La Financiación de las Pensiones con el Impuesto sobre el Consumo

It is possible to plan a thing [zadumat' veshch'] only in reverse, from the last step back-ward to the first—to traverse with seeing eyes the same path one first trod blindly. Reason through the thing [produmat' veshch']. (5:350)

—‘‘Iskusstvo pri svete sovesti’’ (1932) Стакан твой каждый—будет пуст.

Сама ты—океан для уст.

[Your every glass—will be empty. You yourself—are an ocean for the lips.]

—‘‘I esli ruku ia daiu . . .’’ (1920) Я воспевала—серебро,

Оно меня—посеребрило.

[I sang the praises of silver, and it—silvered me.]

—‘‘Kogda-to sverstniku . . .’’ (1940)

Tsvetaeva always felt a creative affinity for the poet Vladimir Maiakovskii, de-spite their diametrically opposite relationships to the Soviet regime—an affinity that was founded upon the two poets’ similarly passionate, reckless way with both words and life.¹The majority of the Russian émigré community did not share Tsvetaeva’s sentiment, however, and she was unpleasantly criticized for some comments she made in praise of Maiakovskii that found their way into print in her husband’s pro-Soviet paper Eurasia.²In April 1930, unexpectedly for some, Maiakovskii put a bullet through his heart. In the conclusion to her 1932 essay ‘‘Art in the Light of Conscience’’ [‘‘Iskusstvo pri svete sovesti’’]

(5:346–74), Tsvetaeva wrote a moving tribute to his death:

Vladimir Maiakovskii, having served for twelve years in a row [i.e., since the Bolshevik Revolution—A. D.] faithfully and truly, having served with his soul and his body . . .

177

178 Ruing Young Orphans ended more strongly than with a lyric poem—with a lyric pistol shot. For twelve years in a row the man Maiakovskii was murdering in himself Maiakovskii-the-poet, and in the thirteenth year the poet rose up and murdered the man. If there is such a thing as suicide in this life, then it is not where people think they see it, and its duration was not just the instant when he pulled the trigger, but twelve years of his life. No govern-ment censor dealt with Pushkin as efficiently as Maiakovskii with himself. If there is such a thing as suicide in this life, then it is not singular, there are two, and neither is a suicide, for the first—is a feat [podvig], the second—a holiday [prazdnik]. The over-coming of nature and the glorification of nature. He lived like a man and died like a poet.

(5:374)

Tsvetaeva, partly in response to a verse fragment contained in Maiakovskii’s suicide note that evoked a ‘‘love boat smashed on the rocks,’’³conceives of his death as the climax of a lifelong struggle between the man and the poet within himself. In her eulogistic cycle ‘‘To Maiakovskii’’ [‘‘Maiakovskomu’’] (2:273–

80), she uses a gruff, humorously colloquial idiom to memorialize Maiakovskii-the-man and prays to God sacrilegiously at the end to ‘‘give solace to the soul of Thy departed enemy’’ [Uspokoi . . . dushu usopshego vraga tvoego].⁴

The questions of death, of suicide, of the poet’s fatal struggle between body and soul that Tsvetaeva addresses in her meditation on Maiakovskii’s suicide are clearly ones that preoccupied her during the 1930s; indeed, Maiakovskii’s smashed ‘‘love boat’’ must have seemed to her an apt metaphor for her own un-happy romantic history. At the same time, the contrast she makes in the conclu-sion to ‘‘Art in the Light of Conscience’’ between Maiakovskii’s crushing self-censorship and Aleksandr Pushkin’s persecution by external authority points to her affiliation during this period with yet another dead poetic genius, as evinced in her 1931–33 cycle ‘‘Poems to Pushkin’’ [‘‘Stikhi k Pushkinu’’] (2:281–90) and her 1937 autobiographical essay ‘‘My Pushkin’’ [‘‘Moi Pushkin’’] (5:57–91).⁵ Tsvetaeva shares with ‘‘her’’ Pushkin a vibrant physical energy that expresses itself equally in a love of hiking and a vigorous poetic work ethic; Pushkin, like Tsvetaeva, challenges authority and ‘‘rhyme[s] the tsar’s censorship . . . with fool ’’ [tsarskuiu tsenzuru / . . . s duroi rifmoval] (2:281). Yet Tsvetaeva’s Push-kin unites the oppositions that plague both Maiakovskii and herself. In contrast with her own habitual separation of Eros and Logos, Pushkin’s physical pas-sion and poetic inspiration are one. Indeed, he is a protean genius, able to be all things to all people simultaneously: ‘‘A thorn in the side of the gendarmes, a god to students, gall to husbands, bliss to their wives’’ [Bich zhandarmov, bog studentov, / Zhelch' muzhei, uslada zhen].

