Marina Tsvetaeva and her addressees. Continuation

(1892 - 1941) had a tragic fate. She lost her parents early, lived in exile for a long time, and upon returning to her homeland she witnessed the arrests of her relatives and friends: her sister, husband and eldest daughter (the youngest died of starvation during the Civil War). In recent years, she was abandoned by everyone and lived in exile. Unable to bear the hardships that befell her, the poetess committed suicide.

The hardships Marina Tsvetaeva experienced left their mark both on her work and on her character (which is naturally complex). Read about what Konstantin Balmont, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and other outstanding contemporaries thought about her in our material.

Along with Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva occupies given time a leading place among Russian poetesses. Her unique verse, complete inner freedom, lyrical strength, genuine sincerity and true femininity of mood are qualities that never change her.

Remembering my painful life in Moscow, I also remembered a whole series of her enchanting poems and the amazing poems of her seven-year-old girl Ali. These lines should be published, and, undoubtedly, they will find a response in everyone who feels poetry.

Remembering those already distant days in Moscow and not knowing where Marina Tsvetaeva is now and whether she is alive, I cannot help but say that these two poetic souls, mother and daughter, more like two sisters, presented the most touching vision complete detachment from reality and a free life, among dreams, - under such conditions under which others only groan, get sick and die. Soul Strength love for love and love for beauty seemed to free these two human birds from pain and melancholy. Hunger, cold, complete abandonment - and eternal chirping, and always a cheerful gait, and a smiling face. These were two ascetics, and, looking at them, I more than once again felt within myself a strength that had now completely extinguished.

On hungry days, Marina, if she had six potatoes, would bring me three. When I became seriously ill due to the inability to get strong shoes, she got hold of a few pinches of real tea from somewhere...

May Fate send her those radiant dreams and those victorious melodies that make up the spiritual essence of Marina Tsvetaeva and this divine child, Ali, who at the age of six and seven learned that wisdom can bloom with golden flowers.

Our first and last two-day meeting took place in June 1941 at Bolshaya Ordynka, 17, in the Ardovs’ apartment (first day) and in Maryina Roshcha at N.I. Khardzhiev’s (second and last day). It’s scary to think how Marina herself would have described these meetings if she had remained alive and I had died on August 31, 1941. It would have been a “fragrant legend,” as our grandfathers said. Maybe it would be a lament for 25 years of love that turned out to be in vain, but in any case it would be great. Now that she has returned to her Moscow as such a queen and forever, I just want to remember these Two days “without a legend.”

When in June 1941 I read M.Ts. a piece of the poem (the first draft), she said rather sarcastically: “You must have great courage to write about Harlequins, Columbines and Pierrot in 1941,” obviously believing that the poem was worldly artful stylization in the spirit of Benois and Somov, i.e., something with which she, perhaps, struggled in emigration, as with old-fashioned rubbish. Time has shown that this is not so.

Marina went crazy. She felt cramped within the framework of Poetry. She is dolphinlike (like a dolphin - editor's note), as Cleopatra says about Antony in Shakespeare. One element was not enough for her, and she retreated to another or others.

It was necessary to read into it. When I did this, I gasped at the abyss of purity and power that opened up to me. Nothing like this existed anywhere around. I'll shorten the discussion. I won’t blame myself if I say: minus Annensky and Blok and with some restrictions from Andrei Bely, the early Tsvetaeva was what all the other symbolists together wanted to be and could not be. Where their literature floundered helplessly in the world of far-fetched schemes and lifeless archaisms, Tsvetaeva easily rushed over the difficulties of real creativity, coping with its tasks playfully, with incomparable technical brilliance. In the spring of 1922, when she was already abroad, I bought her small book “Verst” in Moscow. I was immediately captivated by the lyrical power of Tsvetaeva’s form, deeply experienced, not weak-chested, sharply compressed and condensed, not out of breath on individual lines, covering entire sequences of stanzas with the development of their periods without breaking the rhythm. Some kind of closeness was hidden behind these features, perhaps the commonality of experienced influences or the sameness of incentives in the formation of character, the similar role of family and music, the homogeneity of starting points, goals and preferences.

I wrote a letter to Tsvetaeva in Prague, full of delight and surprise that I had missed her for so long and found out so late. She answered me. A correspondence began between us, which became especially frequent in the mid-twenties, when her “Craft” appeared and in Moscow the “Poem of the End”, “Poem of the Mountain” and “The Pied Piper”, large in scope and thought, bright and unusual in novelty, became known in the lists. We became friends.

Ilya Erenburg

Proud gait, high forehead, short hair cut into brackets, maybe a daring boy, maybe just a touchy young lady. While reading poetry, he hums the last word of the lines, ending with a tongue twister. The boy sings well, he loves wild songs - about Kaluzhskaya, about Stenka Razin, about his native debauchery. The young lady prefers the Countess of Noailles and the banners of the Vendee.

In one poem, Marina Tsvetaeva talks about her two grandmothers - about a simple, dear one, feeding her student sons, and about the other - about a Polish lady, a white-handed girl. Two bloods. One Marina. All she did was sing Stenka the Robber, and when she saw the seventeenth soldier in March, she closed the shutters and cried: “Oh, you are my lordly, my royal melancholy.”

Nadezhda Mandelstam

The case took place in Moscow in the summer of 1922. Mandelstam took me to Tsvetaeva in one of the alleys on Povarskaya - not far from Trubnikovsky, where I ran to look at Ostroukhov’s famous collection of icons. We knocked - the calls were canceled by the revolution. Marina opened it. She gasped when she saw Mandelstam, but barely extended her hand to me, looking not at me, but at him. With all her behavior she demonstrated that she doesn’t care about any wives. “Let's go to Alya,” she said. “You remember Alya...” And then, without looking at me, she added: “Wait here - Alya can’t stand strangers...”.

Mandelstam turned green with anger, but still went to Alya. The front door slammed shut and I was left in what looked like a hallway, a completely dark room littered with junk. As Mandelstam later told me, there used to be a dining room with an overhead light, but the lantern, unwashed since the revolution, did not let in a single ray, but only a grayish haze. Dust, dirt and ruin reigned in all the lordly apartments, but something witchy was added here - there were stuffed animals on the walls, old-style toys everywhere, which the Tsvetaeva sisters probably played with as children - all three in turn. There is also a large bed with a mattress, not covered with anything, and a wooden horse on a rocking chair. I imagined huge spiders, which I could not see in such darkness, dancing mice and all sorts of evil spirits. All this added to my malicious imagination...

