. Even after the end of the Civil War, Sergei Yakovlevich Efron, a member of the Volunteer White Army, could not return to the ugly thing, which determined Tsvetaeva's forced departure from Russia in the spring of 1922. Many Russian publishing houses arose abroad in those years; and, compiling the book, Tsvetaeva confidently pinned her hopes on them.
But she did not have to publish "Earthly Signs": the Berlin publishers, who offered an excellent fee, at the same time set the author a tough and indispensable condition - the book must be outside politicians! This was due to the fact that the sale of books was then calculated for the market of Bolshevik Russia ... Outraged by the demands of the publishers, Tsvetaeva then threw out her anger in a letter to the writer Roman Gulya: “Moscow 1917 - 1919 - what am I, in did the cradle swing? I was 24-26 years old<ет>, I had eyes, ears, hands, legs: with these eyes I saw, and with these ears I heard, and with these hands I chopped (furniture on the stove furnace. - I.K.) ... and with these feet I walked from morning to evening to the markets and outposts - wherever they were!
There is no POLICY in the book: there is passionate truth: biased truth, truth of cold, hunger, anger, Of the year! My youngest girl died of starvation in an orphanage — this is also "politics" (a Bolshevik orphanage).<...>Is not political book, not a second. It is a living soul in a loop - and still alive. The background is gloomy, I didn’t invent it ”.
Essays occupied a special place in the biography of Tsvetaeva the prose writer, and that was, as it became obvious later, only a stage of development. Tsvetaeva will remain faithful to the documentary basis to the end; in her prose work, we will not find a single work with fictional characters and an invented plot. “Fictional books are not attractive now,” she thought. Documentary "recordings, living, LIVING ... for me, a thousand times more valuable than a work of art, where everything is altered, adjusted, unrecognizable, mutilated." And Tsvetaeva creates prose, which is all! - can be called autobiographical, because every time the author speaks openly from the depths personal experience and values his testimony most of all.
Essentially, October in the Carriage, Volny Proezd, My Services, Death of Stakhovich, Attic, are nothing more than a chronicle of a nightmare, written down with an everyday, sometimes almost cheerful pen: a great sense of humor never seems to leave Tsvetaeva, even in the most difficult life circumstances. " She is able to joke when the ceiling in her apartment collapses, to have fun about the cat locked in the office of the bosses (his carpets will get it!), To enjoy the juicy dialect of the common people, overheard in queues and in the countryside ... Even the horror of the famine of 1918-1921 in these essays appears relaxed; This became especially clear now that Marina Tsvetaeva's Notebooks were published. They have preserved the chilling details of the life of Moscow in those years ... But here she writes down "Attic", this is a kind of "One day of Marina Tsvetaeva in Moscow in 1919". After listing the many details that made up this day - the eve of her departure with the children to the fatal Kuntsevo orphanage, where her youngest daughter died soon after, - she stops anxiously: the whole being ... "
This is where the reserve of her invisible courage is located: standing in lines for a vobla or for coupons for enhanced food for children, pacing in the pitch darkness of November, at five o'clock in the morning, for milk for her daughters at the Bryansk station, she is able to look at what is happening, if not from side, then as if from the height of History, always indifferent to human suffering. This is a feature of Tsvetaeva's worldview, and she rests on the strength of her spirit, which is not afraid, as she herself will say, "neither decree, nor bayonet." Fortunately, she knows how to see what is happening on a special, enlarged scale, and this is precisely the feature that gives metaphysical dimension to the best Tsvetaev's poetry and prose. “We learned to love: bread, fire, sun, sleep, an hour of free time,” Tsvetaeva wrote in “the most plague, most mortal” year 1919. Hunger, sleep became bliss, because "there is no more strength", the little things of everyday life have risen to a ceremony, everything has become vital. The iron school from which the heroes will come out. Non-heroes will perish ... "
In the essays that made up "Earthly Signs" there is an almost demonstrative absence of literary devices; before us is almost cursive, devoid of decoration. However, they are read in one breath; everything is kept by the internal energy of the author's narration, extremely relaxed and dynamic. A minimum of descriptions, a maximum of concreteness, a cool rhythm of a phrase, lively dialogues that perfectly convey intonation, author's remarks reduced to dramatic laconicism (“I, flushed” or “he, abruptly”) ...
