Marina Tsvetaeva Essay - UniversalEssays

Custom Writing Services

This sample Marina Tsvetaeva Essay is published for informational purposes only. Free essays and research papers, are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a high quality essay at affordable price please use our custom essay writing service.

Along with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva is included in Russia’s ”poetic quartet,” a group of important authors whose works reflect the changing values in Russia during the early decades of the twentieth century. Tsvetaeva’s central interest as a poet was language, and the stylistic innovations displayed in her work are considered a unique contribution to Russian literature.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

A Childhood of Privilege and Poetry

Marina Ivanova Tsvetaeva (also transliterated as Tsvetayeva, Cve-taeva, and Zwetaewa) was born in Moscow to art history professor Ivan Tsvetayev and concert pianist Mariya Meyn Tsvetayeva. Tsvetaeva grew up in Moscow in an upper-middle-class family distinguished for its artistic and scholarly pursuits. Her father was the founder of the Museum of Fine Arts, and her talented and accomplished mother encouraged Marina to follow a musical career. Attending schools in Switzerland, Germany, and at the Sorbonne in Paris, Tsvetaeva preferred writing poetry.

Two Books, Marriage, and Several Affairs

In 1910, when Tsvetaeva was eighteen years of age, her first collection, EveningAlbum, was privately published. This volume received unexpected attention when it was reviewed by the prominent critic Max Voloshin and the poets Nikolay Gumilyov and Valery Bryusov, all of whom wrote favorably of Tsvetaeva’s work. In 1911, Tsvetaeva published a second collection of poetry, The Magic Lantern, and the following year was married to Sergey Efron. Throughout the marriage Tsvetaeva pursued romantic attachments with other poets, following a pattern of infatuation and disillusionment she had established in adolescence.

Russian Civil War

During the Russian civil war, which lasted from 1918 to 1921, Tsvetaeva lived in poverty in Moscow while her husband fought in the Crimea as an officer of the czarist White Army. The Russian civil war was complicated by the presence of several opposing military factions, but had as its primary antagonists the Bolshevik, or Red, Army—which had a broad mandate following the 1917 Workers’ Revolution—and the czarist White Army, desperately struggling to reestablish the old political order. Tsvetaeva wrote prolifically during this time, composing poetry, essays, memoirs, and dramas. But the anti-Bolshevik sentiments pervading many of these works prevented their publication. During a famine in 1919, the younger of her two children died of starvation, and in 1922 (the year after the Bolsheviks won the civil war and the year their leader, Vladimir Lenin, died), Tsvetaeva immigrated with her surviving child, Ariadna, to Germany. There—after five years of wartime separation—she rejoined Efron.

Adamant Pro-Soviet Stance

While Tsvetaeva’s family was living in Berlin, and later Prague, where her son, Georgy, was born in 1925, she began to publish the works she had written during the previous decade. These found favor with Russian critics and readers living in exile. Moving to Paris, Tsvetaeva continued to write poetry, but her changing politics brought her into disfavor. Tsvetaeva’s reputation among other emigre writers began to deteriorate—largely because of her refusal to adopt the militant anti-Soviet posture of many emigres, and her husband’s pro-Soviet activities (Efron had at this point changed sides so completely as to have become a Communist agent).

Stalinist Terror, World War II, and Suicide

Efon and daughter Ariadna returned to Russia in 1937. Tsvetaeva, who was being treated with indifference by Russian expatriates in Paris, followed in 1939 with son Georgy. At that time, artists and intellectuals, especially those with ties to the West, were at risk under the extremist policies of Joseph Stalin—which included paranoid and, even worse, deeply arbitrary torture and execution of suspected enemies of the state. The family was reunited only briefly in Moscow before Efron and Ariadna were both arrested and Efron was charged with anti-Soviet espionage.

