Lily Feiler

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, born in Moscow on October 9, 1892, committed
suicide in Yelabuga, a small village in the Tatar Republic, on August 31, 1941. Her
grave lay unmarked for nearly two decades, as did her reputation. In 1955, during
Kruschev's "thaw," Tsvetaeva's daughter, Ariadna, was released from seventeen
years in the Soviet Union's Gulag and Siberian exile. She and her aunt, Anastasiya,freed in 1959, devoted the rest of their lives to resurrecting Tsvetaeva's life and poetry.

During the 1960's and 70's Tsvetaeva became the most popular poet of the samizdat, the underground publishing world of the Soviet Union, influencing such young poets of that generation as Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina. In the 1980's and 90's she has become increasingly known through European and American volumes of her work both in Russian and in translation. Although it is generally agreed that no definitive English translation of her poetry has appeared, it is fiendishly difficult to translate because of its musicality, elliptical quality, fractured
syntax and dependence on the nuances of Russian speech patterns, she has been
restored to a position among the four or five most important Russian poets of the first half of the Twentieth Century.

Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Anna Akhmatova,
all born between 1889 and 1892, are often considered a poetic quartet by critics
because of their individual genius, their affinity for and influence upon each other's
work, their similar European Russian educations, and their suffering under the
repression of the Soviet government. Vladimir Mayakovsky, born in 1893, shared
their genius and suffering, but spoke in a voice more purely Russian and proletarian.
Lily Feiler acknowledges the affinity among the poets, but is most concerned with exploring the individual drama of Tsvetaeva's life. Feiler sees the poet as a romantic loner:

"She was never part of a group; she stood alone in poetry as in life. She was
oblivious to politics, but her ethical standards inform all her work; she despised the fat, the greedy, and the bigoted. Victory had no meaning for her; hers
was the lost cause and her hero was the outsider -- the outlaw and the artist.
She had no respect for church or state; only the individual mattered to her."

The loneliness at the core of Tsvetaeva's life was caused, Feiler posits, by the
wounded narcissism of a child whose individuality was never accepted by her mother. She contends that the unresolved relationship with her mother hindered Tsvetaeva's ability to leave the fantasized world of childhood narcissism and left her unable to sustain a normal adult relationship: "Tsvetaeva was simply not able to see the Other, to accept the limitations of ordinary, reciprocal love."

Marina Tsvetaeva was the elder of two daughters of the marriage between
Ivan Tsvetaev, a professor of art history, and Mariya Aleksandrovna; she had an
elder step sister, Valeriya, and step brother, Andrey, from her father's first marriage.

The emotional relationships within the household were strained. Tsvetaev, still in
love with his dead first wife, was twenty four years older than Mariya Aleksandrovna,
an accomplished pianist whose father had refused her a concert career. She married
Tsvetaev, who was looking for a companion and mother for his children, after
breaking with her first love, a married man. Although the Tsvetaev marriage
remained passionless, Mariya proved to be an able partner to her husband in his
efforts to raise funds and create a collection for his museum of classical sculpture. Valeriya resented the presence of her step mother who doted on Andrey. Marina and her younger sister Anastasiya (Asya) grew up in an atmosphere filled with music and books, taught by European tutors, spending the winters in Moscow and the summers on an estate near Tarusa in Kaluga Province. Although their mother was
disappointed that her daughters were not sons, she held her children to the highest
expectations of romantic idealism and accomplishment. She was determined that
Marina would become a musician, and the child was forced to practice four hours a
day at the piano. Despite having her early attempts at poetry ridiculed by the family,
especially by her mother, the young Marina knew that all of her "`unmusicalness' was
nothing more than another vocation!" In her essay "The Poet on the Critic," written in 1926, Tsvetaeva reveals the enormous influence this early musical training had on
her poetry. Describing the source for her poetry she wrote, "I obey something which
sounds in me; constantly, but not consistently sometimes it points, sometimes commands....That which points is an aural path to the poem: I hear a tune, I don't hear the words. I seek the words."

In 1902 Mariya Aleksandrovna contracted tuberculosis, so the family left for
Italy to seek a cure. For the next four years Marina and Asya lived abroad in
Nervi, near Genoa, where their mother was recuperating; in Switzerland at a boarding
school where the Tsvetaeva sisters resisted the strong religious indoctrination of the
Lacaze nuns and in Freiburg at the Brink Pension with its strong German discipline,
boredom and bad food. Despite the sojourn, Mariya's health deteriorated, and the
family returned to Russia in 1905 as the workers' protests in St. Petersburg and
Moscow were being brutally suppressed by the Tsarist regime. Marina's mother died
in July, 1906 Marina was fourteen. Feiler contends that her mother's death at this stage in the poet's adolescence prevented her from resolving the relationship with her mother: "Precisely because there was no one to rebel against, Tsvetaeva was exposed to all the storms of adolescence while chained to her mother's immutable
values."

Expelled from a boarding school for her rebellious attitudes, Tsvetaeva
attended various gymnasiums, grew close to her sister, gave up the piano and wrote
poetry. She came under the influence of the Symbolist poets when she became
friends with Ellis (the pseudonym of Lyov Lvovich Kobylinsky), Vladimir Nilender, and
most importantly, Maksimilian Voloshin. At the turn of the century, the Symbolist
poets had revived the Russian poetic tradition, dormant during the great age of
Russian prose in the Nineteenth Century. Ellis and Nilender wooed Tsvetaeva with
their intellect and their experience both proposed to her, but the eighteen year old Tsvetaeva was not ready to leave the "innocence" of childhood. Feiler sees in her rejection, especially of Nilender with whom she had a complex relationship, an
emerging pattern of rejection of reciprocal relationships: Tsvetaeva could only accept a romantic relationship which she could control either as the mother or the child. Voloshin, on the other hand, offered friendship and patronage.

