In her statements she was no less poetic than in her poems.
Marina Ivanovna became one of the brightest, most original and daring poets of the Silver Age. She created her poems not with her mind, but with her soul. Writing was for her not so much a profession as a necessary means of self-expression. Over the course of her difficult life, Marina Tsvetaeva has accumulated so many desperate feelings and burning emotions that the only way to express it was to put it in poetic and prose lines.
The first collection of her poems "Evening Album" was released when Tsvetaeva was only 18. She released it with her own money. The first step in the literary field - and immediately a challenge to society and established traditions. In those days, it was accepted that serious poets first published individual poems in magazines, and only then, having gained fame, published their own books. But Marina Ivanovna never followed everyone, did not obey orders that she did not understand. She obeyed only what resonated in her heart. Perhaps that is why there are so many sharp turns and tragic moments in her life. When you go your own way in spite of everything, you always take risks.
But she was not afraid to put everything on the line. Her loud voice of a poet sounded even when a revolution began in the country, when poverty forced her to give her daughters to an orphanage, and even when she herself was forced to leave her homeland following her husband Sergei Efron. Many misfortunes fell upon her, but each time she overcame them with an effort of will. Painfully touching the strings of the soul, they turned into poignant poetry or remained on the pages of a personal diary. The eldest daughter, Ariadna, Tsvetaeva managed to take away from the shelter, but the youngest, Irina, died within its walls. In exile, the poetess had a son, George, and Marina Ivanovna herself developed friendly relations with literary circles: she published her poems, edited magazines, and communicated with many famous Russian poets who also fled the country.
Marina Tsvetaeva with her daughter Ariadna
However, in the second half of the 1930s, new tragic events occurred in her life. The husband was involved in a political assassination and fled back to the USSR. And in relations with her daughter, Tsvetaeva had a serious discord - Ariadne left her mother's house, and soon, like her father, returned to her homeland. For Marina Ivanovna, this was a strong blow. She was responsible for her little son, a war was brewing in Europe, and there were no people left nearby who could help and support.
Tsvetaeva comes to the USSR, but this does not bring relief. On the contrary, the clouds gather even more over her head. Almost immediately after their return, the husband and daughter were arrested, and the Second World War, which had already engulfed the whole of Europe, approached the borders of the Soviet Union. She goes with her son to Yelabuga. Boris Pasternak came to help prepare for the move and pack things. He brought a rope to tie up the suitcase. It turned out to be very strong, and Pasternak even joked: "The rope will withstand everything, even hang yourself." He did not even suspect that his words would turn out to be prophetic - later he was told that it was on this ill-fated rope that Tsvetaeva hanged herself in Yelabuga. Even the strongest people have a moment when the last drop overflows the cup of sorrows that they are able to endure.
Tsvetaeva did not live for the future, she always spent herself without a trace. Love sometimes fell on her like snow on her head. Even the bonds of marriage could not stop the sudden outbreak of feelings. She threw herself into the pool, took risks, was happy and unbearably unhappy.
Others said: "Marina, no one does that!", And she always answered: "And I - Who!".
We have selected the most vivid quotes from the poetess from her personal diaries, autobiographical works, letters and memoirs.
“I can’t - even kill - for a person to think that I need something from him. I need everyone, because I am insatiable. But others, more often than not, are not even hungry, hence the ever-intense attention: do I need it?
“Women love not men, but Love, men love not Love, but women. Women never change. Men are always
“For the complete coherence of souls, the coherence of breath 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.
“What can you know about me if you didn’t sleep with me and didn’t drink ?!”
“Beloved” is theatrical, “Lover” is frank, “Friend” is vague. Unloved country!
“Every time I find out that a person loves me, I’m surprised, doesn’t love me, I’m surprised, but most of all I’m surprised when a person is indifferent to me”
“The first love glance is the shortest distance between two points, that divine straight line that the second does not have”
“The first victory of a woman over a man is the story of a man about his love for another. And her final victory is the story of this other about her love for him, about his love for her. The secret has become clear, your love is mine. And while this is not there, you can’t sleep peacefully.”
"Craziness and Good Education: Kissing on You"
“To love is to see a person as God intended him and his parents did not realize him. Not to love - to see a person the way his parents made him. Fall out of love - see instead of him: a table, a chair "
“Listen and remember: anyone who laughs at the misfortune of another is a fool or a scoundrel; most often - both ... When a person gets into trouble - it's not funny ... When a person is poured with slop - it's not funny ... When a person is tripped - it's not funny ... When a person is hit in the face - it's vile. Such laughter is a sin ... "
“Thank you to those who loved me, for they gave me the charm to love others, and thanks to those who did not love me, for they gave me the charm to love myself”
“For a long, long time - since my childhood, since I can remember myself - it seemed to me that I want to be loved. Now I know and tell everyone: I don't need love, I need understanding. For me, this is love. And what you call love (sacrifice, fidelity, jealousy), take care for others, for another - I don’t need this ”
“Humanly we can sometimes love ten, lovingly - many - two. Inhuman - always one ... "
“Feeling does not need experience, it knows in advance that it is doomed. Feeling has nothing to do on the periphery of the visible, it is in the center, it itself is the center. The feeling has nothing to look for on the roads, it knows what will come and bring it to itself ”
“I don't love you anymore. Nothing happened, life happened. I don't think about you either in the morning, waking up, or at night, falling asleep, neither on the street, nor to the music - never. If you fell in love with another woman, I would smile - with arrogant tenderness - and think - with curiosity - about you and about her. I am out of the game."