When German troops attacked Moscow in 1941, breaking the Nonagression Pact that Stalin had secretly signed with German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler at the outset of World War II (1939-1945), Tsvetaeva and Georgy were evacuated to the village of Elabuga in the Tatar Republic. Despondent over the arrest and possible execution of her husband and daughter, denied the right to publish, and unable to support herself and her son, Tsvetaeva took her own life.

Works in Literary Context

Russian Influences

Tsvetaeva’s writings were significantly influenced by those of her contemporaries and by the events surrounding the Russian Revolution. Yet she remained largely independent of the numerous literary and political movements that flourished during this tumultuous era, perhaps because of the strength of the impressions left on her by her eclectic reading interests. Evening Album (1910), for example, bears the strong influence of the young Tsvetaeva’s readings, which included much second-rate poetry and prose. In Mile-posts: Poems: Issue I (1916), she is inspired by the architectural and religious heritage of Moscow, perhaps because of the work of Karolina Karlovna Pavlova, one of her favorite poets.

Tsvetaeva’s numerous affairs, which often did not involve sex, were also apparent influences; she considered these essentially spiritual in nature, and they are credited with providing the highly charged emotion of her poetry, as well as inspiring poems dedicated to Osip Mandelstam, Aleksandr Blok, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Tsvetaeva’s lyric dialogues with Blok, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova in Mileposts center on the themes of Russia, poetry, and love. While she based her poems predominantly upon personal experience, Tsvetaeva also explored with increased detachment such philosophical themes as the nature of time and space.

Russian Folk Style

Tsvetaeva developed poetic traits early on that are largely preserved in her subsequent collections. Both volumes of Mileposts are marked by an extraordinary power and directness of language. The ideas of anxiety, restlessness, and elemental power are emphasized with language, as Tsvetaeva draws on common regional speech and refers to folksongs and Russian poetry of the eighteenth century. Her interest in language shows through the wordplay and linguistic experiments of her verse. Scholars have also noted the intensity and energy of verbs in her poems and her fondness for dark colors. On the level of imagery, archetypal and traditional symbolism prevail, for example, in her use of night, wind, open spaces, and birds.

In the early 1920s, Tsvetaeva experimented with narrative verse. She adapted traditional Russian folktales in The King-Maiden (1922) and The Swain (1924). In the volume After Russia (1928) she fused her early romantic style with more regional diction. As the 1930s progressed, Tsvetaeva devoted more energy to prose than to poetry. In such memoirs as ”Captive Spirit” and ”My Pushkin” (both published in Contemporary Annals in 1934 and 1937, respectively), she recorded her impressions of friends and poets. In a prose style characterized by stream-of-consciousness narrative technique and poetic language, Tsvetaeva expressed her views on literary creation and criticism in such essays as ”Art in the Light of Conscience” and ”A Poet on Criticism” (both published in Contemporary Annals in 1932).

Works in Critical Context

After her death Marina Tsvetaeva and her work were virtually forgotten. For many years her name was unmentionable in the Soviet Union. Then her posthumous publications started to appear, and she soon gained recognition as one of the greatest Russian poets of all time. A veritable cult of Tsvetaeva developed in Russia and outside its borders. Today she is an internationally famous poet and the object of many scholarly studies that are on a par with criticism about Pasternak, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, or even classics of the Russian Golden Age. This reputation springs in part from Tsvetaeva’s earlier poetry. Craft (1923), the last volume of poetry Tsvetaeva completed before her emigration, is praised for its metrical experiments and effective blending of folk language, archaisms, and biblical idioms. After Russia (1928) has been deemed by critics such as Simon Karlinsky ”the most mature and perfect of her collections.”

Demonstrating her literary merit further are both Tsvetaeva’s mature verse and even her first verse work, Evening Album.