It is curious that pieces of prose of this kind can also be found in Tsvetaeva's ordinary letters. An example of this is her letters to Eugene Lann at the end of 1920; I will cite only one excerpt - it is very picturesque, despite the fact that it consists almost entirely of dialogue.
“We are sitting with Alya, writing. - Evening. - The door - no knocking - wide open. A soldier from the commissariat. Tall, thin, hat. - 19 years.
- Are you such and such a citizen?
- I came to you to draw up a protocol.
He, thinking that I did not hear:
- Protocol.
- Understand.
- By not closing the tap and overfilling the clogged sink, you broke a new plate in No. 4.
- That is?
- Water flowing through the floor gradually washed away the bricks. The slab collapsed.
- You bred rabbits in the kitchen.
- It's not me, it's strangers.
- But you are the hostess?
- You have to keep it clean.
- Yes, yes, you are right.
- Do you still have the 2nd floor in your apartment?
- Yes, mezzanine upstairs.
- Mezzanine.
- Mizimim, mizimim, - how is it written - mizim-mim?
I say. He writes. Shows. I, approvingly:
- It's a shame, citizen. You are an intelligent person!
- That's the whole trouble - if I had been less intelligent, all this would not have happened - I am writing all the time.
- What exactly?
- Do you compose?
- Very nice. - Pause.
- Citizen, would you correct the protocol for me?
- Let me write. You speak, and I will write.
- Inconvenient, on yourself.
- All the same - it will be soon! - Writing. - He admires the handwriting: speed and beauty.
- It is immediately obvious that she is a writer. How can you not take the best apartment with such abilities? After all, this is - pardon the expression - a hole!
Alya: - Slum.
We write. We subscribe. Politely salutes. Disappears.
And yesterday, at 10 1/2 in the evening - priests-lights! - he again.
- Do not be afraid, citizen, old acquaintance! I’m back to you, I need to fix something here.
- You are welcome.
- So I will make it difficult for you again.
- I'm at your service. - Alya, clear on the table.
- May be. What would you add to your excuse?
- I don’t know ... The rabbits are not mine, the piglets are not mine - and have already been eaten.
- Was there also a pig? We will write this down.
- I don't know ... There is nothing to add ...
- Rabbits ... Rabbits ... And it must be cold here, citizen. - It's a pity!
Alya: - Who - rabbits or mom?
He: - Yes, in general ... Rabbits ... They gnaw everything.
Alya: - And mother's mattresses gnawed in the kitchen, and the pig lived in my bath.
Me: - Don't write that!
He: - I feel sorry for you, citizen!
Offers a cigarette. We write. It's already 1/2 past eleven.
- Earlier, probably, they did not live like that ...
And, leaving: “Or arrest or a fine of 50 thousand. "I'll come myself."
Alya: - With a revolver?
He: - This, young lady, do not be afraid!
Alya: - You can't shoot?
He: - I can, I can, but ... - I'm sorry for the citizen! "
Isn't it prose?
The stylistics of Tsvetaev's prose will still change. Multidimensionality, visual brightness, linguistic richness of the text will appear in it. But that will happen later.
Observing the chronology of Tsvetaeva's work - and violating the biographical one - we now have to talk primarily about the poet's childhood years. The fact is that Tsvetaeva's urgent need for their resurrection and comprehension matured by the mid-thirties.
Over the nearly fifteen years that have passed since the writing of the essays discussed above, much has changed. One after another, people with whom Tsvetaeva had been friends for a long time, met, whom she valued, about whom she had something to tell, began to die. This is how her original prosaic requiems appeared - to Valery Bryusov ("Hero of Labor"), Maximilian Voloshin ("Living about the Living"), Andrey Bely ("Captive Spirit"). And Tsvetaeva the prose writer got a taste of lyric prose with its broad powers of the author's principle, the possibility of digressions, retrospections, free "reflections on".
It was too early to sum up her own life results for the forty-year-old Tsvetaeva, but the time had come to “stop and look back”. In April 1933, she received a letter from Russia notifying her of the death of her half-brother Andrei. This served as the impetus for a new series of autobiographical essays by Tsvetaeva - those in which she resurrected the atmosphere of her parents' house and the entire "old-name - Tarusa - three-pond" world in which she grew up and which she loved. "Food for the unpaid debt of the heart," says one of Tsvetaevo's letters of that time.
She herself has been living since the end of 1925 already in France, on the outskirts of Paris. Fenced in by a wall of loneliness, buried, in her own words, under the "ash of emigration", going into memories, she created for herself something like a "microclimate" in which it was easier for her to breathe, think, live ...