“Oh, my God, but they say that there is no soul! What hurts me now? - Not a tooth, not a head, not a hand, not a chest - no, chest, in the chest, where you breathe - I breathe deeply: it doesn’t hurt, but it hurts all the time, it aches all the time, unbearably!
“When you love a person, you always want him to leave in order to dream about him”
“People are jealous of only one thing: loneliness. They do not forgive only one thing: loneliness. Revenge for only one thing: loneliness. To that - that - for the fact that you dare to be alone "
“To live is to unsuccessfully cut and patch incessantly, and nothing holds (nothing holds me, there is nothing to hold on to, forgive me this sad, harsh play on words). When I try to live, I feel like a poor little seamstress who can never make a beautiful thing, who only spoils and hurts herself, and who, having thrown away everything: scissors, cloth, thread, begins to sing. At the window behind which it rains endlessly
“I am silent, I don’t even look at you and I feel that for the first time I’m jealous. It is a mixture of pride, offended pride, bitterness, imaginary indifference and the deepest indignation.
“The whole point is that we love, that our heart beats - even if it breaks into smithereens! I have always been shattered, and all my poems are those very silver heart shards.
“I would never, you know, paint lips. Ugly? No, it's charming. It’s just that every fool you meet on the street might think, I’m for him. ”
“If we consider you a close person, you made me suffer very much, but if you are an outsider, you brought me only good. I never felt you either like this or otherwise, I fought in myself for everyone, that is, against everyone.
“And often, sitting for the first time with a person, in the middle of an indifferent conversation, a crazy thought: “What if I kiss him now ?!” - Erotic insanity? - Not. The same should be what the player has before the bet - Will I bet or not? Will I post or not? - With the difference that real players bet "
“I want to sleep with you - fall asleep and sleep. A wonderful folk word, how deep, how true, how unambiguous, how exactly what it says. Just sleep. And nothing else. No, more: bury your head in your left shoulder, and your hand in your right - and nothing more. Not yet: even in the deepest sleep to know that it is you. And one more thing: listen to the sound of your heart. And kiss him"
“There are so many things in life that cannot be put into words.
There are too few words on Earth…”
More than half a century ago, a very young and still unknown Marina Tsvetaeva expressed her unshakable confidence:
Scattered in the dust at the shops
(Where no one took them and does not take them!),
My poems are like precious wines
Your turn will come.
Years of hard life and the most intense creative work passed - and proud confidence gave way to complete disbelief: "There is no place for me in the present and the future." This, of course, is an extreme and misleading, explained by the loneliness and confusion of the poet, who knew the power of his talent, but failed to choose the right path.
The fate of what is created by the artist is not reduced to his personal fate: the artist leaves - the art remains. In the third case, Tsvetaeva said much more precisely: "... there is nothing new in me, except for my poetic responsiveness to the new sound of the air." Marina Tsvetaeva is a great poet, she turned out to be inseparable from the art of the present century.
Tsvetaeva began to write poems from the age of six, to be published from the age of sixteen, and two years later, in 1910, without taking off her gymnasium uniform, secretly from her family she released a rather voluminous collection - "Evening Album". He did not get lost in the stream of poetic novelties, he was noticed and approved by V. Bryusov, N. Gumilyov, and M. Voloshin.
Tsvetaeva's lyrics are always addressed to the soul, this is a continuous declaration of love for people, for the world in general and for a particular person. And this is not humble, but bold, passionate and demanding love:
But today I was smart;
Rozno went out on the road at midnight,
Someone was walking with me
Calling names.
And whitened in the fog - a strange staff ...
Don Juan did not have Donna Anna!
This is from the Don Juan series.
Often Tsvetaeva wrote about death - especially in youthful poetry. This was a kind of sign of a good literary tone, and the young Tsvetaeva was no exception in this sense:
Listen! - still love me
For me to die.
By nature, Marina Tsvetaeva is a rebel. rebellion and
Her poetry:
Who is made of stone, who is made of clay, -
And I'm silver and sparkle!
I care - treason, my name is Marina,
I am the mortal foam of the sea.
In another poem, she adds:
Admired and admired
Seeing dreams in broad daylight
Everyone saw me sleeping
No one saw me sleepy.
The most valuable, the most undoubted thing in the mature work of Tsvetaeva is her inextinguishable hatred of "velvet satiety" and all sorts of vulgarity. Once from impoverished, hungry Russia to well-fed and elegant Europe, Tsvetaeva did not succumb to her temptations for a minute. She did not betray herself - a man and a poet:
Bird - I'm a Phoenix, I sing only in fire!
Support my high life!
I burn high - and I burn to the ground!
