Bride of Ice Read online

  MARINA TSVETAEVA

  Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems

  Translated with an introduction by

  Elaine Feinstein

  from literal versions by

  Daisy Cockburn, Valentina Coe, Bernard Comrie, Simon Franklin, Jana Howlett, Angela Livingstone, Cathy Porter, Tatiana Retivov, Maxwell Shorter and Vera Traill

  Contents

  Title Page

  List of Collaborators

  Introduction

  Poems

  Verse

  from GIRLFRIEND

  Your narrow, foreign shape

  I know the truth

  What is this gipsy passion for separation

  We shall not escape Hell

  Some ancestor of mine

  I’m glad your sickness

  We are keeping an eye on the girls

  No one has taken anything away

  You throw back your head

  Where does this tenderness come from?

  Bent with worry

  Today or tomorrow the snow will melt

  VERSES ABOUT MOSCOW

  from INSOMNIA

  POEMS FOR AKHMATOVA

  POEMS FOR BLOK

  A kiss on the head

  from SWANS’ ENCAMPMENT

  Yesterday he still looked in my eyes

  To Mayakovsky

  ON A RED HORSE

  Praise to the Rich

  God help us Smoke!

  Ophelia: In Defence of the Queen

  from WIRES

  Sahara

  The Poet

  Appointment

  Rails

  You loved me

  It’s not like waiting for post

  My ear attends to you

  As people listen intently

  Strong doesn’t mate with strong

  In a world

  POEM OF THE MOUNTAIN

  POEM OF THE END

  An Attempt at Jealousy

  To Boris Pasternak

  New Year’s Greetings

  from THE RATCATCHER

  from Chapter 1

  from Chapter 2: Dreams

  from The Children’s Paradise

  from POEMS TO A SON

  Homesickness

  I opened my veins

  Epitaph

  Readers of Newspapers

  Desk

  Bus

  When I look at the flight of the leaves

  from POEMS TO CZECHOSLOVAKIA

  Notes

  Select Bibliography of Works in English

  Appendix: Note on Working Method by Angela Livingstone

  About the Author

  Also by Elaine Feinstein from Carcanet Press

  Copyright

  List of Collaborators

  Literal versions of the poems were provided by the following:

  Valentina Coe

  POEM OF THE MOUNTAIN

  Daisy Cockburn

  Verse

  Your narrow, foreign shape

  Bernard Comrie

  Yesterday he still looked in my eyes

  Simon Franklin

  God help us Smoke!

  Ophelia: In Defence of the Queen

  from WIRES: Lyric 1

  Sahara

  Appointment

  Rails

  You loved me

  To Boris Pasternak

  from THE RATCATCHER: from Chapter 1 and from Chapter 2

  Desk

  Bus

  Jana Howlett

  from SWANS’ ENCAMPMENT

  Angela Livingstone

  I know the truth

  What is this gypsy passion for separation

  We shall not escape Hell

  We are keeping an eye on the girls

  No one has taken anything away

  You throw back your head

  Where does this tenderness come from?

  Bent with worry

  Today or tomorrow the snow will melt

  VERSES ABOUT MOSCOW

  from INSOMNIA

  POEMS FOR AKHMATOVA

  POEMS FOR BLOK

  A kiss on the head

  Praise to the Rich

  The Poet

  POEM OF THE END

  Epitaph

  Homesickness

  Readers of Newspapers

  When I look at the flight of the leaves

  from POEMS TO CZECHOSLOVAKIA

  Cathy Porter

  From POEMS TO A SON

  Tatiana Retivov

  GIRLFRIEND

  ON A RED HORSE

  from WIRES

  POEM OF THE END: Lyric 11

  New Year’s Greeting

  Maxwell Shorter

  Some ancestor of mine

  I’m glad your sickness

  To Mayakovsky

  It’s not like waiting for post

  My ear attends to you

  As people listen intently

  Strong doesn’t mate with strong

  In a world

  I opened my veins

  Vera Traill

  from THE RATCATCHER: from The Children’s Paradise

  Introduction

  The poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva drew me initially1 through the intensity of her emotions, and the honesty with which she exposed them. In this, she has remained an enduring and exacting mentor. Her themes, too, seemed immediately relevant: her desperate need for love, and the tension between poetry and domestic responsibilities. Over the years I celebrated her dedication to poetry, while hardly touching on the ruthlessness which underpinned her stamina, still less the inner vulnerabilities that lay beneath her wilfulness. In 2008 I invented her as a Virgil to lead me around Stalin’s Hell in The Russian Jerusalem. In doing so, I became uneasily aware of elements in her complex personality given greater prominence in other biographies. This new selection of her poems contains several sequences which suggest the sources of her own inspiration, and her longing for intimacy with poets of equal genius.

  Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) was the daughter of a Professor of Fine Arts at Moscow University, and grew up in material comfort. Her mother, Maria, was by far the most powerful presence in the household; a gifted woman, of bitter intensity, she had renounced her first love to marry a widower much older than herself. Her considerable musical talents were frustrated, and she turned all her energies towards educating Marina, her precocious elder daughter. Insistence on hours of music practice and a stern refusal of any words of praise made Marina’s childhood unusually austere.

  When Marina was fourteen, her mother died of tuberculosis, expressing a passionate indifference to the world she was leaving: ‘I only regret music and the sun.’ After her death, Marina abandoned the study of music and began to develop her passion for literature. ‘After a mother like that,’ she reflected, ‘I had only one alternative: to become a poet.’2

  Her mother remained in her dreams, sometimes as a longed-for, benevolent figure. In one dream, however, Tsvetaeva meets a bent old woman who whispers surprisingly: ‘A mean little thing she was, a clinging one, believe me, sweetheart.’ This is the witchy crone of Russian folklore, and we meet her again in Tsvetaeva’s cruel fairy tale ‘On a Red Horse’.

  By the age of eighteen, Tsvetaeva had acquired sufficient reputation as a poet to be welcome as a house guest at the Crimean dacha of Maximilian Voloshin. There she met her future husband, Sergei Efron, the half-Jewish orphan of an earlier generation of revolutionaries. At seventeen, he was shy, with huge grey eyes, overwhelmed by Tsvetaeva’s poetic genius. They fell instantly in love, and his was the most loyal affection Tsvetaeva was ever to find. They were married in January 1912. For two years after their marriage, they were irresponsibly happy together. Seryozha, as he was usually known, was an aspirant writer and a charming actor. Most people who knew Efron lik
ed him, but some thought him too much under the influence of his wife. He was certainly weak physically – he suffered from TB all his life – but Irma Kudrova, recently allowed access to files of his 1940 NKVD interrogations,3 has uncovered a man of unusual courage and integrity.

  When war came in August 1914, Seryozha was eager to enlist, and was sent initially to the front line as a male nurse in an ambulance train. Soon afterwards, Tsvetaeva fell in love with Sofia Parnok, a talented poet from a middle-class Jewish family in the Black Sea port of Taganrog. Tsvetaeva had been wildly but innocently attracted to beautiful young girls in her early adolescence, but Parnok was an open lesbian. She was not exactly beautiful, but she possessed a sexual assurance which had never been the main bond in Tsvetaeva’s affection for Seryozha.

  Tsvetaeva was well provided for since her father’s death in 1913, and for fifteen months she threw herself into her passion for Parnok, with little thought for her husband and two-year-old child. She and Parnok travelled brazenly over the wilds of Russia together and even visited Voloshin’s dacha. The lyrics for Parnok are both more sensual, and less tormented, than other love poetry written by Tsvetaeva. Sergei had a brief love affair of his own.

  In Parnok’s poems for Tsvetaeva, she describes her as an ‘awkward little girl’, but her claim to have been the first to give Tsvetaeva intense sexual pleasure may have been no more than a boast. In any case, as the affair came to an end, it soon became clear that it was to Seryozha that Tsvetaeva felt the strongest bond. When the Revolution came, she was in hospital giving birth to their second child. Separated from him in the confusion at the start of the Civil War, she wrote in her diary: ‘If God performs this miracle and leaves you alive, I will follow you like a dog.’

