Catherine Ciepiela
THE SAME SOLITUDE
Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva
320pp.Cornell University Press.£16.95
0 801 43534 X

The painter Leonid Pasternak was not sure how to react when his son wrote to Rainer Maria Rilke in April 1926, asking the elder poet to send an inscribed copy of one of his books, “perhaps the Duino Elegies”, to his “greatest and probably only friend”. “Her name is Marina Tsvetaeva”, Boris Pasternak explained, “and she lives in Paris, 19th arrondissement, 8 rue Rouvet”. He told Rilke that Tsvetaeva was “a born poet, a great talent . . . . who writes in a way that none of us in the USSR now writes”.

Leonid Pasternak, who had met Rilke in Moscow twenty-five years earlier, when his son and Tsvetaeva were just schoolchildren, persuaded himself that his anxieties about the propriety of the request were due to the excessive decorum of his generation and his own insufficient understanding of the ways of poets. “Perhaps among you poets it’s accepted to exchange books without being personally acquainted”, he concluded with paternal deference. For Rilke, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva, separated by geography, politics and domestic circumstances, the exchange of books was itself the source of the immediate and ecstatic sense of kinship – far over-running the bounds of conventional “personal acquaintanceship” – recorded in their correspondence of summer 1926.

Indeed, Pasternak’s request to Rilke was prompted by his reading of Tsvetaeva’s “Poem of the End” (1924) for the first time on the very day that he received word from his father that Rilke had read and admired his own poems. “My whole disposition has been blown to pieces by Rilke’s letter and Marina’s poem”, he wrote to his sister Josephine, “it’s as though my heart has ripped open my shirt. I’ve gone crazy, splinters are flying: something akin to me exists in the world, and what kin!” Although Pasternak fantasized about travelling to Switzerland with Tsvetaeva to visit the dying Rilke, and there were intermittent urges and unrealized plans to meet over the years, actual encounters played no part in the “love” that their letters mutually proclaim. As Tsvetaeva later wrote to Pasternak, “we have nothing except words”. Her shrewd sense of how meeting in person might jeopardize the communion available to them in letters (and dreams) was part of a longstanding philosophy of “non-meeting” (razminovenie) with other great poets, which, in its turn, contributed to what Joseph Brodsky calls her retreat into an ever-expanding “sphere of isolation”. “I know Boris very little”, she wrote to Rilke, “and love him as one only loves the never-seen.” The few meetings between them in Moscow before Tsvetaeva’s emigration in 1922 were inconsequential; their eventual reunion in 1935 at an anti-Fascist Writers’ Congress in Paris, which Pasternak (by now deep in compromise with Stalinism) had been forced to attend, was a disappointment, which soon declined into misunderstanding and recrimination. Nonetheless, Tsvetaeva became a main prototype for Lara in Doctor Zhivago, the novel which Pasternak completed almost fifteen years after her suicide.

The remarkable three-way exchange of letters involving Rilke has been available in various German, English and Russian editions since the 1980s. (A second English edition, with a preface by Susan Sontag, was recently published as Letters, Summer 1926.) It was not until 2000, however, when Tsvetaeva’s personal archive in Moscow was finally opened, that what survives of her long correspondence with Pasternak between 1922 and 1936 (of which the Rilke letters are but one small though fascinating part) could be published in full. The carefully annotated Russian edition of these letters (many reconstructed from drafts in Tsvetaeva’s notebooks), published in 2004 with the title “Souls Begin To See” (“Dushi nachinayut videt’”), provides a core source for Catherine Ciepiela’s fine study of the passionate fourteen-year epistolary conversation between the two poets and its fruits in their art. Their letters provide incomparably rich material for understanding their difficult, often hermetic, works of the 1920s and early 30s, when both were estranged – one in peripatetic emigration, the other in Soviet Moscow – from prevailing literary milieux, and each acted as the other’s most attentive reader and potent creative stimulus.

“Why am I drawn into your childhood, why am I drawn to draw you into mine?”, Tsvetaeva wrote to Pasternak from a French seaside town. “Right now in the Vendée in May of the year 26, I continually play a game with you.” In the same month, she wrote a long lyric poem, “From the Sea” (“S morya”), which imagines the two poets as young siblings whose selves are created in relation to one another: “Side by side, but not crowded, / A fire, but not smoky. / After all, this is not a combined / Dream, but a mutual one: / In God, each in the other”. In the preceding months, Pasternak told her that he anticipated a meeting with her as “happiness of the utmost simplicity . . . that occurs only in childhood solitude”, and declared, “it is as though you have always been my sister”.