And may the night be bright for you!
Her heart yearns for the abandoned homeland, that Russia that she knew and remembered:
Russian rye bow from me,
Niva, where the woman is stagnant ...
Friend! Rain outside my window
Troubles and blessings in the heart ...
And the son must go back there, not to be all his life
Renegade:
Neither to the city nor to the village -
Go, my son, to your country...
Ride, my son, go home - forward -
To your land, to your age, to your hour...
By the 30s, Marina Tsvetaeva had already quite clearly realized the boundary that separated her from the white emigration. She writes in a draft notebook: “My failure in emigration is that I am not an emigrant, that I am in spirit, that is, in air and in scope - there, there, from there ...”
In 1939, Tsvetaeva regained her Soviet citizenship and returned to her homeland. It was hard for her seventeen years spent in a foreign land. She had every reason to say: "The ashes of emigration ... I'm all under it - like Herculaneum - and life has passed."
Tsvetaeva dreamed for a long time that she would return to Russia as a "welcome and awaited guest." But it didn't work out that way. Her personal circumstances were bad: her husband and daughter were subjected to unreasonable repression. Tsvetaeva settled in Moscow, took up translations, prepared a collection of selected poems. The war broke out. The vicissitudes of the evacuation sent Tsvetaeva first to Chistopol, then to Vlabuga. It was then that that “supreme hour of loneliness” overtook her, about which she spoke with such deep feeling in her poems. Exhausted, having lost her will, on August 31, 1941, Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva committed suicide. But poetry remains.
Opened the veins: unstoppable,
Irreversibly gushing life.
Bring bowls and plates!
Every plate will be small,
The bowl is flat. Over the edge - and past -
Into the black earth, feed the reeds.
Irrevocable, unstoppable
Irreversibly whipping verse.
About time and myself
Tsvetaeva the prose writer began later than Tsvetaeva the poet, and yet early. Even in her gymnasium years, she wrote her first story “Four” (its text has not been preserved); apparently, she made prose sketches even after that (pages entitled “What was” appear as early evidence of this). Another thing is more important: Tsvetaeva began to keep her diary from the age of ten and continued to keep notes in various notebooks and notebooks all her life. Whether she thought that these records would serve as material for her creativity is hard to say. She just couldn't do without them. And if sometimes 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 Tsvetaeva's feature. The duration of the essay is the autumn of 1917; Tsvetaeva returns from Feodosia to Moscow and already on the way she learns that bloody battles have been going on there for several days in a row. In the fumes of a car overflowing with soldiers, under the not too friendly glances of fellow travelers, knowing full well that the “young lady”, who does not eat anything, but does not stop scribbling something in her notebook, looks like a “stranger” - she cannot help but write. This is her lifeline, her straw: this is how she soothes the pain of her heart, which was torn in those hours from anxiety for the fate of her husband ...
In another essay - "Free Passage" - we will meet with the same thing: completely exhausted by foot wanderings through the villages, where she tries to exchange matches and chintz for at least some food, endlessly tired from washing dishes and the floor in the tea room, where she huddles in these days, she still won’t fall asleep until she writes down, 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’ll suffocate!” - so she said about it once.
But it was from such notes that Tsvetaev's prose of the early twenties was born. It is most intimately connected with the concreteness of a living fact; tenaciously, greedily, she captures the details of events and feelings carried away - if they are not grabbed! - unstoppable and insatiable flow of time. It seems that the author here is simply an honest chronicler - only not of events of national importance, but of the private life of a Moscow family that fell into the maelstrom of the Bolshevik plague. However, the circumstances of the historical situation are such that the “chronicler” involuntarily falls into the field of view of the soldiers fleeing from the fronts of the war to their villages, and the Red Army soldiers from the food detachment, requisitioning “surplus” food supplies in the villages, and the Moscow theater people who gathered at the funeral of their idol , and young women sighing in a devastated village over a pink chintz, and motley colleagues, by chance gathered in the offices of the People's Commissariat for Nationalities, housed in the former mansion of Count Sologub ... So a personal diary turns into era document, 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 of Russia, in the Czech Republic, where she left in the spring of 1922 - to her husband. Even after the end of the Civil War, it was impossible for a member of the Volunteer White Army, Sergei Yakovlevich Efron, to return to his homeland, which determined the forced departure of Tsvetaeva from Russia in the spring of 1922. Abroad in those years, many Russian publishing houses arose; 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 a wonderful fee, at the same time set the author a tough and indispensable condition - the book should be out of print. politicians! This was due to the fact that the sale of books was then calculated on 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 Gul: “Moscow 1917 - 1919 - what am I, in the cradle rocked? I was 24-26 years old<ет>, I had eyes, ears, arms, legs: and with these eyes I saw, and with these ears I heard, and with these hands I chopped (furniture on the firebox of the stove.— I.K.)... and with these feet I walked from morning to evening through the markets and outposts, wherever they carried me!