The visit to Alya lasted less than a few minutes. Mandelstam jumped out of Ali, or rather, from the living room (there, as it turned out, there was another living room, where Marina did not deign to invite me), talked with the hostess in the hallway, where she thought of turning on the light... He refused to sit down, and they both stood, and I sat in the middle of the room on a creaky and shaky chair and unceremoniously looked at Marina. She obviously already felt that she had gone too far, and tried to start a conversation, but Mandelstam answered monosyllabically and coldly - in the most St. Petersburg voice. (Fool, he would have scolded Tsvetaeva in a stupidly frank voice, as he would have done in the thirties, when he was younger and cheerful, and everything would immediately fall into its own rut...). Marina managed to talk about the death of her second daughter, whom she had to send to an orphanage because she could not feed two. There were terrible details in the story that you don’t need to remember. She also took a stuffed cat or monkey from the wall and asked Mandelstam: “Remember?” It was a “cherished note,” but covered in dust. Mandelstam looked at the animal with horror, assured Marina that he remembered everything, and looked at me to get up. I didn't accept the sign.

The conversation did not work out, the acquaintance did not take place, and, taking advantage of the first pause, Mandelstam took me away.

Marina Tsvetaeva

“I refuse to live in the Bedlam of non-humans”

Marina Tsvetaeva

I. Brodsky, in one of his interviews, confidently called Marina Tsvetaeva the most important poet of the 20th century. And not among Russians, but among everyone. I will only add that she also had the most difficult, inhumanly difficult fate.

Those who know the slightest bit about Tsvetaeva’s biography, when asked what predetermined her fate with such a terrible ending? – most often called family: husband and children. Even her daughter, A.S. Efron sincerely thought that Tsvetaeva ruined her life twice because of her husband: the first time when she left to him to emigrate, the second time, when after behind him returned to her homeland.

For Tsvetaeva, her husband was everything: the object of her ardent passion (for a short time), a man whose moral qualities she could not help but admire (all her life), finally, the father of her children and a heavy cross, which she, as a truly Russian woman, humbly carried to the end .

On November 10, 1923, she shares her secret with her notebook, admits that her meeting with Efron in her distant youth, unfortunately, hastily led to a marriage “too early with too young.” This is, of course, true, but not the whole truth. And let’s not reproach Efron for his ordinariness, for the fact that he turned out to be a pathological loser, that he finally did not become the only support that could still make it easier for his wife one bear a heavy family cross. That's not the point. If he didn’t have these, and many other qualities we haven’t noted, their marriage would still be torture. However, in a short time anyone else would have become for Tsvetaeva not life with a loved one, but just “togetherness.”

She could not (by nature) love for a long time, but she could not live without love either. As soon as Tsvetaeva became interested in someone, she, figuratively speaking, would recklessly throw herself on his neck and retire with him to her own place, just for her alone. accessible world. However, quite quickly the necessary recharge such love dried up, she became “not interested,” and she began to suffocate again in loneliness. It was time for her to fall in love again. Moreover, more often than not, these “loves” of hers were pure “literature,” but that was enough for her. Carnal pleasures were never the main thing for Tsvetaeva. Determined everything - focus for love.

Motherhood did not bring her happiness either. She gave birth three times. But for the children she did not become a mother, but remained Marina. That was her name for both her daughter and her son. She adored Ariadna (Alya), her eldest daughter, as long as she could be proud of her: an amazingly attractive childish face with huge (“Seryozha’s”) eyes, early, not at all child-like intellectual development - in a word, until while she had the opportunity to boast his Alya, while she, like everyone else who came to them, never ceased to admire this amazing child. But as soon as Alya grew up and began to resemble other children, she immediately ceased to be the object of her mother’s adoration, mental alienation set in, followed by quarrels, scandals and an almost complete break. Tsvetaeva’s relationship with her son Georgy (Moore) went through almost the same evolution.

However, we will talk about all this later.

In October 1935, when Tsvetaeva, in a sense understandable to everyone, no longer had a family, she admitted in a letter to B. Pasternak: “I was myself (soul) only in my notebooks and on lonely roads - rare..."

Yes, Tsvetaeva was herself only on “lonely roads,” but poetry is not born on such roads (without people). Inspiration needs soil that can take root. And such “ground” for Tsvetaeva were people, quite specific ones, who somehow, even if only for a moment, attracted her attention. “I owe all my poems to the people I loved - who loved me - or didn't like" The 47-year-old Tsvetaeva entered this confession into her notebook in January 1940.

And one more thing. For any poet, imagination determines, so to speak, the creative area, the living space that falls into his energy field. For Tsvetaeva, imagination meant much more; it not only fueled her creativity, it bicycle through her life - from birth to death. It dictated Tsvetaeva’s actions, it gave her, like any major poet, knowledge future, almost mathematically precise. Meanwhile, the creative imagination was often powerless in the face of her choice, because in essence there were no options: there was one continuous duty- in front of the family, in front of those a choice that she once and for all made. He led her by the hand all her life and eventually brought her... into a noose.

Tsvetaeva never stopped being a poet for a second: both in the first happy years of marriage, and when another love came to her, and when she was starving in Moscow, devastated by the Bolsheviks, during the civil period, and when she was “pressed to the ground” by the alienation of loved ones and the outright hatred of many comrades. in the literary workshop.

If Marina did not write poetry, she still never for a moment forgot about her calling on this earth and therefore made literature from everything: from ordinary conversation, from business notes, from letters. No matter how she felt about her family, about her unbearable life, she lived only “by her creativity, it was the main thing in her life,” says one of the famous researchers creative life Tsvetaeva Anna Saakyants.

Everything could have been taken away from her, but she would have continued to live. And only one loss could deprive her of life - the opportunity to write. “I stopped writing and stopped being,” Tsvetaeva noted in her workbook in 1940. Yes, at that time poetry had already left her, and she was only patiently waiting in the wings to stop be.