Even earlier, in an essay dedicated to the artist Natalia Goncharova (1929), Tsvetaeva expressed her conviction that the key to understanding any personality must be sought in the childhood of that person. “Looking in today's Goncharova,” she wrote, “go to her childhood, if you can, to infancy. There are roots. " In childhood, Tsvetaeva believed, the natural, elemental forces of man express themselves in the most relaxed, primordial way. The child himself is not yet aware of them, and therefore "childhood is the time of blind truth." Further development is only the straightening of the spring. The “blind truth” will be replaced by “seeing power”, but the basis of the personality will remain the same features and inclinations that the child manifested with naive openness.
Another thing Tsvetaeva insisted on was the persistence of first impressions of life. Childhood experiences leave a particularly deep trace in the artist's biography, with his heightened impressionability. That is why, in order to better understand the work of the master, it is necessary to see his early years - a significant time in the formation of the inner essence of a person.
The prose of Tsvetaeva herself generously provides us with material for this kind of thought. She turned to the early years of her life not only in works written directly about childhood (Mother and Music, Mother's Tale, Father and His Museum, Damn, Khlystovki, My Pushkin), but and in those where other people stand in the center - in the House of Old Pimen, in the History of a Initiation, in the Captive Spirit ... As a result, Marina Tsvetaeva's childhood is outlined in her own prose, if not in detail, then brightly - with edges, as if snatched from the darkness of a powerful beam of a searchlight.
Extraordinary richness of mental life pre-seven and seven-year the child here amazes the reader more than anything else. Tsvetaeva recreated the universe, which fit in her own chest, in almost every prose work with breathtaking details, while it seems that she did not even come close to exhausting the topic.
Today we have an interesting opportunity at our disposal: to compare childhood memories left by two sisters - Marina and Anastasia Tsvetaev. The younger sister, Anastasia Ivanovna, who lived an unusually long life (99 years!), Began to write her memoirs already in her advanced years and, almost until her last days, supplemented and supplemented them with new chapters. We owe her an innumerable set of facts, details, names, episodes, dates that her unique memory readily presented to her. At the same time, two circumstances cannot but catch the eye when reading these memories. And above all, the fact that Anastasia Tsvetaeva was captured by her old past as an obsession; the abundance of details is dictated by the fact that everything is infinitely dear to her in the distant land of childhood, every memory is a joy. Try to count how many times here we will encounter the words "happiness", "bliss", "rapture" - you will lose count! Because everything is happiness, from everything is happiness. Happiness to run down the wooden stairs to the hall where there is a Christmas tree, happiness to find a long-lost ball, happiness of waiting, bliss of meeting, delightful smell of old things in the entryway, joy of the spring sky ... It's not about the reasons at all!
It is different in the prose of the elder sister. She certainly retained a fondness for the house in the Trekhprudny lane of old Moscow, as well as for the Tarusa open spaces, where the Tsvetaev family spent the summer months. But just as obvious is the fact that her childhood past did not fascinate her. Resurrecting the old years, she never succumbed to the temptation to recreate the sweet moments of childhood joys. The other occupies her there, by no means the restoration of everyday authenticity. That is why the outside world is written out there differently than in the memories of the younger sister - with a few sharp, abruptly laid strokes; Marina Tsvetaeva is more of a master of color than carefully written details. In the foreground, every time she has not the external - the internal: the dramas and joys of a child's soul hidden from prying eyes.
Resurrecting the old years, she is more busy looking for herself today in that little girl who secretly read "Gypsy" in the room of her older sister Valeria, and in the July heat on the Tarusa balcony she copied poetry into a homemade notebook. In each episode, she seemed to want to inquire: what grew out of that incident? And from this kidney? From this meeting? .. Peering into the kaleidoscope of everyday particulars, she selects, first of all, those from which distinct threads are drawn today.
Meditation, comprehension of the past and the experienced - the deepest nerve of mature Tsvetaev's prose. Joseph Brodsky said in his own way about this feature of her recollections: “this is not 'when-yet-nothing-is-unknown' - the childhood of an inveterate memoirist. This is “when-everything-is-already known”, but “nothing-has-begun-yet” is the childhood of a mature poet, caught in the middle of his life by a cruel era ”.