There is no POLICY in the book: yes passionate truth: biased truth, truth of cold, hunger, anger, Of the year! My youngest girl starved to death in an orphanage - this is also “politics” (a Bolshevik orphanage).<...>Is not political book, not a second. It is a living soul in a dead loop - and yet 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. “Fictitious books are not attractive now,” she thought. Documentary "recordings, live, LIVE ... for me, a thousand times more valuable than a work of art, where everything is altered, fitted, unrecognizable, crippled." And Tsvetaeva creates prose, which is all! - can be called autobiographical, because every time the author speaks openly from the depths personal experience and cherishes his testimonies most of all.
In terms of content, “October in the Carriage”, “Free Travel”, “My Services”, “Death of Stakhovich”, “Attic” are nothing more than a chronicle of a nightmare, written down by 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 authorities (its carpets will get it!), To rejoice at the juicy dialect of the common people, overheard in lines and in the village ... Even the horror of the famine of 1918-1921 in these essays appears relaxed; This has become especially clear now that the Notebooks of Marina Tsvetaeva have been published. They preserved the chilling details of Moscow life of those years ... But now she is recording "Attic", this is a kind of "One day of Marina Tsvetaeva in Moscow in 1919." After listing the many details that made up that day - the eve of her departure with the children to the fatal Kuntsevo orphanage, where her youngest daughter soon died - she stops anxiously: “I didn’t write down the most important thing: fun, sharpness of thought, explosions of joy at the slightest success, passionate focus of the whole being..."
This is where the reserve of her invisible courage is: standing in lines for roach or for coupons for enhanced nutrition for children, pacing in the November pitch darkness, at five o'clock in the morning, for milk for her daughters at the Bryansk railway station, she is able to look at what is happening, if not with side, then, as it were, from the heights of History, always indifferent to human suffering. This is a feature of Tsvetaeva's worldview, and it rests on the strength of her spirit, which is not afraid, as she herself will say about it, "neither a decree, nor a bayonet." Fortunately, she is able to see what is happening on a special, enlarged scale, and this is precisely the trait that gives metaphysical volume to Tsvetaeva's best poems and prose. “We learned to love: bread, fire, sun, sleep, an hour of free time,” Tsvetaeva wrote in the “most plague, most mortal” year of 1919, “food became a meal, because Hunger, sleep became bliss, because "there is no more strength", the little things of life have risen to the rite, everything has become vital. Iron school, from which heroes will emerge. Non-heroes will perish..."
In the essays that compiled 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 held together by the inner energy of the author's narration, extremely relaxed and dynamic. A minimum of descriptions, a maximum of concreteness, a cool rhythm of the phrase, lively dialogues that perfectly convey intonation, the author's remarks, reduced to dramatic laconicism ("I, having flared up" or "he, sharply")...
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 quote only one passage - it is very picturesque, despite the fact that it consists almost entirely of dialogue.
“We are sitting with Alya, writing. — Evening. - The door - without knocking - wide open. Commissariat soldier. Tall, thin, hat. — Years 19.
Are you a citizen?
“I came to draw up a report on you.
He, thinking that I did not hear:
— Protocol.
- Understand.
- By not closing the tap and overflowing the clogged sink, you broke a new stove in 4 No.
- I.e?
— Water, flowing through the floor, gradually eroded the bricks. The plate collapsed.
— You bred rabbits in the kitchen.
It's not me, it's someone else's.
- But you are the hostess?
- You must 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 spelled - mizi-mim?
I'm talking. Writes. Shows. Me approvingly:
“Shame on you, citizen. You are an intelligent person!
- That's the whole trouble - if I were less intelligent, all this would not have happened - I write all the time.
- What exactly?
- Do you compose?
- Very nice. - Pause.
- Citizen, would you correct the protocol for me?
Let's write. You talk and I will write.
— Uncomfortable, on yourself.
- It doesn't matter - it will be soon! - Writing. He admires handwriting: speed and beauty.
- It is immediately clear that the writer. How can you not occupy the best apartment with such abilities? After all, this is - pardon the expression - a hole!
Alya: Slum.
We write. We subscribe. Politely gives under the visor. Disappears.
And yesterday, at 10 1/2 in the evening - the priests-sveta! - he again.
“Don’t be afraid, citizen, old friend! I'm back to you, there's something to fix here.
- Please.
“So I’ll trouble you again.
- I am at your service. - Alya, clean the table.
- May be. What do you add to your excuse?
“I don’t know… The rabbits are not mine, the piglets are not mine—and they have already been eaten.”
- Oh, and there was also a piglet? Let's write it down.
— I don't know... Nothing to add...
“Rabbits… Rabbits… And it must be cold in here, citizen.” - It's a pity!
Alya: - Whom - rabbits or mom?
He: - Yes, in general ... Rabbits ... They gnaw everything.
Alya: - And my mother's mattresses were 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. Already 1/2 of the twelfth.
“Before, they probably didn’t live like that ...
And, leaving: “Either an arrest or a fine of 50 thousand. “I will come myself.”
Alya: With a revolver?
He: - This, young lady, do not be afraid!
Alya: You don't know how to shoot?
He: - I know how, I know how, but ... - sorry for the citizen!
Why not prose?