Leaving for evacuation, Tsvetaeva told L.K. Chukovskaya: “If I can’t write there, I’ll commit suicide.” This, of course, is not an indication of the specific reason for the poet’s suicide, but knowledge that she fully realized: without poetry, life for Tsvetaeva is an unnecessary burden, without poetry it is no longer her. A like this Tsvetaeva should not live.

And yet, let’s not simplify: not only this fact in itself “hid her in death” (B. Pasternak). There were many reasons. This is her whole life. A such the end in a certain sense is a logical ending such her and her family's life.

Tsvetaeva knew her cross and bore it without complaint. She was no longer surprised that she “ by born of time,” she therefore could not truly get used to the people who lived in his time, nor with events that also took place in yours time. She was beyond everything. Therefore, her destiny is rejection. And the worst thing is that she clearly understood this.

Yes, she lived at all times, but within a narrow and extremely uncomfortable living space. And this led to another difficult-to-resolve contradiction: her soul as a poet contained the whole world, but was categorically not compatible with the life that surrounded her in real everyday life. In everyday life she felt outside her element, and therefore was forced to live like a “hunted animal.” It was from these “torments that defy reason” that the entire tragedy of Tsvetaeva’s worldview stemmed.

A. Sahakyants writes that “Marina Tsvetaeva, great poet, was, as it seems to us, created by nature as if from “another substance”: with her whole organism, with her whole human nature, she stretched away from earthly “dimensions” into a dimension and world (or worlds) - others, the existence of which she knew immutably... With In her early years I felt and knew what others could not feel and know. She knew that “poets are prophets,” and even in her early poems she predicted the fate of Osip Mandelstam, Sergei Efron, not to mention her own.”

Tsvetaeva herself in 1925 wrote about her life like this: “I live a home life, one that I love and hate, something between a cradle and a coffin, and I have never been either a baby or a dead person.”

It is stupid to argue where the poet ends and the cook begins. We won't do this. Moreover, by and large, no matter what you call the daily life of a married woman (even if she is a great poet), she still has nowhere to escape from this very life. She is doomed to live the way her own fate has destined for her: “whether it is voluntary bondage” or something else is not important. Tsvetaeva is a woman whom God marked, and this is how she lived her life. She could not do otherwise, because otherwise it was beyond duty.

One could support Victoria Schweitzer’s point of view that Marina lived her whole life “as a poet – among non-poets.” This is supposedly the essence of her life, her destiny. But, unfortunately, this will not give anything for understanding life exactly Tsvetaeva. After all, every poet lives his life among non-poets. And it's all the same his life. It is different from the life of any other poet who also lived his life among non-poets. Therefore, this topic reversal is unproductive.

The fact is that Tsvetaeva (unlike any other poet) was absolutely incompatible with any of her surroundings. Only one person was always allowed into her “universe” for a short time; at that moment she loved him (in her own way, of course, more often - literary), but with everyone else she was in a state of active mutual rejection.

Back in November 1919, Tsvetaeva shared with V.K. Zvyagintseva and A.S. Dorofeev’s astonishing sincerity confession: “I was pushed out of the circle of people, society. There is no living wall behind me, there is a rock: Fate... I have no age and no face... I am not afraid of old age, I am not afraid of being funny, I am not afraid of poverty - enmity - slander.” Unfortunately, it must be admitted that she already had almost everything that she was not afraid of, and more than that.

It was precisely as “Bedlam of non-humans” that Tsvetaeva perceived the entire human race. This is the root of her amazing fate. She, according to Pasternak, ended the last round of her life - in his opinion - in an extremely strange way: she came “from a very long way away then, at the beginning of the war, to hang herself in complete obscurity in a remote outback.” Let us forgive the poet such a superficial judgment: he expressed it in a letter in 1948 and was quite rightly afraid of censorship.

I. Brodsky very accurately noted that the tragedy of Tsvetaeva’s life is not from biography: “he was before" This predestination, fate, with the description of which we began the introductory essay to this book, was the voice from Above. He sounded in her soul, tuned her poetic strings, and she obediently followed him. Only he was always ahead. She lived in tense anticipation of the sound of this “voice”, and it really sounded every time before specific events of her life, that is, predetermined them. She had no control over her own life, although she knew what lay ahead.

Precisely because Tsvetaeva heard this “voice” well and actually knew her future, she wrote to her Czech friend Anna Teskova back in 1934: she should draw up a will, although apart from manuscripts, what can she bequeath. And a little further: “I would like not to be at all.” And having already taken a crazy step and returned to the USSR, Tsvetaeva wrote to V.A. on August 31, 1940. Merkuryeva: “I have no one to blame. And I don’t blame myself, because it was my destiny. Just – how will it end??”

Of course, not only suicide - this terrible finale of her life - was the essence of her fate. And it was not only the tragedy of people close to her (her husband and daughter) that led her to this fatal step. And, of course, not alienating people: she lived with him long years and got used to it as an inevitable reality.

Tsvetaeva’s whole life, which she perceived only as “obedience,” was woven into such a tight knot of problems that she did not have the strength to untangle or cut it. They were only long enough to tie a noose.

The first person to recognize a true poet in Tsvetaeva was Maximilian Voloshin, a friend of her youth. She reported this to Anna Teskova in October 1932. And a few years earlier, Tsvetaeva wrote to her how she shot in the top ten: “I know my worth: it is high for a connoisseur and a lover, zero for the rest.”

That’s right: the connoisseur and the lover have superlative degrees, while others have only disdainful condescension to talk about it.

Let's start with the lovers. S.Ya. Efron, her husband, believed that Marina was gifted “like the devil.” During her mother’s life, her daughter did not share her assessments of her work. But as soon as Ariadne gained freedom in her later years, she devoted all her remaining years to the memory of her mother-poet: she collected Tsvetaeva’s archive, systematized it, tried to publish what was possible in those years, and herself wrote “Memoirs of a Daughter.” She was more than cold towards the living Tsvetaeva; she fell in love only with the memory of her. I became wiser. And she was able to filter her everyday grievances, which is not given to everyone, through the cruel sieve of camps and exile. All garbage has been eliminated from memory. What remains is incorruptible, over which time has no power.

