“T
he whole point of it is that he didn’t love her, and it is only for that reason that she loved him so, choosing him because she se-cretly knew that he would not be able to love her back.… People with this fatal gift for unhappy and unrequited love simply have a genius for hitting upon unsuitable objects of affection.”2 In these words about Pushkin’s Tatyana, written by Tsve taeva just after the end of her epistolary romance with Anatoly Steiger, we see her penchant for combining literature with autobiographical confession. Throughout her creative career, short-lived intimacies with one person or another tended to be immortalized in a literary work just before (or after) they broke up: a cycle of verse, a long poem, or a short memoir written as a sketch.All sorts of relationships might serve as the impetus for this kind of creative incarnation. Examples include her friendship of many years with Prince Sergei Volkonsky, her delight at the literary talent of Osip Man del-stam, and her tribute to the recently deceased Aleksei Stakhovich, with whom she had been only slightly acquainted. However, the most signifi-cant things written by Tsve taeva on the basis of temporary intimacy with another person were those born of a feeling of love.
Love! Love! Both in convulsions and in the grave, I am wary—am tempted—am shy—rush forward.
1 Translated by Eric Naiman. Originally published as “‘Puteshestvuia v Zhenevu …’: — ob odnoi neudavsheisia poezdke M. I. Tsvetaevoi” in Marina Tsve taeva: Trudy 1-go mezhdunarodnogo simpoziuma [Lausanne, 30 June–3 July 1982], ed. Robin Kemball, E. G. Etkind, and Leonid Heller (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 1991), 72–80.
2 Marina Tsve taeva, “Moi Pushkin,” in Izbrannaia proza v dvukh tomakh 1917–1937 (New York: Russica, 1979), 2:262.
“Traveling to Geneva …”: On a Less-than-Successful Trip by Marina Tsve taeva In Tsve taeva’s literary biography “love” is quite a capacious concept, en-compassing an extensive spectrum of shades and gradations. Love for her husband and daughter; her literary infatuation (obviously erotically tinged) with Boris Pa ster nak and Rainer Maria Rilke; her tempestuous love affairs with the hero of The Poem of the End (Poema Kontsa), Kon-stantin Rodzevich, and with the heroine of the cycle Woman Friend (Po-druga), Sofiya Parnok—all these different types of love lie at the founda-tion of Tsve taeva’s works. For the biographer or the commentator there is no getting around them.
So far, all the work I’ve mentioned flowed from real and mutual rela-tionships. But Tsve taeva has cycles of poems which arose from unfulfilled love, love that never came to be or, as she herself wrote, “one-sided” love.
In the collection After Russia (Posle Rossii), these are the poems writ-ten to Abram Vishnyak, whom she would soon reject, and to Aleksandr Bakhrakh, whom she did not know at the time. Such is the cycle Verses to an Orphan (Stikhi sirote), dedicated to Anatoly Steiger, who she knew was not susceptible to a woman’s love or motherly tenderness. The cases of Bakhrakh and Steiger are the most obvious examples of Tsve taeva’s
“fatal talent” for choosing “inappropriate objects of affection.” She would mythologize the chosen one, ascribe to him nonexistent qualities and de-sires, place demands on him that were impossible to fulfill, invest him with hopes that could not possibly come true.
Whether purposefully or not, such “one-sided” love, built on illu-sions, caused the poet to suffer, but at the same time it was the soil from which poetry grew. Tsve taeva yielded to the illusion of mutuality with such fearlessness for the sake of poetic leavening. In her creative work, as she explained in her remarkable letter to Vladislav Khodasevich, “the only full and true” conception of a man (or of a city) is an internal one, “with eyes closed, no peeking.”3 Her meeting in person with Khodasevich—and in a café, at that—could end in disenchantment, just as London, when she saw it for herself, “crumbled before my eyes,” turning out to be not the London described in the lines in the poem “The ancient fogs of love ….”
