Marina Tsvetaeva Research Articles

Larisa Reisner: Myth As Justification for Life

Lidiia Ginsburg's article Once Again about the Old and the New is an attempt to construct the typology of the generation was born around the turn of the century and initially accepted the Revolution. As an index of the correct attitude of her generation to the emerging reality, Ginsburg points to Marina Tsvetaeva's acceptance of Pugachev. Pugachev was not my hero but somehow it went without saying he was O.K. , writes Ginsburg about herself.1 Reisner belongs to the same generation. I remembered this phrase when I started collecting material about her. Larisa Reisner? The woman of the Russian Revolution? These two rhetorical questions usually exhausted the topic. The people I talked to did not know much about her, but somehow, it also went without saying Reisner was not O.K.. Reisner's name is usually associated with the Revolution and the Civil War. Whether or not one would call her fame magnetic as did Cathy Porter, her visibility could not be questioned.2 She was not in the first ranks of activists, but her simultaneous engagement in both the political and literary spheres of Soviet life made her fame broad but transitory, which explains, for example, why her name is almost forgotten today. It appears, however, in indices to many books devoted to the Revolution and the Civil War, to the early diplomatic history of Soviet Russia, to Soviet journalism, and even to the Russian Silver Age. Porter opens her biography of Reisner with a long list of attributes which define her as fighter, writer, first Bolshevik woman commissar, . . . the 'Revolutionary Pallas,' . . . a larger-than-life figure whose short life was so full that it is often hard to see her clearly through a halo of legends and hyperboles surrounding her.'

Exile, Elegy, and Auden in Brodsky's “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot”

During the last three decades the in memoriam genre has come to occupy pride of place in the work of the exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. Through his belatedness (which is not necessarily Bloomian), his permanent exile status at the edges of two empires, and his profound poetic speculations on death as the ultimate border crossing, Brodsky now embodies the elegiac tradition in his homeland as no one has since his high‐modernist precursors, Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. And yet—and herein lies his distinct contribution to Russian verse of this century—Brodsky has constantly sought out other, nonnative precursors to mediate the dead letter of his primary Soviet culture. In “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot” he adopts the “mourning tongue” of Auden's “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” while speaking of the death of Eliot in his own distinctive Russian elegy. In this way, not only does he keep “the death of the poet… from his poems,” he keeps death from the door of his own ailing tradition.

Bells and Cupolas: The Formative Role of the Female Body in Marina Tsvetaeva's Poetry

Like many other Russian women writers, Marina Tsvetaeva did not merely include women's language and physical experience in her poetry; they were central to her concern with poetry and poetic creation. These elements of her work have in recent years evoked an interest from women readers and feminist scholars of Russian literature which is reflected in the number of studies devoted to aspects of her work. Antonina Gove discusses the presence and chronological development of female roles in Tsvetaeva's poetry; Anya Kroth illustrates the importance of gender and specifically androgyny in Tsvetaeva's construction of a dichotomous world-view. Barbara Heldt's landmark study of women in Russian literature, Terrible Perfection, devotes several pages to Tsvetaeva as an autobiographer and a woman poet liberated from the “split selves” of her predecessors.

The Speaking Subject in Russian Poetry and Poetics since 1917

IF FOR THE WESTERN WRITER a baffling abundance of rhetorical frames is discouraging, by contrast what has frustrated the Soviet writer is the difficulty of knocking chunks off a monumental single discourse. We now observe the crackup and dispersion. Soviet writing and literary scholarship begin to join the world. This essay is a narrative of turning points in the making of the postrevolutionary speaking subject. Those points are defined by describing the counterdiscourse that arose to qualify, extend, and contradict Socialist Realism. discourse of dissent was not one but many, but not so many that types and trends cannot be identified. If the narrative is plausible, the logic of an opposition between the speaking subject and discursive frames has been ruled out. Subject and discourse are not in contradiction, if we may define the speaking subject as being literature's propositions of subject in Soviet time, Soviet national tradition. Subject and discourse fit together, precisely because the concept of the speaking subject diversifies and multiplies the traditional human subject, displaces the untenable notion of the unified self without rendering the subject a hollow container for ideologies. In fact, counterdiscourse East and West is always in the process of expressing and resisting what it knows of the language of control. We gain explanatory power when we bring together, in a stereoscopic way, the concepts of speaking subject and of counterdiscourse. What we better explain is the historical momentum and the speech genre of literary resistance to social power. We need not call this resistance imagination, freedom, or self to be able to grant this resistance its own power. Marina Tsvetaeva: The poet takes up her speech from afar.' Far enough to represent other social selves, other rhetorics.

A Life through Poetry: Marina Tsvetaeva's Lyric Diary

A Life through Poetry: Marina Tsvetaeva's Lyric Diary

A Life through Poetry: Marina Tsvetaeva's Lyric Diary

A Life through Poetry: Marina Tsvetaeva's Lyric Diary

A Life through Poetry: Marina Tsvetaeva'S Lyric Diary. By Jane A. Taubman. Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1989. $17.95, paper.