“You are an outrageously great poet,” Pasternak wrote to Tsvetaeva on June 14, 1924. He had long loved her poems. Immediately and for the rest of her life, she became his favorite poet. He was so bewitched by the energy of Tsvetaev’s poetry that Pasternak somehow, imperceptibly for himself, crossed the line that separates poems from their author. He seriously fell in love with her as a woman. She was far away, inaccessible. The more he inflamed his imagination. When we saw each other in 1935, the storm quickly gave way to calm. In addition, Pasternak got married in 1931 and was in love with his wife. With Tsvetaeva, alas, love did not work out. But Marina was going to name her son Boris. But looking into her husband’s extinguished eyes, she agreed with him: let him be George.

Tsvetaeva really liked Akhmatova’s poems. Always. It was she who called Akhmatova “Anna of All Rus'” - the highest praise. Couldn't have said it better. I always dreamed of meeting you. After Tsvetaeva returned from emigration, Pasternak arranged a meeting between the two great poetesses. We met in Moscow, on Ordynka, in the Ardovs’ apartment, where Akhmatova lived at that time (June 1941). We met older women, crushed by life. There was no friendship. It turned out, as Tsvetaeva liked to say, “a non-meeting.” Some emotional gears of their characters did not mesh with each other. And yet, Tsvetaeva, according to the memoirs of literary historian Yu.G. Oksman, “in her confusion,” was very drawn to Anna Andreevna.

Joseph Brodsky rated Tsvetaeva’s work extremely highly. It was with his statement that we began this essay. In one of the interviews, which he gave often and willingly in the last years of his life, Brodsky stated (without forgetting himself) that “Tsvetaeva is the only poet with whom he refuses to compete.”

Only another poet, moreover, commensurate in talent, and therefore devoid of Salierian complexes, can penetrate into the poet’s creative laboratory. Therefore, Brodsky's assessments can be completely trusted. They are sincere. It was he who felt that Tsvetaeva the poet had been creating all her life with all her creativity above oneself"variant of the Last Judgment." She always has

against earthly truth.

And therefore all her poetry is a naked electrical wire that cannot be touched: it will kill!

During her lifetime, Tsvetaeva was the most “unnoticed” (Victoria Schweitzer) Russian poet. We noted it later. They exalted them worthily too - later. And they finally realized that regardless of the attitude towards her work, she will still forever remain in Russian poetry “the most touching, the most painful figure that hurts us all.” These are the words of Yu. Karabchievsky, whom we often mentioned in the essay about Mayakovsky.

And the descendants also understood: it is useless to compare Tsvetaeva with anyone or, as Brodsky put it, to “compete” with her. You cannot compete with infinity: her poetry is “immeasurable,” as Irma Kudrova accurately noted. But the nature of this immensity cannot be unraveled in principle, for each genius has his own individual immensity, the “dimension” of which even he himself does not know.

Now a few words about the opinion of those who were indifferent to her work or did not recognize it at all.

Famous Russian philosopher F.A. Stepun, expelled from the USSR in 1922 on the memorable “philosophical ship,” met Tsvetaeva in exile. He did not write poetry himself. Tsvetaev’s lines didn’t really warm his soul either. But I noticed specific manifestations of her talent immediately. They were striking: “There was, however,” he wrote, “in Marina’s manner of feeling, thinking and speaking something not entirely pleasant: a certain ineradicable egocentrism of her mental movements. And, without telling anything about her life, she always talked about herself... Let’s not judge Tsvetaeva too harshly for this. Real, natural poets, of whom there are fewer and fewer, live according to their own laws, which are not always clear to us, and sometimes even unpleasant.”

Yes, Tsvetaeva lived by “her own laws.” From the outside it could look like anything: she didn’t care. Her regular detractor in exile, literary critic G. Adamovich, once noted that Tsvetaeva constantly lived, as sick people live, “with a temperature of 390.” This is how he saw it from his sixth place.

Ivan Bunin did not find anything worthy of attention in Tsvetaeva’s poetry. His own talent fell well within the framework of the “norm” that everyone understood. And he demanded the same from other “talents.” And if they could not fit into a given frame, then they fell beyond the limits of his acceptance. In the eyes of our first Nobel laureate in literature, not only Tsvetaeva, but many others, received such an assessment. Bunin rarely seated anyone on the “literary sofa” next to him. So don't let her be offended. Moreover, she never claimed the admiration of snobs.

In relation to Tsvetaeva, Bunin found himself in the same company with the leaders of Soviet proletarian literature: M. Gorky and V. Mayakovsky.

As we see, she actually lived, as it were, outside of people. She was rejected even by those whom she allowed herself to love - Mayakovsky, for example.

On October 13, 1927, Pasternak sent a letter to Gorky. In it, he highly appreciated Tsvetaeva’s talent. In the response letter I read: “I find it difficult to agree with your high assessment of Marina Tsvetaeva’s talent. Her talent seems to me loud, even hysterical, she has poor command of words and she, like A. Bely, has command of words. She knows the Russian language poorly and treats it inhumanely, distorting it in every possible way...”

Pasternak did not spoil relations with Gorky because of Tsvetaeva. He only coquettishly wrote to him that he was not inferior to either M. Tsvetaev or A. Bely to him, Gorky. And then the words, quite pleasant to the proletarian humanist: “... just as I will never yield you to anyone.” This is politeness. The main thing is that Pasternak “yielded” to Tsvetaev Gorky. The point is this. The rest is words.

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was an attractive woman. The figure, with a good (for a woman) height of 163 cm, was slender, with a straight (“proud”) posture. The face is thin and thin. Aquiline nose. The hair is thick, straight, and has begun to turn gray early. But the main thing is the eyes: “green, grape-colored, bordered by brown eyelids.” This is how Alya remembered them. Tsvetaeva suffered from very severe myopia, but never wore glasses. Perhaps for this very reason she always looked past her interlocutor and never into his eyes. This manner of communication in itself immediately set anyone against her: who would like the fact that she “doesn’t see” you and looks at you as if through a transparent object.