The style of Tsvetaev's prose will still change. Multidimensionality, pictorial brightness, linguistic richness of the text will appear in it. But that will happen later.
Observing the chronology of Tsvetaev's work - and violating the biographical one - we will now have to speak mainly about the poet's childhood years. The fact is that the urgent need for their resurrection and comprehension matured in Tsvetaeva by the mid-thirties.
In the nearly fifteen years that have passed since the writing of the essays discussed above, much has changed. One by one, people with whom Tsvetaeva had been friends for a long time, met, whom she appreciated, about whom she had something to tell, began to pass away. This is how her original prose requiems appeared - to Valery Bryusov ("Hero of Labour"), Maximilian Voloshin ("Living about the Living"), Andrei Bely ("The Captive Spirit"). And Tsvetaeva the prose writer got a taste lyrical prose with its broad powers of the author's beginning, the possibility of digressions, retrospections, free "reflections about".
It was still too early to sum up her own life results for the forty-year-old Tsvetaeva, but the time to “stop and look back” has come. In April 1933, she received a letter from Russia informing her of the death of her half-brother Andrei. This served as an impetus for a new series of autobiographical essays by Tsvetaeva - those in which she resurrected the atmosphere of her parents' house and the entire "Staro-Pimenov - Tarusa - three-pond" world in which she grew up and loved. “I am eating according to the unrequited debt of the heart,” says one of Tsvetaeva’s letters of this time.
She herself has been living since the end of 1925 already in France, on the outskirts of Paris. Surrounded by a wall of loneliness, buried, in her own words, under the “ashes of emigration”, she, going into memories, 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 years of this person. “Seeking in the current Goncharova,” she wrote, “go to her childhood, if you can, to infancy. There are roots. In childhood, Tsvetaeva believed, the natural, elemental forces of a person express themselves in the most relaxed, primordial way. The child himself does not yet realize 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 were manifested with naive openness in the child.
Another thing Tsvetaeva insisted on was the persistence of life's first impressions. Children's 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 man.
The prose of Tsvetaeva herself generously provides us with material for reflection of this kind. 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”, “Devil”, “Khlystovki”, “My Pushkin”), but and in those where other people stand in the center - in "The House at the Old Pimen", in "The History of One Initiation", in "The Captive Spirit" ... As a result, Marina Tsvetaeva's childhood years are outlined in her own prose, if not in detail, then brightly - with facets, as if snatched out of the darkness of the departed by a powerful searchlight beam.
Extraordinary richness of spiritual life under seven and seven years old The child strikes the reader here more than anything else. The universe that fits in her own chest, Tsvetaeva recreated in almost every prose work with exciting details, while, it seems, 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 Tsvetaeva. The younger sister, Anastasia Ivanovna, who lived an unusually long life (99 years old!), began to write memoirs already in her advanced years and, almost until her last days, supplemented and supplemented them with new chapters. We owe her an innumerable multitude of facts, details, names, episodes, dates, which her unique memory readily presented to her. At the same time, two circumstances cannot but strike the eye when reading these memoirs. And above all, that Anastasia Tsvetaeva is captured by her long past, as if by 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 joy. Try to count how many times here we will meet the words "happiness", "bliss", "rapture" - you will lose count! Because everything is happiness, everything is happiness. Happiness to run down the wooden stairs to the hall where the Christmas tree stands, happiness to find a long-lost ball, happiness of expectation, bliss of meeting, intoxicating smell of old things in the hallway, joy of the spring sky ... It's not about the reasons at all!
Other - in the prose of the elder sister. She certainly retained a tenderness for the house in Trekhprudny Lane of old Moscow, as well as for the Tarusa expanses where the Tsvetaev family spent the summer months. But just as obvious is the fact that her childhood past did not fascinate her. Resurrecting old years, she never succumbed to the temptation to recreate the sweet moments of childhood joys. Something else 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 memoirs of the younger sister - with a few sharp, abruptly laid strokes; Marina Tsvetaeva is more of a master of color than meticulous detail. In the foreground, every time she has not the external - the internal: dramas and joys of the child's soul hidden from prying eyes.
Resurrecting old years, she is more than anything else busy searching for herself today in that little girl who secretly read "Gypsy" in the room of her elder sister Valeria, and in the July heat on the Tarusa balcony copied poems into a homemade notebook. In each episode, she seems to want to find out: what grew out of that case? And from this kidney? From this meeting?.. Peering into the kaleidoscope of everyday particulars, she selects first of all those from which clear threads extend to today.
reflection, comprehension of the lived and experienced - the deep nerve of mature Tsvetaev's prose. Joseph Brodsky said in his own way about this feature of her memoirs: “this is not“ when-still-nothing-is known ”- the childhood of an inveterate memoirist. This is “once-everything-is-known”, but “nothing-has-began yet” – 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 just the comparison of memories makes it possible to see especially clearly the bizarre interweaving of the kindred with the foreign - in characters and in the very type of personality. Marina is quick-tempered, Asya is soft; the older one is always annoyed by everyday life, Asya does not notice him. Marina is closed, Asya just needs to share any joy and sorrow with others. From an early age for Marina, torment is to hold in her hands anything but a pen; everything goes well in the hands of the youngest: she knows how to cut and bind books, sew a seam and pack a suitcase ... The feast of the Christmas tree is coming: the youngest joyfully jumps around Christmas surprises; Marina sits buried in a book she has been given, not seeing or hearing anything around...