This same metaphysical wholeness that governs Pushkin’s life and creativity is manifest in Tsvetaeva’s description of his tragic death in a duel:

Кто-то, на фуру Несший: «Атлета

The End of the Line 179 Мускулатура,

А не поэта!»

То—серафима Сила—была:

Несокрушимый Мускул—крыла.

[Someone who carried you to the hearse said: ‘‘An ath-lete’s musculature, and not a poet’s!’’ That—was the strength—of a seraph: the indestructible muscle—of a wing.]

True, Pushkin is an athlete of the soul; yet his power is viscerally, palpably physical. When he is shot down by the French assassin Baron Georges-Charles D’Anthès—who stands, in Tsvetaeva’s interpretation, for the uncomprehending mob, to whom the language of poetry is incurably alien—his demise equates the raw meat of the stomach with the glory of poetic martyrdom. Thus, Tsve-taeva reminisces: ‘‘At three years old I learned definitively that a poet has a stomach . . . In the word stomach there is something sacred for me . . . With that shot, they wounded all of us in the stomach’’ (5:57). Tsvetaeva identifies with the pangs of this human stomach, as she does likewise with Pushkin’s persecution by the ‘‘mob.’’ (During the last years of her emigration, she felt more and more estranged from the Parisian émigré community; her publica-tions and public readings occurred with rapidly diminishing frequency, while the vociferousness of her resentment increased.⁶) Yet, these affinities aside, the primary question for Tsvetaeva remains whether her own death will emulate Pushkin’s and mend the divisions within herself, or whether she walks instead the same tortured path to irrelevant self-destruction that Maiakovskii so re-cently trod.⁷

Photographs of Tsvetaeva taken during the decade 1930–40 narrate a harrow-ing progress of agharrow-ing, worry, and exhaustion. In the late 1920s, Tsvetaeva is still a young and attractive woman with smooth skin, shining green eyes, and silky chestnut hair, who gazes at the camera with a shy, alluring calm. By the end of the following decade, not yet fifty years of age, she has gone prematurely gray, her hair is coarse, her skin lined, her eyes kind but somehow dimmer, her ex-pression one of wisdom and endurance. For a woman like Tsvetaeva with Eros and self-image so much on her mind, this dramatic physical change was surely devastating. According to social convention, old men look stately and distin-guished; old women look ridiculous or pathetic. Unlike Akhmatova in her later years, Tsvetaeva proved unable to find an alternative poetic self-image that per-mitted power to continue to flow into old age; the most she could do was to inscribe her losses in her poetry.⁸

Tsvetaeva’s physical erosion, brought on at first by her exhaustion, must also

180 Ruing Young Orphans have exacerbated her spiritual condition, so that the aging process only con-tinued to accelerate further. In this way, Tsvetaeva’s life comes full circle.

Whereas earlier, she renounced bodily desires in favor of poetic transcendence and passion at a distance, now her former ‘‘wildness’’ with words comes home in the body, and she is forced, for the first time, to reinvest genuine value in what is trapped in the flesh. Erotic metaphors of sexual penetration, pregnancy, uterine rebellion—even in the service of pure spirituality—are grounded, after all, in a reminiscence (or at least an imagination) of actual, physical, sensual, sexual, brute biological experience. Gender is inescapable, as are the human consequences of her attempts to escape from gender.

Thus, Tsvetaeva’s many hymns to poetic isolation notwithstanding, she rec-ognizes in her later years that such isolation must be an answer to a question, proposition, or refusal, stated or unstated. Dreams, visions, and faith in the un-seen are ultimately insufficient; as both a woman and a poet, she is still in need of real emotional and inspirational events. She requires dialogue for her life and her art. Without the challenge of a subjectivity—and a body—external to her own, there can be for her neither life nor art; the dearth of a beloved now be-comes tantamount to real death (not the fecund metaphoricity of creative Mra, but the barrenness of complete spiritual annihilation). Without a push, there is no shove; Tsvetaeva ultimately finds the dead to be too compliant. She needs a vector; the spiral is not, after all, consistent with her inspirational requirements.