The rare, generally speaking, combination of arrogance and confusion that I. G. Erenburg noticed in the young Tsvetaeva also becomes clear. Roman Gul adds: “As a woman, Tsvetaeva was not pretty.” This, of course, is just for his taste. And he continues: there was something masculine and courageous about her. She walked with wide, sweeping steps, and on her feet there was a clear confirmation of her poor condition - worn out half-men's shoes.

At the age of 17, Marina started smoking and did not stop until the end of her life. She smoked cheap cigarettes and too much, which is why her fingers were constantly yellow and smoky.

I didn’t finish high school - the routine began to irritate me. She openly and demonstratively despised the generally accepted. Probably for this reason, as a gypsy, she wore numerous cheap rings that did not suit her taste.

She was taciturn. She spoke as she wrote letters - not in words, but in ready-made formulas. But once she got going, she was unstoppable. Then those who did not really sympathize with her tried to hide, so as not to get caught in her tongue, because Tsvetaeva was obviously smarter and “sharper” than any of her opponents.

But this, I repeat, did not happen often: only when her own principles were stepped on. If Tsvetaeva was “normal,” that is, calm and trusting, she immediately turned from an aggressive tigress into an affectionate and trusting kitten. “I approach everyone from the street. – She wrote to her husband on October 25, 1917. – And now the street takes revenge. Otherwise I don’t know how, otherwise I have to leave the room. Everyone is a hypocrite, I'm alone I can not».

On July 21, 1916, Tsvetaeva spoke about another facet of her nature in a letter to P. Yurkevich: “Now I know and tell everyone: I don’t need love, I need understanding. For me this is love... I can only love a person who, on a spring day, would prefer a birch tree to me. - This is my formula.

... My whole life is a romance with my own soul, with the city where I live, with a tree on the edge of the road, with the air.” All this, of course, is pure “essay on a given topic”: as realistic as it is imaginary. Tsvetaeva was everything and loved in every way. And she had affairs with birches, and with the air, and with women, and with completely healthy men, devoid of any romanticism. Everything was.

... In 1914, Marina became seriously interested in her husband’s brother, who was sick with tuberculosis, so strongly and seriously that with the outbreak of war, Sergei Efron decided to flee this humiliation to the front so as not to be “in the path of her life.” The death of Peter Efron saves the situation.

Soon Tsvetaeva, visiting A. Gertsyk, meets Sofia Parnok (Russian Sappho) and falls recklessly in love with her. Parnok wrote poetry herself, but she left her mark on Russian poetry not for this reason - for a long time she was “Tsvetaeva’s beloved.” Marina felt bisexual since childhood and was attracted to women. She fell in love with the greenhouse in a completely earthly way. As a result of this " strange love» an unusual cycle was born love lyrics Marina Tsvetaeva.

S. Efron was in despair. At that time he served as a “brother of mercy” on the ambulance train and, of course, knew everything. Marina never hid anything from him. He was powerless to do anything: he still loved Marina too passionately to leave her, and was too weak to take such a decisive step. And he understood this perfectly. But Marina was a strong person, he was not able to influence her. Fortunately for S. Efron, the affair with Parnok faded away on its own by the beginning of 1916.

Marina, as we see, could not live without love. And she didn’t live. For her, romance novels were necessary; they gave impetus to her poetic imagination. In fact, she most often did not need closeness; affection with words was quite enough for her. She herself said that for those who were dear to her at the moment, she would like to become “not a mistress - a favorite.” It was much more important for her that they loved not her as a woman, but her world. Marina writes in one of her letters: “Love world in me, not me in the world."

And yet, if He did not share her understanding of love, she most often did not argue: she gave in. Moreover, she did not consider it cheating on her husband. The main thing for her is that she can be with the object of her love interview. Almost all of her chosen ones treated such a perception of love without understanding. Therefore, with her “conversation” she quickly overfed the one who was close to her at the moment, and he tried to sneak away at the first opportunity. Or she threw him out of her life, like throwing away disposable tableware.

We will not remember everyone she loved (each in his own way). For what? Such accounting will not clarify anything. Let us briefly touch upon only one of her passionate interests in 1923, completely feminine, without any “Tsvetaev things”, her love for Konstantin Rodzevich, “a crafty and deceitful,” as V. Schweitzer wrote, “a short man with rosy cheeks.”

K. Rodzevich was the son of a general tsarist army, fought in civilian life, first for the Reds, then, having been captured by the Whites, he quickly changed his color. The Reds (in absentia) sentenced him to death, but he managed to escape to Turkey, where he met S. Efron and moved with him to Prague. He, like Efron, subsequently began working for the NKVD, but turned out to be not as radiantly enthusiastic as his friend, and did not return to the USSR. That's why he lived to old age.

Marina could not cool down during the three autumn months of 1923. The main (for all of us) result of this frenzied passion was Tsvetaeva’s lyric masterpieces: “The Poem of the Mountain” and “The Poem of the End.”

What can I say? S. Efron fell in love with a girl, almost a girl. K. Rodzevich is a young woman who suffered a lot and did not quench her irrepressible passion. She, as always, did not hide anything from her husband. Yes, that would be impossible. The affair with Rodzevich not only tormented Tsvetaeva, dried her out, he tore her to pieces. “I am without tomorrow,” Tsvetaeva wrote on January 10, 1924 to another subject of her short-lived passion, journalist A.V. Bachrach.

S. Efron, although he had already gotten used to these Marina love twists, was in complete confusion, because he saw: this time - seriously, to the very edge, she had lost her head from her passion.

But what to do to him, how to proceed? After all, he can do absolutely nothing. If Marina throws herself headlong into the water, he carefully tests her to see if she is cold. If she acts, then he reasons. He should give a damn about everything and go wherever his eyes go, but he undresses his soul in front of Maximilian Voloshin:

“Marina,” writes Efron, “is a person of passions... Surrendering herself headlong to her hurricane has become a necessity for her, the air of her life. Who is the causative agent of this hurricane now does not matter. Almost always... or rather, everything is always built on self-deception. The man is invented and the hurricane begins. If the insignificance and limitations of the hurricane’s causative agent are revealed soon, Marina indulges in hurricane-like despair... Today there is despair, tomorrow there is delight, love, giving of oneself wholeheartedly, and a day later there is despair again... Yesterday’s pathogens are today wittily and evilly ridiculed (almost always rightly so). Everything is entered into a book, everything is calm, mathematically cast into a formula.”