While she was corresponding with Anatoly Steiger and writing Verses to an Orphan, two different Steigers existed for Tsve taeva—a real, living
3 Tsevtaeva to V. F. Khodasevich, 15 April 1935, in “Pis’ma Mariny Tsvetaevoi,” Novyi mir, 1969, no. 5, 206.
one and an imaginary one—along with two Switzerlands: the country next door, which her neighbors from Château d’Arcine often visited, and another Switzerland, in which her internal Steiger dwelt. Initially, she wasn’t drawn to the real Switzerland:
People often go to Geneva from here, i.e., to Switzerland, and that is a bit irritating, but I am not envious and know that in the final analysis all good things have been fairly distributed: I have been given a talent for dreaming so powerful that it outstrips any automobile. (Letter of 14 August 19364)
The next day Tsve taeva was “invited from the morning on to Ge-neva—for a whole day,” but she declined.5 This would have been the real Switzerland, but she would have liked to meet with Steiger in an oneiric castle or room, “in a dream, to enter with you into a dream—and to live there.”6 This room, the imagined place of their imaginary meeting, had already been described in Tsve taeva’s poems Attempt at a Room (Popytka komnaty) and Poem of the Air (Poema Vozdukha), and Tsve taeva would envision it vividly in a diary entry in the form of a letter which she sent to Steiger by letter on 18August.7
In a letter written the next day, Tsve taeva returned to that prospect of a one-day trip to Geneva. It wasn’t Geneva that attracted her, but the possibility of making her way from there to the sanatorium in Berne where Steiger was being treated. She rejected this idea as impractical, but in subsequent letters continued to play with the notion that Geneva might serve as the gateway for a face-to-face meeting, whether through Steiger’s arrival in St. Pierre de Rumilly or Tsve taeva’s at the sanatorium of Heilige Schwendi. And when on 2 September Tsve taeva was again asked to take part in a group trip to Geneva, she agreed. There were two reasons for the journey: to show Geneva to her son Mur, and to profit from the domes-tic Swiss mail to send Steiger a package. Steiger was recovering from an operation in a decent sanatorium, his parents were there, and he did not
4 Opyty (New York), 1955, no. 5, 59.
5 Ibid., 56.
6 Ibid., 59–60.
7 Ibid., 61.
“Traveling to Geneva …”: On a Less-than-Successful Trip by Marina Tsve taeva seem to need anything. Nevertheless, Tsve taeva bought him a jacket out of her meager means.
On 4 September 1936, in a letter entitled “My Geneva,” which never found its way into the collection published by K. Vilchkovsky, Tsve taeva ironically described the day which she had not ended up spending in that city.8 Calling upon Pa ster nak’s “all-powerful god of details,” she recreates for Steiger the events (or anti-events) of 3 September. The departure had been set for ten in the morning. Tsve taeva hurriedly wrapped up her parcels and dressed herself and Mur “so that we looked more or less like the Swiss.” Ten o’clock came, eleven o’clock, twelve—and there still was no car. The land-lord’s son informed Tsve taeva that all the other traveling companions—the owner of the castle (formerly a Russian colonel), his Swiss-Russian wife, and one other woman—had thought better of it and would not be going.
I go to the landlady and try just a bit to persuade her (one thing is for sure—I absolutely have to send off those things!). In a vague manner she both refuses and agrees to go. And it is already one o’clock, lunchtime (endless), now it’s already two, and there is still no car.
At four the car ordered for ten a.m. arrived, and at half past four the whole group departed for Geneva. The ride was marvelous, three poten-tial pitfalls were successfully navigated—there was enough gasoline, the French and the Swiss borders were crossed. Tsve taeva was shown the Eng-lish Garden and Lake Geneva. But she had one concern:
I haven’t been to Switzerland since 1903—and then I didn’t send any packages—will I manage to send them off from a foreign post office?
And will I find the courage to stop a car full of people in front of the post office.… But this, too, was dealt with.
She folded a note inside the package for Steiger: “I myself would like to be this jacket: to warm [you] and to know when and for whom I am
8 Unpublished letter, M. I. Tsve taeva to A. S. Steiger, kindly provided to me by Steiger’s sister, A. S. Golovina. The passages describing the trip to Geneva on 3 September are cited in accordance with this letter. [The complete corpus of Tsve taeva’s letters to Steiger is now available in Marina Tsve taeva, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh (Moscow: Ellis Lak, 1995), 7:565–635.—Ed.]
needed. M. Ts.”9 “Now”—Tsve taeva writes—“I can ride back.” However, Mur and the other passengers had other goals and other plans.