She thirsts for a renewal of the exaltation she experienced through her love for Rilke, but the renewal does not come, and the liberating curve of mutuality that she sketched together with him is now transformed through memory’s agency into the entrapping circle of endless repetition.

The poems of Tsvetaeva’s last decade or so, no less than her prose, consti-tute a retrospective stock-taking, a leave-taking; even her long works in these years are historical reminiscences connected not only with past events, but with her lost homeland and a lost era (pre-Revolutionary Russia).⁹Her lyric poems are few and far between; she no longer writes as a habit of being, but only as a conscious effort that emanates from urgency or extremity. Her poetic ‘‘play’’

has even ceased to be exhilarating, for she has begun to realize in deadly earn-est the toll it has taken on herself and on those dear to her. The leitmotifs of Tsvetaeva’s late poetry, therefore, are isolation, loneliness, exhaustion, and the desire for death; her tone is almost always dark, whether searingly ferocious or quietly desperate; and her style, which has always been so flamboyant, now tends toward sparsity, to the point of being telegraphic. More and more, her imagery is heavily gendered and emphasizes motherhood to the exclusion of sexuality—and frustrated motherhood, at that. More and more, she gazes in-ward; she no longer searches for a muse or a mentor, but turns instead toward the younger generation, in an avowedly futile search for poetic heirs.

The End of the Line 181

Tsvetaeva’s Poetic Orphans: Nikolai Gronskii and Anatolii Shteiger

For Tsvetaeva, the admission of body into poetry is the admission of pain, need, illness, vulnerability, and the corpse. Her project in much of her late poetry is to prove the frailty of body under the debilitating burden of poetic drive. Fate co-operated with this aim when it sent her way two young poets whose lives would become, in different ways, exemplary casualties of the human body’s transience.

Nikolai Gronskii, for whom Tsvetaeva had served as a poetic mentor and self-designated substitute mother beginning in the spring of 1928,¹⁰was tragi-cally killed when he fell into the Paris metro at the end of 1934—prompting her poetic cycle ‘‘Epitaph’’ [‘‘Nadgrobie’’] (2:324–28), a philosophical and emo-tional counterweight to ‘‘New Year’s Letter.’’ Anatolii Shteiger, a homosexual, a friend of Tsvetaeva’s poetic arch rival Georgii Adamovich, and a member of the Fascist/neo-Bolshevik organization ‘‘Young Russia’’¹¹—and, for all these reasons, the unlikeliest recipient of her affections—was undergoing a cure for tuberculosis in a Swiss sanatorium when he sent her an admiring letter in the autumn of 1936. The disease was sufficient to activate all of her most robust ma-ternal instincts; so much so that she forgave Shteiger his numerous ‘‘sins’’ and made room for him in her heart: ‘‘And if I said mother—then it was because that word is the most spacious and all-embracing, the vastest and most exact, and—it demands nothing. A word before which all, all other words are limita-tions’’ (7:566). A copious correspondence and the cycle ‘‘Poems to an Orphan’’

[‘‘Stikhi sirote’’] (2:337–41) were the result of Tsvetaeva’s mostly one-sided long-distance affair with Shteiger.¹²

The relationships that give rise to the cycles ‘‘Epitaph’’ and ‘‘Poems to an Orphan’’ are far more incidental and have far less formative significance for Tsvetaeva’s poetic self-definition than did her earlier inspirational infatuations with Blok, Pasternak, and Rilke.¹³Her later relationships no longer hold out to her any promise of a true exit into the alterity of either myth or love; her ambiva-lent emotional dalliances with Gronskii and then with Shteiger serve, instead, as the occasion for her insular poetic retrospection on the full extent of her sub-jective isolation. Whereas in the case of Blok, Pasternak, and Rilke, Tsvetaeva strained to rise to their level, levitating upwards and outwards, in the case of Gronskii and Shteiger, by contrast, she must stoop down in order to have anyone at all to talk to.

Indeed, Tsvetaeva’s desire to view Gronskii and Shteiger as her potential po-etic disciples prompts her to adopt a generous perspective on the less-than-brilliant work of both younger poets. Thus, she rationalizes the weakness she perceives in their writing by her belief that their talent simply has not yet been fully realized. To Gronskii she writes in 1928: