C
hildren who grow up in cultured or somewhat-cultured Russian I families are introduced to the poetry of Aleksandr Pushkin at an early age. In the last decades of the nineteenth century this introduction usually occurred through the primer Native Word (Rodnoe slovo), which was compiled by the pedagogue Konstantin Ushinsky and went through more than fifty editions in the first two decades after its appearance in 1864. This mode of using primers to introduce children to poetry was part of the national cult of Pushkin, a cult Marina Tsve taeva summed up in part six of her essay “The Poet about the Critic” (“Poet o kritike”) in the phrase“primers, bad grades, exams, busts, masks,” and so forth.2 In fact, exams and bad grades were not always the extent of it. In more cultured families, a child might be callously humiliated for insufficient or overly individu-alistic understanding of one of Pushkin’s texts. Examples can be found in Tsve taeva’s “My Pushkin” (“Moi Pushkin”). In less cultured families, if one is to believe Anton Che khov’s story “Out of Sorts” (“Ne v dukhe”), published in 1884, it could reach the point of beatings because of Pushkin.
As a little girl, Marina Tsve taeva came upon the same excerpt from Evgeny Onegin (the second stanza of the fifth chapter) that poor Vanya
1 Translated by Liza Knapp. Originally published as “Pa ster nak, Pushkin i okean v po-eme Mariny Tsvetaevoi ‘S moria’” in Boris Pa ster nak and His Times: Selected Papers from the Second International Symposium on Pa ster nak, ed. Lazar Fleishman (Berke-ley: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1989), 46–57.
2 SK’s source in this essay for Tsve taeva’s texts was the exemplary edition of her prose and poetry published in New York between 1979 and 1990, masterminded by Alek-sandr Sumerkin: Marina Tsve taeva, Izbrannaia proza v dvukh tomakh (New York:
Russica, 1979); Marina Tsve taeva, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy v piati tomakh (New York:
Russica, 1980–90). However, in lieu of multiple references to these seven volumes, we have chosen to provide the titles of her writings in both English translation and the original Russian (in transliteration) for the benefit of readers who have access to other or later editions of Tsve taeva’s writings.—Ed.
Pa ster nak, Pushkin, and the Ocean in Marina Tsve taeva’s From the Sea Prachkin is learning from Ushinsky’s reader in Che khov’s story. True, for little Marina, in the line “Winter, the peasant triumphing …” Pushkin ap-peared “not stolen, but given, not mysterious, but revealed.” Before that had come a secret and forbidden reading of The Gypsies at the age of five or six in the room of Valeriya, her half-sister. Valeriya’s room was a forbidden realm in the mythology of Tsve taeva’s childhood. It was enemy territory, attractive for this very reason. It was a place of liberation from maternal prohibitions and the place of encounters with the imagined and beloved devil, described in the sketch “The Devil” (“Chort”). In Tsve taeva’s remi-niscences of childhood the image of the devil personifies revolt (first of all, against her mother), eroticism, and, at the same time, Russian literature with Pushkin at its head—literature that little Marina, raised on German literature, became acquainted with behind her mother’s back and in an atmosphere of prohibition and danger.
One should not, I am well aware, mix life with literature and fictional characters with real, live people (although Tsve taeva herself, as we shall see, loved to do this). Nevertheless, there is a remarkable parallel in the theme of parental punishment for the reading of Pushkin in Che khov’s tiny story and in the memoiristic sketch by Tsve taeva. At the end of Che khov’s story the fa-ther beats the boy, not just on account of Pushkin but also out of annoyance with himself over a loss at cards. The highly cultured Mariya Aleksandrovna Tsve taeva, née Mein, certainly did not beat Marina. But she did recognize in Pushkin some form of incendiary power, since the girl was punished for Pushkin: for her interest—premature, according to her mother—in Onegin and Tatyana, for her ignorance of who Bonaparte, referred to by Pushkin, was, and for her inappropriate use of new words read in Pushkin.
And yet little Marina held on to her love of Pushkin despite prohibi-tions and ridicule during childhood, and Pushkin remained for her the heart of Russian literature her whole life long. None of the Russian poets and prose writers of the nineteenth century was as dear to her. Tsve taeva would hold forth in admiration of individual poems by Baratynsky, Ler-montov, or Fet; she had an affinity for Leskov’s Cathedral Folk and Aksa-kov’s Family Chronicle; but she did not know the full scope of their oeuvre as she did the oeuvre of Pushkin and her beloved German poets, Goethe, Heine, and Rilke. Only among her older contemporaries and her peers did Russian poets emerge whom she studied and placed on the same level as Pushkin: Blok, Bely, Kuzmin, Akhmatova, and, above all, Boris Pa ster nak.