In 1910, while in her last year of school, Tsvetaeva took a collection of her
poems to a printer and paid for the publication of 500 copies of her book, Vechernii al'bom (Evening Album), which she then took to a bookshop. She sent off a few
inscribed copies to important writers, four of whom wrote reviews of the volume
the most admiring was Voloshin, who appeared one day at her door and took her
under his wing. He directed her reading, introduced into Moscow's literary society
and invited her and Asya to spend the summer of 1911 at his country house in
Koktebel where Marina met and fell in love with Sergey Efron.

Tsvetaeva's love affair with Efron carried her into a wider life. The two set up
housekeeping together and finally married in January 1912; their daughter Ariadna
(Alya) was born in September. In their first years together, they lived comfortably and participated in Moscow's literary and theatrical societies. The marriage was founded on the ideal of freedom for both partners it was the elastic that bound them together while they strayed far from each other. Efron would be carried off by the winds of political necessity, first into the White Army opposing the Bolshevik revolutionaries, then into exile in Europe where he was converted to a faith in Stalinism, and finally back to the Soviet Union.

Tsvetaeva hurled herself into
romantic affairs (some sexual, some not) with poets, actresses, publishers and
Efron's friends. But she followed her husband into exile and then back into certain persecution in the Soviet Union.

Feiler contends that the "steely, arrogant" Tsvetaeva endowed Efron with the
romantic qualities of her heroic vision while envisioning him as her "little dark haired boy." She describes the marriage in terms of disastrous imbalance:
"He became first a 'son,' later a 'brother,' always coming from the same 'cradle.' He was her 'duty'in life."

In her own fashion, she always remained loyal to him. But more than twenty years later, she would write to a friend: "Marriage and love rather destroy a personality, it's an ordeal.[...] And an early marriage (like mine) is a disaster altogether, a blow for all of life."

This kind of out-of-context quotation from Tsvetaeva's published correspondence is
typical of Feiler's psychoanalysis. There is no denying Tsvetaeva's total dedication to poetry at the expense of personal relationships. But there is also no denying her intense connection with her family, her ambivalent and tenuous tie to Efron and her adoration of her children which encompassed smothering attention, neediness and immense pride. It is important to note that, despite her sexual infidelities, Tsvetaeva remained personally loyal to Efron even when he was implicated in an assassination carried out by the Soviet secret police and had to flee to the Soviet Union. She was also, in her own way, devoted to Alya and her son Georgi, nicknamed Mur, who was born in 1925 while Tsvetaeva and Efron were in exile in Prague.

Tsvetaeva was caught in Moscow during the Russian Civil War (a period also
known as War Communism) from 1918 to 1921 while Efron was fighting with the
White Army in the Crimea. At twenty-five she found herself poverty stricken with two
children, Alya and Irina, born in 1917. During the famine of 1919, Tsvetaeva put the
children in an orphanage in an attempt to provide them with food. During a period
when she took the ailing Alya home to nurse her, Irina died of malnutrition. Feiler
uses Tsvetaeva's letters to indict her with neglect of Irina and further blames her for
not taking any mementoes of Irina with her when she left Russia in 1922.

Although Feiler attempts to explain Tsvetaeva's behavior in terms of
psychological imperatives, there is, nevertheless, a strongly judgmental tone in her narrative. Feiler leaves the reader with the impression that Tsvetaeva was a
disastrous wife, a failed mother, and an impassioned philanderer. Perhaps she was
all of these, but Feiler seems to be morally measuring Tsvetaeva's life against some kind of psychological "norm." However, the "norm" she posits is not reflected in the milieu in which Tsvetaeva lived. The norm of early twentieth century Russian (and European and American) intellectuals and artists encompassed heightened enthusiasms and promiscuity; one need only compare Tsvetaeva's experiences with those of her contemporaries to see the similarities. Young, idealistic and caustically
intelligent, they rebelled against the stifling moralism of the Nineteenth Century and were caught in the global upheavals of revolution and world war. Perhaps the whole
generation of poets suffered from neuroses -- The Europeans and Americans: Eliot,
Pound, H.D., Cummings and Lorca, as well as the Russians: Akhmatova, Pasternak,
Mandelstam, Mayakovsky and Tsvetaeva.

Feiler claims that her book is "not a case
history but an attempt to understand Tsvetaeva's persona through a close reading of her texts...[using] psychological theories to lend more substance to my intuitive interpretation." However, this attempt to encapsulate Tsvetaeva's life, and even her work, in a neurotic reaction ultimately diminishes both the individual and the art.

While Feiler's psychobiography may add some interesting grist for the mills of
Tsvetaeva scholars, it is a misleading introduction to the poet. The reader loses sight of the accomplishments of one of the major voices of the early Twentieth Century. Tsvetaeva wrote over two thousand poems, numerous essays, a half dozen or so
plays, and carried on a voluminous correspondence with important literary figures of the day including Boris Pasternak and Rainer Maria Rilke. Although she held no political loyalties, she is an important witness to the cataclysmic events of the Russian revolution. But it is in her craft and in her genius that her measure should be taken. Joseph Brodsky, Russian poet and U.S. citizen, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature, when recommending Twentieth Century poets said: "Well, if you are talking about the Twentieth Century, I'll give you a list of poets. Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva (and she is the greatest one, in my view). The greatest poet
in the Twentieth Century was a woman."… (mehr)