He had, of course, known this feature of hers for a long time - being in a state of constant love for someone. He himself, as the object of her female passion, has long and irrevocably become a thing of the past. And new hobbies replaced each other with kaleidoscopic speed. Efron, perhaps, would not have attached importance to them, would not have noticed them (it is easier for a weak person), but this time Marina fell in love for real, not as a poet, but as a woman.

S. Efron decides to leave the family. I told Marina about this. But he didn’t leave, but only “forced a discussion” on her on this topic. She is against the breakup. She doesn’t love her anymore, but it will be unbearable for her if “her Seryozha” ends up somewhere alone. They could no longer live together as human beings: irritation over every trifle, scandals, bitterness. And yet, Tsvetaeva cannot remove these chains: they are crowned, and she is obliged to carry her cross further.

“She is sure,” Efron continues his confessional letter to Voloshin, “that now, having sacrificially given up her happiness, she is forging mine... Everything around me is poisoned... I loved her so strongly and straightforwardly and unshakably that I was only afraid of her death...”

And one more quote from this letter: “Marina and I continue to live together. She calmed down. And I put aside (? – S.R.) a radical solution to our problem. When there is no way out (? – S.R.) – time is the best teacher.”

May these words be forgiven, but still I can’t get rid of the thought that Tsvetaeva was mistaken in the main thing - her husband is not a knight, not a support. And also because thoughts of leaving only visited him. If Marina had planned something like this, she would have carried out her plans, there is no doubt about it. However (it’s not a sin to repeat): marriage for her is a sacred matter, it is higher than love.

Efron carried this letter with him for a whole month. I didn’t dare send everything. Then he sent it. It had not yet reached the addressee when Marina calmed down. And he's right there I forgot everything.

Tsvetaeva’s virtual love for two of her great contemporaries, the poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Boris Pasternak, turned out to be a true epistolary masterpiece. The uncontrollable flow of written outpourings did not dry up throughout 1926. Sometimes it overwhelmed her soul so much that she could no longer distinguish between where the word ends and the “passionate beating of hearts” begins. One gets the complete impression that she, without ever hugging Pasternak, truly fell in love with him. He “melted the furnace,” and a flame ignited in their souls - it helped them live and create. Mentally, she surrendered herself to him with passion, and he loved her madly. But this, I repeat, was only an epistolary passion. But it was enough: thanks to this “Pasternak fire”, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote about 40 beautiful lyric poems.

From 1923 to 1931, they religiously fulfilled the “agreement” - “to live to see each other.” But, as always, this time the object of her transcendental passion turned out to be unreliable: Pasternak married Z.N. in 1931. Neuhaus. At first, Tsvetaeva was terribly jealous. But when they met in Paris in 1935, neither he nor she remembered any love.

This went on all my life, from youth until I was more than venerable. Tsvetaeva’s latest hobby is the poet A.A. Tarkovsky. Marina Ivanovna was 15 years older than him. She didn’t expect anything from this last outburst; it only showed her that she was still a poet. But very soon the inspiration completely left her, and she ceased... to be.

Tsvetaeva, however, was not only a person of impulse and passion, but also of action. Even love was necessary for her affairs, for creativity, she couldn’t live without it. Ariadne Ephron recalled that idleness and consumerism were organically disgusting to her mother, as well as “laxness, laziness and idle talk... She was a man of word, a man of action, a man of duty.” And he adds a little further: “Her talent for work ability and internal organization was equal to the poetic gift.”

Tsvetaeva seems to confirm her daughter’s words: “I have a debt... from my mother, who lived her whole life as decided: how I didn’t want to.” V. Bunina, the writer’s wife, wrote about this on October 24, 1933.

With such programming for ascetic work, for the fullest possible realization of the gift with which Heaven had marked her, it was almost impossible to depend even to the smallest extent on people, to be connected with them by any extraneous matters that distracted her from the main thing. Therefore, almost from childhood, Marina separated herself from those around her, consciously opposing herself to people, because they simply interfered with her. Even for meaningless communication, she didn’t need just people; she needed only one person at any given moment. The rest seemed to not exist at all. People, of course, did not accept such an attitude towards themselves. They perceived it as dismissive arrogance and distanced themselves from her.

This is exactly what happened with Russian literary emigration. It itself very quickly stratified: mediocrities began to cluster together, and the leaders fiercely pecked at each other.

Tsvetaeva’s enemies appeared earlier than others, as if out of thin air, without any visible effort on her part. She has not yet shown herself to them in any way, but they have already given her their “black mark”. As we have already noted, G. Adamovich became her constant opponent, and by no means a benevolent one. But Tsvetaeva’s worst enemy in exile is Zinaida Gippius. The woman is more intelligent than talented, always angry and never benevolent; in Tsvetaeva she did not tolerate talent that was incomparable with her own. Because she herself composed and knew how to compare.

We will give evidence from only two eyewitnesses of how Tsvetaeva knew how to turn everyone against herself.

S.N. Andronikova, to whom Marina treated very warmly, recalled: “I immediately fell in love with her. I must say, few people loved her. She somehow irritated people, even well-meaning ones...

Tsvetaeva was smart, very smart, endlessly... She spoke very well, lively, had a lot of humor, laughed a lot. She knew how to coin a phrase. I don't understand how people could not like her. And so it was. Emigrant circles hated her independence, non-negative attitude towards the revolution and love for Russia..."

These words complement the memories of M.L. Slonim, a critic and publisher who was in love with Tsvetaeva’s work and published a lot of her works written in the West. She treated him condescendingly and even with irony, which was not always friendly. So, Mark Slonim:

“Marina Ivanovna’s life was tragic, and a significant role in this was played by her loneliness and the impossibility of long-term connections with people... She was too demanding, too “thrown” by her friends if they did not please her in some way... And some of her acquaintances who were ready for her to everything, somehow didn’t notice - and, perhaps, without knowing it, humiliated and scared away - with coldness and contemptuous indifference...” The author clearly means himself.