Anastasia Tsvetaeva stubbornly pedaled in her memoirs on the inner similarity of the sisters. Well, they really had a lot in common - mainly in the emotional sphere. But it is precisely the comparison of memories that makes it possible to see especially clearly the bizarre interweaving of the relative with the foreign - in the characters and in the type of personality itself. Marina is quick-tempered, Asya is soft; the eldest is always annoyed by everyday life, Asya does not notice it. Marina is closed, Asya just needs to share any joy and sorrow with others. From an early age, it is torment for Marina to hold in her hands something other than a pen; the youngest has everything in her hands: she knows how to cut and bind books, sew a seam and pack a suitcase ... The holiday of the Christmas tree is coming: the youngest happily jumps around Christmas surprises; Marina sits, buried in the presented book, not seeing or hearing anything around ...
But this is enough for the sisters' memories to be strikingly different! And if you read them carefully, it is difficult to get rid of the impression: as if two different childhoods took place at the same time, in the same house, with the same parents! One is filled with unconditional happiness, the other is too much bitter ...
In Tsvetaeva's prose, devoted mainly to meetings with Osip Mandelstam ("The Story of a Dedication"), there is a characteristic scene related to Marina's childhood.
"Round table. Family circle. On a blue service platter, Sunday pies from Bartels. One for each.
- Children! Take it!
I want a meringue and take an eclair. Embarrassed by my mother's clear-eyed gaze, I lower my eyes and completely fail them, when:
Fly, my zealous horse
Over the seas and through the meadows
And shaking his mane
Take me there!
- Where to go? - They laugh: my mother (triumphantly: the poet will not come out of me!), My father (good-naturedly), my brother's tutor, a student from the Urals (go-go!), The older brother laughs for two years (following the tutor) and for two years younger sister (after the mother); only the elder sister, seventeen-year-old schoolgirl Valeria, is not laughing - in opposition to her stepmother (my mother). And I - I, red like a peony, stunned and blinded by the blood that hit and hammered in my temples, through the boiling, not yet shed tears - at first I am silent, then - yell:
- There - far away! There - there! And it's a shame to steal my notebook and then laugh! "
Well, isn't it really a strange situation! A wonderful family - and a wounded child to the very heart. Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev - professor at Moscow University, founder of the Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts, always fascinated by something extremely important for everyone, is a gentle, kind person; his wife Maria Alexandrovna is an outstanding pianist who did not make an artistic career only because her overly strict father did not allow her to do so. She also plays the guitar, sings beautifully, writes pictures and poems, knows several languages, and is also a fan of noble kings and heroes. And so, for all that, they laugh! How much more humane, it seems, would even be to whip a child with a belt, the old fashioned way! But there’s no reason. And the elders, of course, understand this. They understand, but laugh cheerfully - at the innermost secret of a shy girl. It never occurs to dear, kind, intelligent parents how unbearable this pain of hers is, how painfully aggravated all the feelings of this child are from birth. It does not occur to them that fate has prepared the future of a brilliant poet for this unsmiling, ruddy fat woman ...
However, this is not entirely true. The girl was only four years old when Maria Alexandrovna wrote in her diary: “The eldest walks around and mutters rhymes. Maybe my Marusya will be a poet? .. ”But - she wrote it down and forgot. And all the same, she gave her daughter only sheet music, so she scribbled lines and rhymes on randomly found scraps of paper.
In the eyes of the mother, the girl is simply stubborn and restive. "Other children are like children, but this one ... is more stubborn than ten donkeys!" - she angrily complains to the director of the music school. On that day, she was annoyed by her daughter's answer: when asked what she liked most about the concert that had just ended, the girl answered: “Onegin and Tatiana”. "How? Not a Mermaid, not ... "-" Onegin and Tatiana. " “I know her,” my mother said to the director, “now she will be repeating all the way in a cab to all my questions:“ Tatiana and Onegin! I'm not really glad I took it. Not a single child in the world from everything seen would have liked Tatiana and Onegin, everyone would have preferred The Mermaid, because it is a fairy tale, understandable. I don’t know what to do with it !!! ”
The mother was angry for nothing: a six-year-old girl told her the truth. What could she answer, if, in fact, she was most seduced by the love scene of Pushkin's heroes that evening? Say what is expected of her? I could — and already knew well what was expected, but I could not. She did not learn this even later.
It wasn't stubbornness at all. From an early age, this girl seemed to listen to what she was born with. As if she knew something about herself that she could not change. Not so much depended on her will: she herself was in the grip of a certain irresistible force, to which it is senseless to resist and sweetly submit, to a force to which, as Tsvetaeva herself said, you are "betrayed as sold." Scribbling music paper, this child only made his way to an obscure light in the distance, did what he did not could not do.
Tsvetaeva's autobiographical prose allows us to trace the stubborn energy with which this child created his own miraculous fortress of spirit. How persistently he pushed her limits, how stubbornly and patiently, clenching his teeth, walked by. Early discrimination your own and someone else's, perhaps one of the most striking qualities of this child. They hide "adult" books from her - she secretly learns Pushkin's "Gypsies", with a sinking heart reads "The Captain's Daughter" and learns the words of romances sung by her elder sister Valeria; goes to the first communion and, horrified by his own blasphemy, repeats to himself about the devil; falls in love with a tutor and the first, like Pushkin's Tatiana, writes him a letter ...
And all this secret, incredibly spacious world of the soul - the world of secret loves, devils, rhymes, fears, hopes - carefully guards from prying eyes.
She goes her own way, and this is nothing but the path of calling.
"You fly, my zealous horse ... Take me there!" Satisfied adults then brought the girl to tears, but they should know, guess, admit for a minute that that horse will then pass through all the poetic notebooks of Marina Tsvetaeva! A winged horse flying over the towers, over the mountains ... - both in verses and in poems. "Take me there!" So exactly what - there! Even later it was difficult for her to name the address more precisely, but the direction was clear: above everyday life, above the bustle of everyday life, “over sour, over rust” ... It was an unclear, but strong craving, on a literal level, a craving there , I don’t know where, devotion to that, I don’t know who. Akin to the craving that an infant unconsciously feels when reaching for its mother's breast.
There is an important slip of the tongue in Old Pimen's House. The author notes here unexpectedly related features that brought his mother, Maria Alexandrovna, closer to Ilovaisky, the father of Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev's first wife. “They looked like something remotely,” it says here. "My mother would be more suitable for him as a daughter than his own." And right there - a harsh characterization of the pedantic intelligent Ilovaisky in his relations with children: "... the obviousness of his eyes was the same: his parental authority and the infallibility of his decrees."
The maternal authority in the Trekhprudny house was of the same row. In this house there were paintings, books, music, marble busts of the gods, the cult of toiler. There was not only simplicity and cordial closeness between children and parents. “Be my mother as simple with me as other mothers with other children ...” - Tsvetaeva sigh in “My Pushkin”. What is this if not a sigh of heartfelt rejection, experienced too early!
When Marina Tsvetaeva grows up, her name will be included in the literary encyclopedia (two years before her death) and will be offered to write an autobiography. She agrees. He takes the pen in his hands. And now, among the most important of her self-characteristics, we read: “I am my mother's eldest daughter, but my beloved is not me. She is proud of me, she loves the second. An early resentment about the lack of love. "
Which means: Marina Tsvetaeva has lived her entire life with this wound. Is this why she has so many idols from an early age - unattainable, long gone to another world: the artist Maria Bashkirtseva, and the unfortunate son of Napoleon ("Eaglet"), and Napoleon himself, especially of the time when, abandoned by everyone, he languished from loneliness on the island of Saint Helena. Is it not from there that Tsvetaeva's insatiable thirst for love, its Himalayas of love, addressed even to those who are still just born in a hundred years? And this generosity of self-giving: “Hands are given to me - to stretch out both to everyone! / Do not hold one! ", These immensity of feelings:" Half a life? - All of you! / To the elbow? - There she is!"
In Tsvetaeva's prose of the thirties, large and small plots are embodied by a writer who was never satisfied with the external side of the phenomenon, be it a special life incident or a colorful figure of a contemporary.
Life at home in Trekhprudny lane, episodes of the Tarusa summer, images of a father, mother, sister under Tsvetaevsky's pen acquire multidimensionality, exceeding their empirical level. And we can say that in the peculiarities of this excess lies all the uniqueness of Tsvetaeva the artist ... Her attention is always directed inward, to the source; the obvious occupies her, but as a path to what is hidden behind it. What is there behind the obviousness of a particular case, if you do not rush past a person who is not doing anywhere with haste? Is it just everyday life? .. But everyday life is also voluminous and multidimensional!
It would be difficult to retell Tsvetaeva's essay "Khlystovka": there is literally nothing to cling to. Only three or four scenes precede the central episode: little Marina with her father, mother, brother and sister come to the haymaking to the "Khlystovki" - not far from their Tarusa dacha - and they jokingly offer the girl to stay with them forever.
