The Presidential Library — on the occasion of 125th anniversary of birth of Marina Tsvetaeva

October 8, 2017, marks the 125th years anniversary of the birth of Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892—1941) — a famous Russian poetess, prose writer, translator, who has left with her work an intense and tragic imprint in the literature of Silver Age. To appreciate the complex system of poetic coordinates of the poetess, or rather of the Poet, as she personally denoted herself, will be possible with a help of some scientific researches, dedicated to creative work of M. I. Tsvetaeva, the abstracts of which are available on the Presidential Library electronic stock.

Marina and her younger sister Anastasia were born in a family of Moscow intellectuals. Their father, Ivan Vladimirovich, was the founder and first director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, a professor at the Moscow University, specializing in an ancient history, art and an epigraphy. Mother, Maria Alexandrovna Main, was a piano player, a student of A. G. Rubinshtein; she died too early, but managed to introduce the world of music and the Russian word to her dearly loved daughters, playing the piano for them and reading aloud the best books from their home library.

“That sensation was from the very first years: a passion for the word, literally, to the letters it was consisting of, or something, — Anastasia Tsvetaeva wrote in the book of “Memoirs,” which is analyzed in the thesis focused on The world of A. I. Tsvetaeva’s works: an artistic, ontological, an event driven (2009), — the digitized copy of author's abstract of this work is available on the Presidential Library website. — The words’ sound, full brimmed with their meaning, caused utterly semantic pleasure. Just beginning to speak — and almost immediately in three languages, we found ourselves in such a fellowship, as if appeared, just like in a fairy tale, in a mountain cave full of the precious stones that the gnomes guarded.

The precious existence of the word, as a source of sparkling, awoke in us such an echo, which already in six or seven years was a torture and a pleasure of domination… As for the Russian words… <…> Were it these words with which a heart was all of a glow in the tale about Vasilisa Premudraya (lit. the wise one), about fearless knights, and some kind in far of lend kingdoms? <…> Could it be so that this organic delight of “language” explains that I do not remember any the troubles in “learning” languages? It was just coming into your house, where everything was familiar.

About Marina — there’s simply nothing to say. Her talent was an entire grade higher than mine, she from the very first years of her life — like in a popular proverb — grasped anything in a single flash.”

As we can see, the stylistics, a mutual passion for the favorite punctuation mark — a dash — and a similar artistic style of the sisters cannot be seen better anywhere else then in this fragment of the memories about their childhood.

The first literary experiments of Marina were connected with the circle of symbolists in Moscow. Yet being a teenager, Tsvetaeva met Bryusov, who had a great influence on her early poetry. Created by the critic and poet Maximilian Voloshin artistic world of the house in the Crimean Koktebel had no less impact on the growing talent. Up to the marriages of both sisters their close spiritual connection was not interrupted, because the sister is a “witness of childhood,” the keeper of the most precious memories, the first critic of each other’s lines.

The times when Anastasia was perceived only as a biographer of her famous sister have already passed. Today Tsvetaevas’ researchers consider the work of the younger Tsvetaeva as a significant, original and an outstanding phenomenon, independent from the powerful creative and personal mind of Marina Tsvetaeva. This is confirmed, in particular, in a digitized copy of the author’s abstract on the title of PhD in philology by Mary Golovey entitled Synthesis of literary and melodic genres in the lyrics of M. I. Tsvetaeva and A. I. Tsvetaeva (2013).

At the core of that work is the phenomenon of interaction between literary and musical genres, already associated with the unique sisters in their youth. Literary critics included the diverse phenomena that integrate the means of music, painting, and theater along with literature in the concepts of the “synthetism” (I. I. Ioffe), the “inner artistic ties” (M. M. Bakhtin). Artistic synthesis was peculiar to the aesthetics of modernism, which was clearly manifested in the poetry of that time and in the first experiments of Marina Tsvetaeva. A constant “dialogue” between the two sisters and the fact that Marina appreciated the charming but not so strong perceptions of her sister’s poetry is recognized in the work of Golovey.

This left its imprint on Marina Tsvetaeva’s first poetry collections, such as “The night album” (1910) and “The magic lantern” (1912) — what a fabulous description of household items (portraits, mirrors, living room, children's bedchamber), reading to each other aloud, the walks down the boulevards, music classes, relations with the sister and the mother! And an imitation of the diary of a young schoolgirl could be seen in all this.

Later, when this accustomed world collapses, there will be a book of “Swan flock” — a frightening one, like awaiting for the letters from an officer husband, who entered the Civil War as a white officer and ended it up as an agent of the OGPU and shot later in the same dungeons, about which she poet, passing away in 1941, will never know…

Her prose of the Soviet period is the prose of the poet: a figurative, an impulsive, abounding of all the same beloved by the poet dashes. The friendship with the poets Maximilian Voloshin, Andrei Bely and Mikhail Kuzmin resulted in a birth of the unique creative portraits of each of them — “Live about the alive,” “Captive spirit” and “Unearthly evening.” She also wrote about Pushkin, having internalized all the vicissitudes of his life through herself in “My Pushkin.” Tsvetaeva loved Mayakovsky and devoted to him an entire poetic cycle “Mayakovsky” — and it turned to a rebellious poet to a break with the émigré environment of Paris, in which the family of Marina Ivanovna lived until the pre-war years.

Unfortunately, the poet did not see recognition within her lifetime. Contemporaries did not appreciate her poetry nights and collections of poems. But today these works are part of the compulsory school curriculum. Is this that what poetess foresaw herself in 1913 — not the poetess, indisputable, definitely — the poet:

In dusty bookstores stands

(Which they have never left),

My poems, just like precious wines in cellars,

Unnoticed with patience wait for their turn.

And here is how Vladimir Nabokov translated these lines of Marina Ivanovna in 1972:

Amidst the dust of bookshops, wide dispersed

And never purchased there by anyone,

Yet similar to precious wines, my verse can wait

Its time will come.