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Puškin en français : Les poèmes traduits par Marina Cvetaeva. [Essai d'analyse métrique

Robin Kemball, Pushkin in French. The poems translated by Marina Tsvetaeva. An experimental metrical analysis. In contrast to the pure syllabism of French versification, Tsvetaeva 's French translations of Pushkin's verse (PVC) are clearly syllabo-tonic in character, and include all the rhythmic variations encountered in the originals. (Tsvetaeva 's correspondence on this subject shows that this was a deliberate process on her part.) On the other hand, there is no apparent correlation in the incidence and distribution of these variations as between French versions and Russian originals. The syllabo-tonic character of the PVC is more marked than that of other analogous versions. However, even these other versions tend towards a basic syllabo-tonic rhythm, especially if one compares them with an original French poem of analogous type (here, Baudelaire's « Le chat »). The author confines himself to an objective analysis of the metrical and rhythmical elements involved, considering that all aesthetic or artistic valuation should properly be left to the reader of French mother-tongue.

Reading Suicide: Tsvetaeva on Esenin and Maiakovskii

Мне кажется, смерть художника не следует выключать из цепи еґо творческих достижений, а рассматривать как последнее заключительное звено.Osip Mandel’ shtamThe death of a poet is a theme Marina Tsvetaeva addressed frequently both in poetry and in prose. The list of poets whose deaths underwent Tsvetaeva’s artistic scrutiny is varied and includes Aleksandr Pushkin, Aleksandr Blok, Sergei Esenin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Maksimilian Voloshin, Andrei Belyi, and Nikolai Gronskii. A number of notable lyric cycles and some of Tsvetaeva’s finest prose essays emerged as homage to deceased poets. The function of these works extends beyond commemoration and entails the elaboration of Tsvetaeva’s definition of lyric poetry and her exploration of poetic responsibility.

A life through poetry: Marina Tsvetaeva's lyric diary

A life through poetry: Marina Tsvetaeva's lyric diary

“I Named Her Ariadna…”: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Tsvetaeva's Poems for Her Daughter

Early in March 1914 Marina Tsvetaeva wrote to her new acquaintance Vasilii RozanovSeveral features of this passage stamp it as characteristically Tsvetaevan: the emotional excess, the hero worship of her husband, the preoccupation with familial blood lines. Perhaps the most interesting of these is the quasi-mythical quality with which she imbues the figures of husband and child. Whereas Tsvetaeva's powers as a maker of myths are commonly acknowledged, the extent to which her mythmaking shaped her most intimate relationships has yet to be explored. In the case of her daughter, the mythic relationship assumed the dimensions of a Greek tragedy.

After the Ball is Over: Sophia Parnok's Creative Relationship with Marina Tsvetaeva

The love affair between Sophia Parok and Marina Tsvetaeva, which consumed the two poets from late October 1914 until February 1916, seems to have been one of those passions fueled by an attraction to its own doom. Yet, as Sofiia Poliakova has demonstrated, the creative potential and fruits of this love affair were substantial.1 It inspired Tsvetaeva's magnificent lyrical cycle Podruga (Girlfriend), arguably her most mature work so far, as well as several other lyrics. On the whole, Tsvetaeva's poems about Parok are striking for their ambivalence-the mixture of tenderness, love, bitterness, and predictions of doom. In the very first poem of Podruga, Tsvetaeva predicts the end of the relationship, telling her girlfriend that one of the reasons she loves her is that she will tell her good-bye: [Ia Vas liubliu!...] Za to, chto Vam, moi demon krutolobyi,/Skazhu prosti. ([I love you!...] Because to you, my steepbrowed demon,/I'll say goodbye.) Despite their expressions of ecstatic love, Tsvetaeva's poems to Parok are preoccupied with the aftermath of the ball. The poems Parok wrote while she was in love with Tsvetaeva are neither numerous nor poetically distinguished, but they share Tsvetaeva's ambivalence about the relationship. One of Pamok's best early poems, however, was directly inspired by breaking up with Tsvetaeva. Another beautiful lyric to her was composed many years later, in 1929, long after the love affair was over.

Lives and Myths of Marina Tsvetaeva - Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, her Worlds and her Poetry. By Simon Karlinsky. Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature. Cambridge; London; New York; New Rochelle, N.Y.; Melbourne; and Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1985. x, 289 pp. Cloth. - A Captive Lion: the Life of Marina Tsvetaeva. By Elaine Feinstein. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987.