The sibling fantasy that runs through their friendship was well grounded in the facts of their matching childhoods. Pasternak and Tsvetaeva were born, two years apart, into the most elevated circles of the Moscow intelligentsia: romantic, musical, duty-conscious and Germanophile. Their mothers – Rozalia Kaufman and Maria Mein – were both prodigiously talented pianists, who had given up musical careers for family responsibilities. Tsvetaeva’s father, the classical philologist Ivan Tsvetaev, founded the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts; its opening ceremony in 1912 was the subject of a drawing by Leonid Pasternak. In Ciepiela’s first two chapters, which are deeply informed about the wider intellectual environment in which Tsvetaeva and Pasternak began to write, she reveals further symmetries and coincidences in the imaginative worlds of “the girl muse” and “the boy poet”.

By the time they discovered the underlying affinities that Ciepiela’s skilful cross-readings reveal, Revolution and war had disintegrated the Moscow of their childhoods, and they were far apart, married to other people, and parents themselves. Tsvetaeva had lost one of her two daughters to malnutrition, in 1920; Pasternak’s wife, Evgenia, who was “tortured” by the correspondence from its start, bore him a son in 1923. Pasternak distinguished between his love for Evgenia, which gave life to “living children”, and his higher romance with Tsvetaeva, which pushed at the bounds of what love between a man and a woman can accommodate. Tsvetaeva, meanwhile, “cast herself as a mother to Pasternak’s poems”, and also fantasized about bearing him a real son. For her, giving life to verse and to children were (despite their rivalry in daily life) analogous aspects of her creative vocation, which she figured as a force working “through” her body. When she conceived again, in 1924, she registered an enlargement of her sense of creative power, and wrote to Pasternak: “. . . this is the first child who’s knocked after these seven years . . . . I acted properly, I didn’t interfere with life’s workbench . . . . I didn’t thrust a stick into the wheel of fate. That’s the only thing I respect. (The right to existence – always – in everything: from the right to existence of a given line of verse, despite the most fateful consequences – to that of my son inside me)”.

Poets of the magnitude and agility of Tsvetaeva and Pasternak are, in all senses, hard to follow. Their shared fund of cultural reference was vast. The relentless candour of Tsvetaeva’s self-scrutiny, her linguistic energy, and the turns of her wit, both in prose and verse, are often dizzying. Both role-played freely with notions of gender in relation to their creativity, swapping and sharing “male” and “female” poetic attributes and ideas of agency. Pasternak often figured his own lyric disposition as feminine, and called Tsvetaeva an “active masculine soul, militant, resolute, and indomitable”.
Ciepiela, with admirable tact and erudition, maps the movement between emotional experience registered in the letters, and the metrical, rhythmic, metaphorical and myth-laden structures of verse. Her main interpretative resource is the concept of “hysterical poetics”, which she summons from the highly elaborated theoretical repertoire of contemporary gender studies. The “hysterical discourse”, rooted in “ambivalence about femininity”, which she finds in the work of both poets, is characterized, in the words of the feminist critic Claire Kahane (on whose work Ciepiela draws), by “splittings and displacements of the subject . . . . phonemic rather than semantic continuities, and seemingly gratuitous and often bizarre disruptions”. Occasionally, for all her attentiveness to their writing and the lucidity of her own, theoretical imperatives come between the author and her subjects. “Hysteria” is a slippery concept; intrinsically unfalsifiable, never precisely defined, and with a dangerous potential to diminish our ability to discriminate poetic art from everything it is not.

One of Ciepiela’s critical problems, as she is aware, is that when Tsvetaeva, Pasternak and their contemporaries invoked “hysteria” in relation to poetry, the word was construed negatively. The negative connotation survives in Brodsky’s long essay “Footnote to a Poem” (1981), a virtuosic explication of Tsvetaeva’s “New Year’s Greeting” (“Novogodnee”), a love lyric and funeral lament on the death of Rilke, completed early in 1927. Brodsky emphasizes the “argumentation”, “logic” and “rationalism” in the poem. “A poet”, he writes, “is someone for whom every word is not the end but the beginning of a thought; someone who, having uttered rai (‘paradise’) or tot svet (‘next world’), must mentally take the subsequent step of finding a rhyme for it.” The poet, for whom no word is “gratuitous”, consciously works with the continuities between the phonemic and semantic aspects of language. Brodsky invokes “hysterics” three times in “Footnote to a Poem” to mark the risky line between uncontrolled utterance and poetry, on which Tsvetaeva poises her voice with vertigo-defying equilibrium. In her repeated question, “Am I right, Rainer?”, Brodsky discerns the proximity of “hysterics beginning to boil up in the throat of the speaker”. In another instance, he remarks that a further repetition of the word “Bellevue” – the temporary address in “this world” from which she wrote to Rilke at his new address in “the next world” – would “verge on hysterics”, which is just what “Tsvetaeva cannot permit herself in ‘Novogodnee’, first of all as a poet . . . ”.

Rachel Polonsky is the author of English Literature and the Russian Aesthetic Renaissance, 1998. Her forthcoming book, Molotov's Magic Lantern, is a work of memoir, travel and cultural history.