Of course, such a humanly understandable apostasy weighed on her. Intellectually, she understood perfectly well that without friends, without income, with a loser husband who was unable to somehow alleviate the difficult and humiliating (essentially impoverished) life of the family, especially in an environment of unfriendly emigration, and even with two children in her arms, she simply won’t survive. But she could not reshape herself even in such circumstances. If Tsvetaeva thought that someone on whom she depended in any way looked at her not this way, then she preferred to go to her kennel hungry than to accept completely sincere help from him. Here, as they say, what you have is what you are rich...

“I have no friends in Paris and never will... I have finally moved into a notebook,” she writes with bitter irony on January 15, 1927 to Anna Teskova. And a few months later she returns once again to this not very pleasant thought for her: “In Paris, with rare, personal exceptions, they hate me, write all sorts of nasty things, bypass me in every possible way, etc... Participation in Versts, my husband is a Eurasian and, here As a result, I have Komsomol poems and I am in the pay of the Bolsheviks.”

On April 4, 1933, in a letter to Yuri Ivask, Tsvetaeva herself, with her characteristic frankness, better than any memoirist, demonstrates the underside of the Russian emigration. Let's read excerpts from this letter:

“In emigration, they first print me (in the heat of the moment), then, having come to their senses, they are removed from circulation, sensing something that is not their own: there!... Then “Versts” (collaboration with the Eurasians), and the final expulsion of me from everywhere except the Socialist-Revolutionary Will of Russia... But the Will of Russia - now it’s over... You can’t imagine the poverty in which I live, but I have no means of living except writing. My husband is sick and cannot work. The daughter of the knitted cap earns 5 francs<анков>per day, four of us (I have an 8-year-old son, Georgiy) live on them, i.e. We're just slowly dying of hunger. In Russia I lived like this only from 1918 to 1920, then the Bolsheviks themselves they gave me rations...

So, here I am - without a reader, in Russia - without books.

... You might want to say that my hatred of the Bolsheviks is for her (emigration. - S.R.) weak? I will answer this: other hatred, foreign. Expats hate<отому>h<то>they took away their estates, I hate that Boris Pasternak may (and it was) not be allowed into his beloved Marburg, and me into my native Moscow.”

Further in the same letter, Marina describes such a characteristic scene at a meeting of the Young Russians: “Report of the former editor and employee of V.<оли>Russia (Jew) M. Slonim: Hitler and Stalin. After report - the phenomenon of the Young Russians in full force. They stand with their arms crossed over their chest. Towards the end of the debate, I’m moving towards the exit (I live in the countryside and am connected by train) - because I’m standing in the thick of it. A respectful whisper: “Tsvetaeva”...

From the stage Slonim: “As for G<итлера>and Jews...” One of the Young Russians... to the whole hall: “I see! One of the Jews myself!” Me, clearly and separately: “Ham-lo!” (Whisper, they don’t understand). Me: “Ham-lo!” Several threatening gestures. Me: “Don’t understand? Those who say Jew instead of Jew and interrupt the speaker are boors...” Then I leave. (I speak to everyone in their language!).”

And he concludes: “No, my dear, neither with these, nor with these, nor with the third, nor with the hundredth, and not only with “politicians,” but I with writers, too,” Not, with no one, alone, all my life, without books, without readers, without friends - without a circle, without an environment, without any protection, involvement, worse than a dog, but -

But that’s all.”

And the final touch to this impromptu portrait. According to the kindest Adrian Makedonov, whom I knew well for more than 20 years, Tsvetaeva never kept pace with anyone. And at the same time, she physically could not make any compromises. Even at the cost of imaginary relief for the fate of her arrested husband and daughter, she did not write a single fawning poetic line to Stalin.

And others wrote...

Here are the main milestones (they still need to be identified) in the life path of this amazing woman.

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in 1892 in Moscow, on Trekhprudny Lane. In 1914, in a letter to the philosopher Vasily Rozanov, she wrote about her parents like this: “The lives walked side by side, without merging. But they loved each other very much...” And in 1926, already in exile, answering a writer’s questionnaire, Tsvetaeva noted: “The dominant influence is the mother (music, nature, poetry, Germany). Passion for heroism. One against all. Heroica. More hidden, but no less strong, the influence of the father (passion for work, lack of careerism, simplicity, detachment) ... The air at home is not bourgeois, not intellectual - knightly.”

Father, Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a professor at Moscow University, glorified his name with his selfless work in organizing the Museum of Fine Arts named after Alexander III in Moscow. Nowadays it is the world-famous Museum of Fine Arts. A.S. Pushkin. Was married twice. Second wife, M.A. Maine, a pianist, gave birth to two daughters: Marina and Anastasia. Life Paths The sisters separated quite early, although the spiritual closeness between them always remained.

In the spring of 1911, Marina arrived in Koktebel, to Voloshin’s house. There she met a 17-year-old boy, Sergei Efron. Just six months later, on January 27, 1912, they got married, although, despite prejudices, they began to live together much earlier. On September 5, 1912, Ariadna (Alya) was born, and five years later, at the height of the February democratic collapse of 1917, Tsvetaeva gave birth to another daughter, Irina, on April 13.

A few months later, Tsvetaeva and her two girls were left alone in hungry, ruined Moscow. Her poor husband was looking for truth and justice at that time together with the whites and ended up first in Turkey, then in the Czech Republic.

Tsvetaeva wrote amazing lines in 1918, after reading which you feel that time and that life with your skin. These four lines capture the essence of the nightmare of the civil war:

The red-haired Tatar seeks freedom,

The altar and throne are level with ashes,

Over the ashes - a table roar

Runaway soldiers and unfaithful wives.

This civil massacre was resisted as best she could by a young woman, absolutely unadapted to life, who could do nothing but write, and with two constantly hungry children in her arms. Immediately came hopeless beggary. Tsvetaeva sold everything that could be sold. I used to travel around in the heated cars to the Tambov province to exchange some household “rags” for food.

For a pittance salary she even went to serve in the Bolshevik Commissariat for Nationalities. She was assigned to the position of “assistant informant.” Lasted about six months. “I couldn’t do it anymore. “It’s better to hang yourself.”