The young Tsve taeva’s study of Pushkin went through three early stages: the quasi-infantile forbidden reading of The Gypsies and The Cap-tain’s Daughter, with a very approximate understanding of the meaning but with complete faith in the poetic enchantment; next, an authorized reading in the primer of excerpts from Onegin and Poltava, minor poems like “The Drowned Man” (“Utoplennik”), as well as her mother’s reading aloud of Pushkin’s fairy tales; and, finally, at the age of ten, her fascination with a poem that might appear to be inaccessible to the understanding of a child, “To the Sea” (“K moriu”). The whole final part of the sketch “My Pushkin” is devoted to the description of the young Marina’s murky but not distorted perception of Pushkin’s epistle to the sea. It is significant that this little girl, who didn’t understand many of the words or the realia of the text, interpreted the content of the poem as a love story—the separa-tion of two lovers, the poet and the sea.
This situation is probably the most unusual in the polymorphous-androgynous love stories in the poetic world of Tsve taeva, where the limitations of sex, age, or the feasibility of a meeting are often not taken into account.3 One may point to relevant examples such as the “love plot”
between Grinyov and Pugachov, spotted by Tsve taeva in The Captain’s Daughter,4 or, in the memoiristic sketch “My Jobs” (“Moi sluzhby”), the hypothesis about the desirability of Pushkin’s marrying not Nataliya Goncharova, but instead Natasha Rostova from War and Peace. Her re-proaches to Natasha Rostova for having married Pierre instead of wait-ing for Pushkin overlook not only Rostova’s and Pushkin’s existence in two incommensurate worlds, but also something even more substantive from the point of view of the epoch: the inappropriate age of the proposed bride. Natasha Rostova, thirteen in 1805, at the time of her first appear-ance in War and Peace, would have been nearly forty at the time of the marriage of the thirty-year-old Pushkin to the sixteen-year-old Goncha-rova. The romantic encounter between Psyche-Natasha and the inspired blackamoor imagined in “My Jobs” is undermined by the overripe age of Tolstoi’s heroine. However, in the poetic world of Marina Tsve taeva such practical obstacles are not taken into account.
3 “My God! How a human being is diminished by taking on sex.” Marina Tsve taeva,
“Moi Pushkin.” See also Tsve taeva’s “Natal’ia Goncharova.”
4 See Tsve taeva’s “Pushkin i Pugachev.”
Pa ster nak, Pushkin, and the Ocean in Marina Tsve taeva’s From the Sea Fate offered the ten-year-old Marina the opportunity of seeing whether the grand picture which so captivated her measured up to real-ity: the poet’s parting from the ocean which was in love with him, against the background of Napoleon expiring on a cliff and a genius by the name of Byron racing across the sky, “with his head made up of rays of light and his body of clouds.”5 Because of her mother’s illness, the whole family went to Italy “to the sea” in the fall of 1902, at the height of her infatu-ation with the poem “To the Sea.” But the sea turned out to be the bay of Genoa, a cove or tourist beach in Nervi, which in no way compared to the powerful and loving ocean in Pushkin’s poem. Tsve taeva, in “My Pushkin,” and, following that text, her sister Anastasiya in her memoirs, describe Marina’s disappointment when the sea turned out not to be as it was for Pushkin:
At first sight, I did not fall in love with the sea; gradually, as everyone does, I learned to make use of it and play in it: collecting pebbles and dancing in it—just like a youth, dreaming of a great love, gradually learns to take advantage when opportunity presents itself.6
This ambivalent attitude toward the sea—dislike of the actual sea and a certain recognition of the value of the sea as a traditional literary theme—runs through Tsveateva’s whole poetic and epistolary legacy. To renounce the sea once and for all was impossible for her, if only because of her name, whose marine etymology she understood and valued.7 From this etymology, marine-Marina, are constructed two poems from Tsve-taeva’s early collection Magic Lantern (Volshebnyi fonar’): “Prayer to the Sea” (“Molitva moriu”) and “Soul and Name” (“Dusha i imia”). In the latter, the poet asserts that not only her name but also her dreams and her soul are marine, though it seems more a matter of paronomasia than true conviction. References to her connection to the sea are to be found also in lyrics of the mature Tsve taeva, such as, for example, “Some are cre-ated from stone” (“Kto sozdan iz kamnia”), 1920, and “Naiad” (“Naiada”), 1928. In a somewhat salonesque poem of 1913 (not completely successful,
5 Marina Tsve taeva, “Moi Pushkin.”
6 See also Anastasiia Tsve taeva, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1983), 95–96.
7 See her dialogue with Asya Turgeneva in the memoiristic sketch “A Captive Spirit”
(“Plennyi dukh”).
in my view),8 Tsve taeva envisioned an imaginary encounter with Pushkin on the seashore in Gurzuf, using the setting Pa ster nak would later use in Theme with Variations (Tema s variatsiiami).