But here they come—the Uniprix, the arcades, in a word that household and female version of hell. Immediately Mur wants a fountain pen and a whole bunch of other things, I keep making him multiply by five, the landlady (Russian-Swiss—very sweet) picks out collars for her daughters in Russia (she sends them in letters), the colonel, her husband, wants beer. Mur can’t multiply by five—in a word, a good hour of standing around over things, of immersion—face first—in the sorts of detail which I hate. As a reaction to all the chocolate, I don’t buy any. (After your operation you probably are not supposed to have any, and my landlady bought some for Mur)—we sit in a café, the heat is insane, I write you a postcard, and Mur takes advantage of this by ordering himself an unbelievably large mug of beer (Gargantua!)—and again Uniprix and again the demand for a pen (Mur now has two).
A postcard with a view of the store “Au Grand Passage” has survived;
on it Tsve taeva, sitting with Mur in the hot café, wrote to Steiger: “Per-haps only in the times of Herzen and Ogaryov and their Natashas have greetings been sent with such bitterness from Switzerland to Switzerland.
M.Ts.”10 Leaving the café with Mur, she found that her companions had vanished: “For a long time nobody comes back. Absolutely nobody.” Later it turned out that her landlady had suffered heart palpitations in the Uni-prix and been taken to a doctor.
Tsve taeva spent the following hours waiting, sitting alone in the burning heat of the car. (All the while Mur and the driver kept going off to drink beer.) She yielded to only one of Geneva’s many temptations:
she bought herself a cigarette lighter that cost one Swiss frank. “But since I already have my own with me and I have to take it across the border, I stuff it down my bosom—rather deeply.” And as the fatal inevitability of Tsve taeva’s destiny would have it, the punishment was about to begin for this miniscule whim.
9 Cited from a text transcribed by K. S. Vilchkovsky. The publication of Tsve taeva’s letters to Steiger in the journal Opyty was made on the basis of this text. A copy of the unpublished part of Vilchkovsky’s transcript was in turn furnished to me by the editor of Opyty, Yury Ivask, during the preparation of my monograph about Tsve taeva.
10 The text of the postcard was kindly provided to me by A. S. Golovina.
“Traveling to Geneva …”: On a Less-than-Successful Trip by Marina Tsve taeva 7 o’clock. 7:30.… All the stores have closed. And—pay attention—I begin to feel it burn. That is, it has been burning me for a long time, from the first minute. In the little pit between the parting of my ribs. And—it really burns. It. The lighter. And as luck would have it, it is full of fuel.
With gallows humor Tsve taeva tells Steiger that she was wearing a tight dress which buttoned at the back, so that she could not extract the scorching lighter, without undressing right there, on the square in front of the store. From the heat, the scorching metal seemed to have fused into her skin. There follow humorous observations about whether the fuel in the lighter might explode from the hot weather and the temperature of her body.
And what if it suddenly bursts into flame—on the border? That’s the sort of thing that happens with me. (And the dress will burn, and the automobile will burn, and the border will burn!) From time to time (and it is already well past 8), I check, running my hand over my dress—could it be smoldering—and I sniff, does it smell burnt? No! But it smells of fuel. As though I had been bathed in it. And my companions are still not back, and Mur keeps drinking beer with the driver, they come back again, and then go away again.
Finally at nine the colonel turned up, they set off to get his ill wife, and the trip back began. Tsve taeva joked with the driver and watched the moon rise. (“For me the moon is loneliness itself. All the inhumanity of loneliness. I don’t have a poet’s feelings for the moon, but rather a wolf’s.”) But this description of the trip back to Château d’Arcine recalls a different animal from the canine order: the fox cub mentioned several times in Tsve taeva’s poetry, hidden by a young Spartan under his clothes and gnawing away at his stomach. Despite the continuous pain, Tsve-taeva did not tell anyone about the lighter. Only after they have returned to the castle:
I run upstairs and—I can only see the surface of the lighter—it has become a part of me. I tear it away with difficulty: raw flesh. A terrific burn—and two lighters (at one point I had moved it). Now I can say on the basis of experience (my raw flesh): a lighter, full of fuel and thrust down the bosom, (1) does not light (2) but burns through.