But if you do live, then how? There are no funds at all. Since the fall of 1918, Marina eats only what compassionate friends bring into the house. She took it not as alms, but as a donation for the future. This comes from my father’s “museum philosophy.” I didn’t despair. This fragile woman’s supply of vitality seemed to be inexhaustible. Even such She managed to turn her life into literature: she kept detailed notes in a workbook and even composed.

Exactly at civil war Tsvetaeva defined her life credo:

If the soul was born winged -

Wha? her mansion - so what? her huts!

What is Genghis Khan to her and what is the Horde!

I have two enemies in the world,

Two twins, inextricably fused:

Hunger for the hungry and satiety for the well-fed!

Ariadne was only 8-9 years old at that time. And she kept her diary and left notes there that were completely unchildish: “The main vices of my childhood were lies and theft.” It’s hard to say what kind of “lie” it is. And Tsvetaeva herself helped with the “theft.” She admitted later that it was not begging that helped her survive the civilian famine, but simple theft. “Tsvetaeva,” writes Victoria Schweitzer, “had her own special attitude to the concepts of good and evil, to what is permissible and what is not. It was impossible for her to ask, to let her feel the entire abyss of her poverty and despair. This was immoral because it put the one you asked in the intolerable position of giving; she believed that at such a time, wealth and satiety should oppress those who have them. It was much easier to take - both for yourself and for the one from whom you take (steal. - S.R.). Tsvetaeva did not consider this immoral.”

It is clear that such a heap of “explanatory philosophy” is nothing more than the reasoning of Schweitzer herself, speaking in this situation not as a researcher, but as a lawyer. For what? After all, it is crystal clear that such an excuse following There are always pure lies. It was not because Tsvetaeva stole food from her friends, and they delicately averted their eyes to the side, that she spared their proud pride. Everything is much simpler and more prosaic: it was unbearable for her to return to her poor house empty-handed and look into the eyes of her daughters, mad with hunger. Besides, she herself was barely holding on, and she simply had to survive. There was no other way out. If it weren’t for the girls, perhaps she would have killed herself back in 1919...

It is not Tsvetaeva’s fault that in her homeland, before her eyes, all-Russian robbery took place. Marina’s goal is almost an instinct: to save the children. By any means. And she didn’t choose these paths. She acted. That's how she was.

My business is treason, my name is Marina,

I am the mortal foam of the sea.

Two words about the fate of the unfortunate two-year-old Irina. In the hungry year of 1919, when Tsvetaeva simply no longer had the strength to get at least some food for her daughters, she, on someone’s advice, gave them to the Kuntsevo orphanage. A few weeks later, in a state of extreme physical exhaustion, she is forced to take the seriously ill Alya home. I went out. Irina died on February 2, 1920 in a shelter from exhaustion. Reporting the death of her daughter, she gives hard-to-imagine advice to her husband: “Do as I do: DO NOT remember” *. Such advice from the mother can be understood only in one case: Tsvetaeva deliberately put armor on her soul, because physical strength already there was none, but the strength of spirit was still glimmering and it had to be preserved in the name of Ali’s life.

And yet, the wound from this death remained with Tsvetaeva for the rest of her life. She could not forgive herself for losing her daughter and for not going to her funeral (she didn’t have the strength). At first, however, she shifted all the blame for this tragedy onto her husband’s sisters.

And what is also striking, perhaps even more than the personal grief Tsvetaeva experienced, is that in This time she writes. He writes a lot. And the poems are wonderful. So all my life: everyday life, poverty, hostility of the environment and... love, sacrifice, poetry. Tsvetaeva could not live without such a combination of the incongruous. I couldn't write.

She wrote a lot, despite the “circumstances.” Despite the circumstances. They printed little. And she continued to write.

... Tsvetaeva came to poetry at the very height of the “Silver Age”, when the names of A. Blok and V. Bryusov were already shining. Vyach. Ivanov, A. Bely and others. Marina published her first book of poems, “Evening Album,” with her own money in October 1910. It included works by a 15-17-year-old girl. Already in this first collection, the poems in which were naive and “very weak,” Anna Sahakyants saw a constant line of Tsvetaeva’s poetry in the future - an irreconcilable conflict between everyday life and being. According to another famous researcher of her work, Victoria Schweitzer, with these poems Tsvetaeva got sick like the mumps. Although this very first collection of Tsvetaeva was liked by V. Bryusov, N. Gumilyov and M. Shaginyan.

Two months later, in January 1912, Tsvetaeva released her second collection, “The Magic Lantern,” which also did not become an event. In February 1913, Marina selected the 50 best, to her taste, poems from the first two collections and published a third book of poems under the ingenuous title “From Two Books.”

As a poetess, Tsvetaeva was in the shadow of the famous names of those years for almost 10 years. Her very first book, which made people talk about her as a new, unusually strong phenomenon in Russian poetry, was the collection “Versts”. It was published in 1921 almost immediately after the start of the NEP, in a private publishing house in Moscow. It included only 35 poems written by Tsvetaeva from January 1917 to December 1920, i.e. during the years of transcendental national and political impatience.

It was from this collection, as all researchers of her work are unanimous, that the Tsvetaeva we all know and love was born.

We have already mentioned that in the first years of emigration, Tsvetaeva was published willingly, although more often in periodicals. And yet, in 1923 alone, two of her collections were published in Berlin: “Craft”, then “Psyche”. In 1924, another collection “Cedar” was published in Prague. There, in the Czech Republic, thanks to the efforts of M.L. Slonim, the magazine “Will of Russia” published such wonderful poems by Tsvetaeva as “The Pied Piper”, “Attempt of the Room”, “Poem of the Staircase”, “Poem of the Air”, as well as prose about R.M. Rilke, the article “The Poet and Time” and many other smaller works.

VII. Marina Pretender was already in active correspondence with Yaroslavl, where the Sandomierz governor and his daughter recognized him without hesitation. Like his predecessor, he addressed the queen with very tender messages, and in Sambir, to the governor’s wife, with words of consolation and encouragement.

TSVETAEVA MARINA IVANOVNA (born in 1892 - died in 1941) Outstanding Russian poetess, author of lyrical prose, essays about A. S. Pushkin and memoirs about A. Bely, V. Ya. Bryusov, M. A. Voloshin, B.L. Pasternak and other poets. On an autumn day in 1910, from the gate of a small house near