But this is already 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 passed at the same time, in the same house, with the same parents! One is filled with unconditional happiness, the other is too heavily seasoned with bitterness...
In Tsvetaeva's prose, which is mainly devoted to meetings with Osip Mandelstam ("The Story of a Dedication"), there is a very characteristic scene related to Marina's childhood.
"Round table. Family circle. Sunday pies from Bartels on a blue serving platter. One for each.
- Children! Take it!
I want meringue and take an eclair. Embarrassed by the clairvoyant look of my mother, I lower my eyes and completely fail them, with:
You fly my zealous horse
Through the seas and through the meadows
And shaking his mane
Take me there!
- Where to go? - They laugh: mother (triumphantly: a poet will not come out of me!), Father (good-naturedly), brother's tutor, Ural student (hoo-hoo!), Laughs for two years older brother (following the tutor) and for two years younger sister (after mother); Only the elder sister, seventeen-year-old college student Valeria, does not laugh - in defiance of her stepmother (my mother). And I - I, red as a peony, stunned and blinded by the blood that hit and clogged in my temples, through boiling, not yet shed tears - at first I am silent, then I yell:
- Far away! There - there! And it’s very shameful to steal my notebook and then laugh!”
Well, isn't it a strange situation, in fact! A wonderful family - and a wounded child in the very heart. Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, professor at Moscow University, founder of the Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts, always fascinated by some extremely important matter 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 excessively 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 yet, with all that, they laugh! How much more humane, it seems, would even be to flog a child with a belt, in the old fashioned way! But not for anything. And the elders, of course, understand this. They understand, but laugh merrily - over the innermost secret of a shy girl. It never occurs to sweet, kind, intelligent parents for a moment how unbearable this pain of hers is, how painfully sharpened all the feelings of this child from birth. It doesn’t occur to them that this unsmiling, ruddy plump woman is destined for the future of a brilliant poet...
However, not quite so. The girl was only four years old when Maria Alexandrovna wrote in her diary: “The eldest keeps walking around and mumbling rhymes. Maybe my Marusya will be a poet?..” But she wrote it down and forgot. And all the same, she gave her daughter paper only musical notes, so she scratched lines and rhymes with scribbles on randomly found paper scraps.
In the eyes of her mother, the girl is simply stubborn and stubborn. “Other children are like children, but this one ... is more stubborn than ten donkeys!” she complains angrily 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 Tatyana." "How? Not a Mermaid, not ... "-" Onegin and Tatyana ". “I know her,” the mother said to the director, “now she will repeat all the way in a cab to all my questions: “Tatyana and Onegin! I'm just not happy I took it. Not a single child in the world would have liked Tatyana and Onegin, everyone would have preferred The Mermaid, because it’s a fairy tale, of course. I don't know what to do with her!"
The mother was angry for nothing: the six-year-old girl told her the honest truth. What was she to answer if, in fact, she was most seduced that evening by the love scene of Pushkin's heroes? Say what is expected of her? She could, and she already knew what she was waiting for, but she couldn't. She didn't learn to do it later.
That was not stubbornness at all. From an early age, this girl seemed to listen to what she was born with. It was as if she knew something about herself that she could not change. Not so much depended on her will: she herself was at the mercy of some irresistible force, which it is pointless to resist and sweetly obey, a force to which, as Tsvetaeva herself said, you are “betrayed like sold out.” Scrawling on music paper, this child only made its way to a dim light in the distance, doing something that could not do.
Tsvetaeva's autobiographical prose allows us to trace the stubborn energy with which this child created his own miraculous fortress of the spirit. How persistently he pushed her limits, how stubbornly and patiently, clenching his teeth, he walked way. Early discernment one's own and someone else's perhaps one of the most striking qualities of this child. "Adult" books are hidden from her - she secretly learns Pushkin's "Gypsies", reads "The Captain's Daughter" with bated breath and learns the words of romances sung by her older sister Valeria; goes to the first communion and, horrified by his own blasphemy, keeps talking to himself about the devil; falls in love with a tutor and is the first, like Pushkin's Tatiana, to write him a letter...
And all this secret, incredibly spacious world of the soul - the world of secret loves, devils, rhymes, fears, hopes - is carefully kept from prying eyes.
She goes her own way, and this is nothing but the way of calling.
“You fly, my zealous horse... Take me there!” Satisfied with themselves, the adults then brought the girl to tears, but if only they knew, they would have guessed, allowed for a minute that that horse would later go through all the poetic notebooks of Marina Tsvetaeva! A winged horse flying over towers, over mountains ... - both in verse and in poems. "Take me there!" So, exactly what - there! Even then it was difficult for her to give an exact address, but the direction was clear: above everyday life, above the hustle and bustle of everyday life, “above nitrous, above rustiness” ... , I do not know where, devotion to that, I do not know to whom. Akin to the craving that a baby unconsciously feels, reaching for its mother's breast.