However, to shift from Tsve taeva’s poetry, we find in her letters the recurrent leitmotif of dislike of the sea. It appears especially often dur-ing Tsve taeva’s émigré period, when more than once for the sake of her children she took pains to gather the means for summer trips to the sea, only then to curse it in letters to friends. Of numerous examples, we can cite the letter to Anna Tesková:
The Ocean. I recognize its grandeur, but I don’t like it (I never liked the sea, only once, the first time, in childhood, under the sign of Pushkin’s
“Farewell, free element!”). It is free, whereas I am “constrained”;9 or the letter to Raisa Lomonosova, who was setting off for America:
At the sea—the simplest, almost familial …—I languish, don’t know what to do with myself.… How many times have I tried to fall in love with it!10
Tsve taeva made the most significant of these attempts to love the sea not only in the poetic but in the existential sense at the end of May 1926 when her goal was to intensify her contact with her most beloved contemporary poet, Boris Pa ster nak. This attempt flowed into the writing of the poema dedicated to Pa ster nak, From the Sea (S moria).
II
The foundation for studying the interrelations of Marina Tsve taeva and Boris Pa ster nak was laid in an article by Olga Raevsky-Hughes, published in 1971.11 From then on these relations were explored in a series of studies,
8 SK is referring to “A Meeting with Pushkin” (“Vstrecha s Pushkinym”).—Trans.
9 Marina Tsve taeva to Anna Tesková, 8 June 1926, Pis’ma k A. Teskovoi (Prague, 1969), 39.
10 Tsve taeva to Raisa Lomonosova, 1 February 1930, from the Archive of Leeds Uni-versity, courtesy of Richard Davis. [This letter is now available in Marina Tsve taeva, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, vol. 7 (Moscow: Ellis Lak, 1995), 316–19, after a first publication by Richard Davis in Minuvshee, no. 8 (1989).—Ed.]
11 Ol’ga Raevskaia-Kh’iuz, “Boris Pa ster nak i Marina Tsve taeva: K istorii druzhby,”
Vestnik Russkogo studencheskogo khristianskogo dvizheniia (Paris), no. 100 (1971).
Pa ster nak, Pushkin, and the Ocean in Marina Tsve taeva’s From the Sea most extensively in Lazar Fleishman’s book Boris Pa ster nak in the Twen-ties12 and in the introductory essay to the collection of letters by Rilke, Tsve taeva, and Pa ster nak, compiled by Konstantin Azadovsky and Elena and Evgeny Pa ster nak.13 For our purposes here, we need only note that, prior to the beginning of the two poets’ correspondence and her essay about Pa ster nak, “A Cloudburst of Light” (“Svetovoi liven’”), published in 1922, Tsve taeva was only familiar with his book My Sister Life (Sestra moia zhizn’), also published in 1922, which she thought was the only one he had published. In early 1923, she became familiar with the collection Themes and Variations (Temy i variatsii), about which she wrote Pa ster nak in a letter of 11 February 1923.14 The cycle Theme with Variations, found within this collection, shares some common ground (as mentioned above) with Tsve taeva’s poem “A Meeting with Pushkin.” As is well known, the theme on which Pa ster nak wrote variations in the cycle was the painting by Aivazovsky and Repin depicting Pushkin on Crimean cliffs above the breakers. The poem depicts Tsve taeva herself with Pushkin in this very landscape. However, if Theme with Variations in all fairness may be con-sidered to be one of the loftiest of Pa ster nak’s poetic flights, Tsve taeva’s
“Meeting with Pushkin,” with its speech addressed to Pushkin by a young poetess (specifically, a poetess, and not yet a poet), written in the style of Edmond Rostand, beloved by Tsve taeva at the time, does not poeticize Pushkin, but, to be blunt, vulgarizes him.
12 Lazar’ Fleishman, Boris Pa ster nak v dvadtsatye gody (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1980).
A revised edition of this indispensable study was published in St. Petersburg by Aka-demicheskii proekt in 2003.—Ed.