Evening Album (1910)

Composed almost entirely before she was eighteen years old, Evening Album is considered a work of technical virtuosity. The volume’s occasionally immature themes do not obscure Tsvetaeva’s mastery of traditional Russian lyric forms. At the time of its publication it was noticed immediately by leading critics, who gave the book favorable reviews and emphasized its intimacy and freshness of tone. Valerii Iakovlevich Briusov, who, in his 1911 article ”New Verse Collections” in Russian Thought, expressed some reservations concerning Tsvetaeva’s domestic themes and commonplace ideas, nevertheless dubbed her an ”undoubtedly talented” author capable of creating ”the true poetry of the intimate life.” Further reflecting the critical attitude at the time, Nikolai Sergeevich Gumilev wrote enthusiastically about Tsvetaeva’s spontaneity and audacity, concluding in his 1911 article ”Letters on Russian Poetry” in Apollo, ”All the main laws of poetry have been instinctively guessed here, so that this book is not just a book of charming girlish confessions, but a book of excellent verse as well.”

After her initial critical success and popularity, Tsvetaeva was largely neglected because of her experimental style and her refusal to assume either a pro- or anti-Soviet stance. Recent critics regard her work as among the most innovative and powerful Russian poetry of the twentieth century, with scholars such as Angela Livingstone writing, ”An emotional but not a ‘feminine’ poet, she avoids all mellifluous sentimentality and instead loves, hates, lauds, castigates, laments, marvels, aspires . . . with a kind of unflinching physicality, always pushing passions and stances to the point at which they will be fully revealed.”

References:

Briusov, Valerii Iakovlevich. Sredi stikhov 1894—1924: Manifesty, stat’i, retsenzii. Compiled by Nikolai Alekseevich Bogomolov and Nikolai Vsevolodovich Kotrelev. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990.
Gumilev, Nikolai Sergeevich. “Pis’ma o russkoi poezii.” In Sobranie sochinenii, pp. 262, 293-294. Washington, D.C.: Victor Kamkin, 1968.
Karlinsky, Simon. Marina Cvetaeva: Her Fife and Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.
-. Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World and Her Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Karlinsky, Simon, and Alfred Appel Jr., eds. The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West, 1922-1972. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
Pasternak, Yevgeny, Yelena Pasternak, and Konstantin M. Azadovsky, eds. Fetters, Summer 1926: Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by Margaret Wettlin and Walter Arndt. New York: Harcourt, 1985; reprinted, Oxford University Press, 1988.
Tsvetaeva, Marina, Unpublished Fetters. Edited by Gleb Struve and Nikita Struve. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1972.
Burgin, Diana Lewis. ”After the Ball Is Over: Sophia Parnok s Creative Relationship with Marina Tsvetaeva.” Russian Review 47 (1988): 425-44.
Ciepiela, ”Taking Monologism Seriously: Bakhtin and Tsvetaeva’s ‘The Pied Piper.”’ Slavic Review 4 (1994): 1010-24.
Forrester, Sibelan. ”Bells and Cupolas: The Formative Role of the Female Body in Marina Tsvetaeva’s Poetry.” Slavic Review 2 (1992): 232-46.
Gove, Antonina F. ”The Feminine Stereotype and Beyond: Role Conflict and Resolution in the Poetics of Marina Tsvetaeva.” Slavic Review 2 (1977): 231-55.
Hall, Bruce. ”’The Wildest of Disharmonies’: A Lacanian Reading of Tsvetaeva’s ‘Provoda’ Cycle in the Context of Its Other Meanings.” Slavic and East European Journal 1 (1996): 27-44.
Heldt, Barbara. ”Two Poems by Marina Tsvetayeva from After Russia.” Modern Language Review 3 (1982): 679-87.
Kneller, Andrey. Translations of Marina Tsvetaeva: Selected Poems and Links. Retrieved March 31, 2008, from http://home.comcast.net/ ~kneller/tsvetaeva.html.
Manevich, Vadim, and Olesya Petrova. Heritage of Marina Tsvetayeva. Retrieved March 31, 2008, from http://english.tsvetayeva.com/.
The World of Marina Tsvetaeva (in Russian). Retrieved March 31,2008, from http://www.ipmce.su/~tsvet/.