There is an important slip in the essay "The House at Staryi Pimen". The author notes here unexpectedly related traits that brought the mother, Maria Alexandrovna, closer to Ilovaisky, the father of the first wife of Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev. “They were something remotely similar,” it says here. "My mother would have been more suitable for him as a daughter than his own." And then - a harsh characterization of the pedantic intelligent Ilovaisky in his relationship with children: "... the evidence of his eyes was one: his parental authority and the infallibility of his decrees."
Maternal power in the Trekhprudny house was of the same order. In this house there were paintings, books, music, marble busts of the gods, the cult of work. 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’s sigh in My Pushkin. What is this but a sigh of heartfelt rejection experienced too soon!
When Marina Tsvetaeva grows up, her name will be entered in a literary encyclopedia (two years before her death) and she will be offered to write an autobiography. She agrees. Takes the pen in hand. 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. Early resentment at the lack of love.
Which means: Marina Tsvetaeva lived with this wound all her life. Is it because 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 St. Helena. Is it not from there that Tsvetaeva's insatiable thirst for love, her Himalayas of love, addressed even to someone who is still only born in a hundred years, comes from! And this generosity of self-giving: “Hands are given to me - to extend both to everyone! / Do not hold on to a single one! ”, These immensities of feeling: “Half a life? - All to you! / To the elbow? - Here she is!"
In Tsvetaeva's prose of the thirties, large and small plots are embodied by the writer, who was never satisfied with the external side of the phenomenon, whether it be a private life case or a colorful figure of a contemporary.
Life at home in Trekhprudny Lane, episodes of the Tarusa summer, images of father, mother, sister under Tsvetaeva's pen acquire multidimensionality, exceeding their empirical level. And we can say that the peculiarities of this excess contain all the originality of Tsvetaeva the artist ... Her attention is always directed deep into, to the source; the obvious occupies her, but as a path to what is hidden behind it. What is there - behind the evidence of a particular case, if you do not run past with the haste of a person who does not have time to go anywhere? Is it only everyday life?.. But everyday life is voluminous and multidimensional!
It would be difficult to retell Tsvetaev's sketch of "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 for haymaking to the "khlystovkas" - not far from their Tarusa dacha - and they jokingly offer the girl to stay with them forever.
Only and everything. But the inner richness of this little work could be envied by the author of another poem. However, it is precisely poems, and not short stories, because everything that is being discussed here acquires weight and meaning due to the lyrical feeling of the author. It is his power to resurrect the blissful summer in the Moscow region, permeated through with the sun, the smells of cut grass, apples, berries - a visually vivid piece of childhood with its fabulous abundance of impressions. But behind the visually vivid, the reader sees the characters of the mother and father, the difficult family relationships of the Tsvetaevs; it is clear who is leading here, who is suffering, but the main thing here is: the quivering world of a little girl who, with her offended heart, goes through 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, outwardly insignificant episode, the tragedy of a child fits, with a painful acuteness of feeling 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 take a closer look ... “When others talk about their lives,” she wrote in one of her letters, “I am always surprised at poverty - not events, but perceptions: two, three episodes: school (usually not listed before school),“ the first love”, well, marriage or marriage ... - Well, what about the rest? The rest is either not listed, or it was not. - Boring. It's scarce. It's boring..."
This is how two passions merge in Tsvetaev's prose work of the mature period. For the desire to recreate the past, to keep it from a traceless failure into oblivion, clearly competed in the author of autobiographical prose with another comparable in strength. That was passion for life a passion for reflection and observation on its laws and its mysteries, on the very "origins of life and being," as she called it. Prose, which was born as memories of departed people and the past time, provided a convenient opportunity to express the riches of the accumulated spiritual and spiritual experience, and this opportunity increasingly captured 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, to stop - "Oh, this chair in Valeria's room ... But past, past, otherwise it will lead us too far ..." - she writes. And it is quite clear that if it were not necessary to rush past, if it were possible not to rush, we would learn something that is by no means everyday-everyday: within the framework of everyday life, Tsvetaeva's associations never fit. In her perception, any life detail, any accidentally heard word, especially a human personality, is always a kind of hieroglyph that is worth looking at, listening to, pondering. And unhurried deciphering it will certainly lead to the clarification of many things. Through the reality of certainty, a phenomenon emerges, through a face - a face, through being - being. So we are faced with an organic feature of Tsvetaeva's worldview, which determined the philosophical nature of her prose.
This is a special philosophicity. It is not stuck to the text by some moralizing appendage, 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 what characterizes, say, the autobiographical prose of Bunin ("The Life of Arseniev") or Paustovsky ("Distant Years"). “House at Old Pimen”, “Devil” or “Khlystovki” are written as a free reflection “about” the chosen plot - with chronological interruptions, digressions, inclusions of “side” themes, etc. The author is open leads narration, and no canons of the prose form restrain it. We will not find any plot, no growth of events, no climax in her works.