13 In abridged form, Voprosy literatury, 1978, no. 4. In unabridged form, the collection was published in German, French, and Italian. The Russian text is cited in the pres-ent essay from an unpublished typescript, kindly provided to the author by Serena Vitale and Angela Livingstone. [SK presented this paper in 1984, a year before the collection appeared in English: Letters, Summer 1926: Boris Pa ster nak, Marina Tsve-tayeva, Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. Yevgeny Pa ster nak, Yelena Pa ster nak and Konstantin M. Azadovsky (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985); 2nd ed. (New York: New York Review Books, 2001). In 1990 the same editors’ Russian version was published in Moscow. See also: Nebesnaia arka: Marina Tsve taeva i Rainer Mariia Ril’ke, ed.
Konstantin Azadovskii (St. Petersburg: Akropolis, 1992); Marina Tsve taeva and Boris Pa ster nak, Dushi nachinaiut videt’: Pis’ma 1922–1936 godov, ed. E. B. Korkina and I. D. Shevelenko (Moscow: Vagrius, 2004).—Ed.]
14 Marina Tsve taeva, Neizdannye pis’ma, ed. G. Struve and N. Struve (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1972), 279, where several poems from the collection Themes and Variations are enumerated.
It is hard to say whether Tsve taeva, on reading the collection Themes and Variations, noticed this contrast, so unflattering to her, in the treat-ment of the theme of Pushkin in the Crimea. In her letter to Pa ster nak about this collection she did not mention his Pushkin cycle. However, she subsequently cited it at least three times: (1) in the first poem of her cycle Verses to Pushkin (Stikhi k Pushkinu), 1931, which contains the words
“Brows more blue than olives” (“Лбы голубей олив”) from the fourth poem of Pa ster nak’s cycle; (2) in the essay “My Pushkin,” into which Tsve-taeva inserted his lines
Стихия свободной стихии С свободной стихией стиха
(An element of a free element [the sea]
with the free element of a line of verse);
and (3) in From the Sea, where the lines Лучше волны гложу,
Осатанев на пустынном спуске (Better than a wave am I gnawing away, Possessed, atop a steep deserted slope)
appear as an amalgam of the Pa ster nak line “В осатаненьи льющееся пиво” (Beer aswirl as if possessed) and the Pushkin line cited later by Pa-ster nak “На берегу пустынных волн” (On the shore of deserted waves).
These three lines make it safe to assume that at the time of composition of From the Sea, not just Pushkin but also Pa ster nak was associated with the thematics of the sea.
This triple association—Pushkin, Pa ster nak, and the sea—reached its height of intensity for Tsve taeva in May of 1926, when she was staying on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean in the fishing village of Saint-Gilles-sur-Vie.
This was the period of furious attacks on Tsve taeva in the émigré press for her article “The Poet on the Critic,” attacks that augured the possibility of a break between her and part of the expatriate literary community.15 At this
15 On this, see Irma Kudrova, “Polgoda v Parizhe,” in Marina Cvetaeva: Studien und Materialien, Wiener slawistischer Almanach 3 (1981).
Pa ster nak, Pushkin, and the Ocean in Marina Tsve taeva’s From the Sea same time, in May of 1926, the three-way correspondence between Tsve-taeva, Pa ster nak, and Rilke reached its culmination. Over the course of four days, from Sunday to Wednesday, 23 to 26 May, Tsve taeva wrote Pa ster nak an extended letter, which, as the compilers of the volume of correspon-dence of Rilke, Tsve taeva, and Pa ster nak point out, contains invaluable commentary on From the Sea. In particular, on the 26th Tsve taeva writes:
Boris, I don’t live backwards, I don’t try to foist on anyone either my six-year-old self or my sixteen-year-old self,—why, then, am I so drawn to your childhood, why am I so drawn to drawing you into mine? … With you now, in the Vendée, in May of 1926, I have been playing nonstop some kind of game, so that in the game—in the games!—I am collecting seashells with you.
Further on, Tsve taeva sets forth in detail and poetically the causes of her dislike of the sea, after which she cites the first lines of the chapter
“Marine Mutiny” (“Morskoi miatezh”) from Pa ster nak’s The Year 1905 (Deviat’sot piatyi god). The chapter had been published in New World (Novyi mir) three months prior to this letter. The opening of “Marine Mutiny” in its own way treats some of the basic motifs of Pushkin’s “To the Sea,” especially the theme of the contrast between the quiet and the stormy sea. Tsve taeva writes that she went to the Atlantic Ocean in the hopes of finally seeing the sea with the eyes of Pushkin and Pa ster nak and that she again—for the nth time—failed:
That, with which and for which I went: your verse, that is, transfiguration of the thing. I’m an idiot to have hoped to see your sea with my own eyes—beyond sight, above sight, out of sight. “Farewell, free element”
(I was ten years old) and “I am getting fed up with everything” (my thirty years)—there you have my sea.
(I was ten years old) and “I am getting fed up with everything” (my thirty years)—there you have my sea.