Lives and Myths of Marina Tsvetaeva - Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, her Worlds and her Poetry. By Simon Karlinsky. Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature. Cambridge; London; New York; New Rochelle, N.Y.; Melbourne; and Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1985. x, 289 pp. Cloth. - A Captive Lion: the Life of Marina Tsvetaeva. By Elaine Feinstein. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987. x, 289 pp. Photographs. $19.95, cloth. - Volume 47 Issue 3

Reviews : Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, her World, and her Poetry. By Simon Karlinsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. x + 289 pp. £27.50 (hardcover); £9.95 (paperback

Reviews : Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, her World, and her Poetry. By Simon Karlinsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. x + 289 pp. £27.50 (hardcover); £9.95 (paperback

Mandel'shtam's Farewell to Marina Tsvetaeva: “Ne veria voskresen'ia chudu”

… tak znai zhe: tvoi Dmitrii Davno pogib, zaryt — i ne voskresnet.A. S. Pushkin, Boris Godunov“Ne veria voskresen'ia chudu” is the last of the three poems that Osip Mandel'shtam addressed to Marina Tsvetaeva. The poets had met briefly in Koktebel' in the summer of 1915; they were reintroduced that December in Petrograd, and soon after Mandel'shtam made the first of several visits to Tsvetaeva in Moscow. He responded to her gift of the city, “Iz ruk moikh — nerukotvornyi grad/ Primi, moi strannyi, moi prekrasnyi brat” and to the affection of her “Otkuda takaia nezhnost'” with “V raznogolositse devicheskogo khora,” a celebration of his companion against the wondrously integrated Russo-Italian backdrop of the old capital. But in his next poem to her, “Na rozval'niakh ulozhennykh solomoi,” a sinister note is heard that relates their friendship to a darker side of Moscow's past, to Tsvetaeva's identification with Marina Mnishek and to his own confused identity at her side.

Tsvetaeva's Onomastic Verse

In her artistic philosophy Marina Tsvetaeva insists on the precedence of the word over what it stands for. “Slovo ved' bol'she veshch', chem veshch': ono samo veshch', kotoraia tol'ko znak.” The signifier comes first and the signified trails after it, for the acoustic properties of the word expand its capability beyond mere denotation to poetic creation. The proper name too, far from being a mere representation in Tsvetaeva's view, draws its bearer into a broad range of associations and creates a complex personal universe that can be discovered by means of the poet's “khozhdenie po slukhu.”From general observations on the importance Tsvetaeva ascribed to names in a variety of works, this paper will proceed to an examination of her 1916 dedication to Aleksandr Blok, “Imia tvoe—ptitsa v ruke.” Analysis of this remarkable poem demonstrates vividly Tsvetaeva's realization of the creative potential of Blok's name. This specific example will provide the basis for a discussion of the broader implications of naming in Tsvetaeva's art.

Vladimir Mayakovsky and Marina Tsvetaeva

It's hard to say when Mayakovsky first met Tsvetaeva. Perhaps it was at a gathering held one evening at the end of January 1918 at the apartment of the poet A. Amari (M. O. Tseitlin), where almost all the poets in Moscow were present other than Briusov. Viacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Belyi, Aleksei Tolstoi, Konstantin Bal'mont, Natalia Krandievskaia, Il'ia Erenburg, Boris Pasternak, Vera Inber, and Iurgis Baltrushaitis were there.

Tsvetaeva: Fotobiografiia/Tsvetaeva: A Pictorial Biography. Edited by Ellendea Proffer. Translated by J. Marin King. Introduction by Carl Proffer. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980. 143 pp. $18.50, cloth. $10.00, paper. - A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose. By Marina Tsvetaeva. Edited and translated by J. Marin King. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980. viii, 491 pp. $22.50, cloth. $7.50, paper. - Lebedinyi Stan/the Demesne of

Tsvetaeva: Fotobiografiia/Tsvetaeva: A Pictorial Biography. Edited by Ellendea Proffer. Translated by J. Marin King. Introduction by Carl Proffer. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980. 143 pp. 10.00, paper. - A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose. By Marina Tsvetaeva. Edited and translated by J. Marin King. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980. viii, 491 pp. 7.50, paper. - Lebedinyi Stan/the Demesne of the Swans. By Marina Tsvetaeva. Edited and translated by Robin Kemball. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980. 211 pp. 7.50, paper. - Volume 41 Issue 1

Marina Tsvetaeva. A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose. Translated and edited by J. Marin King. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980. 491 pp. cloth $22.50; paper $7.50. Marina Tsvetaeva. The Demesne of the Swans / Lebedinyi stan. A bilingual edition, with translation, introduction, notes and commentary by Robin Kemball. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980. 211 pp. cloth $15.00; paper $7.50. Tsvetaeva: A Pictorial Biography.

Marina Tsvetaeva. A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose. Translated and edited by J. Marin King. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980. 491 pp. cloth $22.50; paper $7.50. Marina Tsvetaeva. The Demesne of the Swans / Lebedinyi stan. A bilingual edition, with translation, introduction, notes and commentary by Robin Kemball. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980. 211 pp. cloth $15.00; paper $7.50. Tsvetaeva: A Pictorial Biography.

The Diary of Valery Bryusov (1893-1905). With Reminiscences By V. F. Khodasevich and Marina Tsvetaeva. Edited and translated by Joan Delaney Grossman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. x, 234 pp. + 8 pp. plates. $15.75.

The Diary of Valery Bryusov (1893-1905). With Reminiscences By V. F. Khodasevich and Marina Tsvetaeva. Edited and translated by Joan Delaney Grossman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. x, 234 pp. + 8 pp. plates. $15.75. - Volume 41 Issue 2