In the Russian tradition, Tsvetaeva's autobiographical prose of the thirties is rather close to Boris Pasternak's Safe Conduct. 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 reasonable pretext, flash, fly into the mind of the reader like ball lightning, which can explode, or can quietly fly out the window, striking everyone with the mere fact of its existence. Transitions from the personal to the universal are on almost every page. The same improvisational approach to generalizations is also found in the mature Tsvetaeva. Expanded or fleeting, they permeate the narrative, saturating it to the utmost - and sometimes even oversaturating it...
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 comprehension.
Let me remind you in the end that Brodsky highly valued this side in the work of Marina Tsvetaeva and believed that in her person we are faced with one of the most interesting thinkers of the 20th century.
The tragic life and fate of Marina Tsvetaeva is striking to this day. Sometimes you don’t understand how such trials could fall on the fragile shoulders of a beautiful and intelligent woman.
Marina Ivanovna wrote poetry from the age of 6, and her first collection, which attracted the attention of the general public, was published when the girl was only 18 years old. But on this gift to a talented woman from fate ended. Marina Tsvetaeva survived the death of one of her children, the repression of the second and shared the exile with the third. The husband was shot under the Soviet regime on suspicion of espionage. And the woman herself, unable to endure the humiliation and shame, hanged herself on a rope that Boris Pasternak gave her on the way so that Marina could tie her suitcases.
Surely all of you at least once in your life read her beautiful poems full of incredible lyrics, deep meaning and charm. We invite you to turn your attention to other thoughts of the poetess. She has a myriad of life philosophical quotes, which in places amaze with their accuracy and depth.
About feelings...
- After all, you fall in love only with someone else's, native - you love.
- To love means to see a person as God intended him and his parents did not realize him.
- “I will love you all summer” sounds much more convincing than “all my life” and - most importantly - much longer!
- "To endure - fall in love." I love this phrase, just the opposite.
- There is no second you on earth.
- Men are not accustomed to pain, like animals. When they hurt, they immediately have such eyes that you can do anything, if only they would stop.
- Whether to dream together, whether to sleep together, but always cry alone.
- If I love a person, I want him to feel better from me - at least a sewn on button. From the sewn on button to my whole soul.
- Humanly, we can sometimes love ten, lovingly - many - two. Inhuman - always one.
- If you came in now and said: “I am leaving for a long time, forever,” or: “It seems to me that I don’t love you anymore,” I would not seem to feel anything new: every time you leave, every hour when you are gone, you are gone forever and you don't love me.
- All women lead into the mists.
About creativity...
- Poems themselves are looking for me, and in such abundance that I don’t know directly - what to write, what to throw. You can not sit down at the table - and suddenly - the whole quatrain is ready, while squeezing the last shirt in the wash, or feverishly rummaging in a bag, gaining exactly 50 kopecks. And sometimes I write like this: on the right side of the page there are some verses, on the left - others, the hand flies from one place to another, flies around the page: do not forget! catch! hold on!.. - not enough hands! Success is to be on time.
- The sculptor depends on the clay. Paint artist. String musician. The hand of an artist, a musician can stop. The poet has only a heart.
- The most valuable thing in life and in poetry is that which has broken.
- Creativity is a common cause, created by solitary people.
About life…
- We joke, we joke, but the longing grows, grows...
- What can you know about me, since you did not sleep with me and did not drink?
- I don't want to have a point of view. I want to have vision.
- The world has a limited number of souls and an unlimited number of bodies.
- The only thing people don't forgive is that you got along without them in the end.
- Favorite things: music, nature, poetry, loneliness. I loved simple and empty places that no one likes. I love physics, its mysterious laws of attraction and repulsion, similar to love and hate.
- My dream: a monastery garden, a library, old wine from the cellar, a long pipe and some seventy-year-old "from the former" who would come in the evenings to listen to what I wrote and tell me how much he loves me. I wanted to be loved by an old man who loved many. I don't want to be older, sharper. I don't want to be looked up. I've been waiting for this old man since I was 14...
- If something hurts - be silent, otherwise they will hit exactly there.
- In one thing, I am a real woman: I judge everyone and everyone according to myself, I put my speeches into everyone’s mouth, my feelings into my chest. Therefore, everything is with me in the first minute: kind, generous, generous, sleepless and insane.
- How much better I see a person when not with him!
- Listen and remember: anyone who laughs at the misfortune of another is a fool or a scoundrel; most often it's both.
- No one wants - no one can understand one thing: that I am all alone. Acquaintances and friends - all of Moscow, but not a single one who is for me - no, without me! - will die.
- Oh, my God, but they say that there is no soul! What hurts me now? - Not a tooth, not a head, not a hand, not a chest - no, a chest, in the chest, where you breathe - I breathe deeply: it doesn’t hurt, but it hurts all the time, it aches all the time, unbearably!
- I want such a modest, deadly simple thing: that when I enter, a person would be happy. The sin is not in the darkness, but in the unwillingness of the light.
In these phrases, one can feel pain, and the bitterness of the lived places, and experience, and willpower, and the desire to change the world around me, I did not see only one thing - the happiness of a beautiful woman.