That's all. But the inner content of this little work could have been the envy of the author of another poem. However, it is a poem, and not a story, because everything that is being discussed here acquires weight and meaning due to the lyrical feeling of the author. It is his power that resurrected a blissful summer in the Moscow region, thoroughly penetrated by the sun, the smells of mown grass, apples, berries - a visually bright piece of childhood with its fabulous abundance of impressions. But behind the visually striking reader sees the characters of the mother and father, the uneasy family relations of the Tsvetaevs; it is clear who is leading here, who is suffering, but the main thing here: the quivering world of a little girl who, with her offended heart, experiences every word of a harsh mother - and feels: these "whips" - pullets in white headscarves - her love ... At home they are always unhappy with her, but here ...
Inside a short, seemingly insignificant episode, there was the tragedy of a child who, with a painful acuteness, feels his loneliness and abandonment. This is how Tsvetaeva sees the world: it is always a complex world, in which so many contradictory things are intertwined! One has only to look closely ... “When others talk about their lives,” she wrote in one of her letters, “I am always amazed at poverty - not events, but perceptions: two, three episodes: school (usually not listed before school),“ first love ”, well, marriage or marriage ... - Well, and the rest? The rest is either not listed, or it was not. - Boring. Scanty. It's boring ... "
This is how the two passions converge in Tsvetaevo's prose of the mature period. For the desire to recreate the past, to keep it from falling into oblivion without a trace, clearly competed in the author of autobiographical prose with another, comparable in strength. That was passion for comprehending life, passion of reflection and observation of its laws and its riddles, over the very "origins of life and being," as she called it. Prose, which was born as memories of people who have passed away and times gone by, provided a convenient opportunity to express the wealth of accumulated spiritual and mental experience, and this opportunity was more and more exciting for Tsvetaeva. That is why there are no everyday trifles for her: they are insignificant only as long as you glide over them with an unseeing gaze. One has only to linger, stop - "Oh, this is a chair in Valeria's room ... But by, by, otherwise it will lead us too far ..." - she writes. And it is quite clear that if we didn’t have to rush past, if we could not rush, we would learn something that is not at all everyday life: within the framework of everyday life, Tsvetaeva's associations never fit. In her perception, any detail of life, any word accidentally heard, especially a human personality, is always a kind of hieroglyph, which is worth looking at, listening to, thinking about. And unhurried decoding of it will certainly lead to clarification of many things. Through the reality of certainty, a phenomenon appears, through the face - the face, through everyday life - being. This is how we come across an organic feature of Tsvetaeva's perception of the world, which determined the philosophical nature of her prose.
This is a special philosophicality. It is not attached to some kind of moralizing appendix to the text, but is closely connected with the living concreteness of a fact or situation - growing out of them, feeding on them.
The ratio of the "documentary basis" and the author's reflections in this prose, as a rule, is the opposite of that which characterizes, say, the autobiographical prose of Bunin ("The Life of Arseniev") or Paustovsky ("Distant Years"). "The House at Old Pimen's", "Damn" or "Khlystovka" are written as free reflections "about" the chosen plot - with chronological interruptions, digressions, inclusions of "side" themes, etc. The author is open leads narration, and no canons of the prosaic form hold it back. We will not find any setting, no escalation of events, no culmination in her works.
In the Russian tradition, Tsvetaeva's autobiographical prose of the thirties is rather close to Boris Pasternak's "Safeguard". V. Kaverin at one time subtly noticed the features of this work, drawing attention to the fact that in his text “reflections enter without a justified pretext, flare up, fly into the reader's mind like ball lightning, which can explode, or can calmly fly out the window, having amazed everyone with just the very fact of its existence. The transitions from the personal to the universal are on almost every page. " The mature Tsvetaeva has the same improvisational approach to generalizations. Expanded or fleeting, they permeate the narrative, saturating it to the utmost - and sometimes even oversaturated ...
This feature immediately distinguishes the autobiographical prose of the thirties from those essays with which the work of Tsvetaeva the prose writer began. The documentary, factual basis has taken a more modest place here, giving way to reflection and reflection.
Let me remind you in the end that Brodsky highly appreciated this aspect of Marina Tsvetaeva's work and believed that in her person we are faced with one of the most interesting thinkers of the 20th century.