  Through the Moscow famine, Tsvetaeva and her two children lived in Boris and Gleb Lane, in unheated rooms, sometimes without light. She and Efron were to be separated for five years. In those years, she and her elder daughter, Ariadne, were almost like sisters. Alya, as she was usually called was as precociously observant a child as Tsvetaeva had been herself. This is how she writes of Tsvetaeva:

  My mother is not at all like a mother. Mothers always think their own children are wonderful, and other children too, but Marina doesn’t like little children… She is always hurrying somewhere. She has a great soul. A kind voice. A quick walk. She has green eyes, a hooked nose and red lips… Marina’s hands are all covered with rings… she doesn’t like people bothering her with stupid questions…4

  The family fared badly in the Moscow famine. Marina was unskilled at bartering trinkets for food, and she and Alya often lived on potatoes boiled in a samovar. They sometimes went out on a sledge together in the freezing cold to exchange bottle tops for a few kopeks, often leaving the younger child, Irina, strapped against a table leg to prevent her coming to harm. When starvation looked imminent in the winter of 1919-20, Tsvetaeva put both children into the Kuntsevo orphanage, which was thought to be supplied by American food aid. When she arrived on her first visit, Alya was running a high temperature and Tsvetaeva, frightened, took her home to nurse her. Alya pulled through but Irina died of starvation in the orphanage in February 1920. Tsvetaeva was unable to make herself go to the funeral. She blamed Seryozha’s sisters, probably unfairly, for refusing to help her, claiming they had behaved ‘like animals’. She told all her friends to write to Seryozha that the child had died of pneumonia rather than hunger. There was much gossip about her own neglect of the child. Certainly, she was never as close to Irina as to Alya.

  The following year was taken up by a new infatuation – Yevgeny Lann, a poet friend of her sister Asya – a humiliating rejection by him, and anxiety about Seryozha as the defeat of the White Army loomed closer. In January 1921, Tsvetaeva wrote a poem of pitiless inquiry into the nature of her own inspiration: ‘On a Red Horse’. The tone resembles that of her other folkloric poems of the period such as ‘The Tsar Maiden’ (1920) and ‘The Swain’ (1922) but the story of ‘On a Red Horse’ is not taken from one of Alexander Afansyev’s volumes of Russian fairy tales; it is her own invention. A handsome rider of implacable cruelty demands that all her other loves be sacrificed for him. These dream-like sacrifices do not secure his kindness, however, and an old woman she encounters reveals the bleak truth: ‘Your Angel doesn’t love you!’ Released from the hope of winning his affection, she plunges into battle as a male figure. A phrase from the resolution of this poem gives this book its title:

  And he whispers I wanted this.

  It is for this I chose you,

  you are my passion, my sister,

  mine till the end of time

  my bride of ice – in armour –

  Mine. Will you stay with me…5

  In 1922, the Civil War ended in victory for the Bolsheviks. Ilya Ehrenburg, who was always in touch with what was happening to his friends, learned that Seryozha had made his escape to Prague, where he had been offered a student grant to study at the university. Ehrenburg brought Tsvetaeva the news and, without hesitation, she and Alya prepared to set off into exile to join him – though it has to be said that Tsvetaeva found Berlin almost irresistibly exciting along the way. When the family was reunited, she was shocked to find how little Seryozha had changed from the boyish young man she remembered. She herself had been shattered by her experience and was prematurely grey at thirty. In Prague, Seryozha was given a room in a student hostel, while Tsvetaeva and Alya lived in the village of Horni Mokropsky.

  At first, Tsvetaeva was welcomed in Prague as a major literary figure, but her more conventional compatriots soon turned away from her. She failed, as Nina Berberova makes clear in her auto-biography The Italics Are Mine,6 to show the domestic graces that make poverty bearable. Men of comparable genius usually find women to take care of them. Anna Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva’s only equal as a Russian woman poet, always found friends to look after her, even in old age. Tsvetaeva was less fortunate and she resented the burden of the daily round. Nevertheless, it was in Prague that she had her short, fierce affair with Konstantin Rodzevich, which drew from her some of her greatest poetry: ‘Poem of the End’, ‘Poem of the Mountain’ and ‘An Attempt at Jealousy’. Rodzevich ended the affair, and went on to marry an ‘ordinary’ woman with a private income.

  When I met Rodzevich in the 1970s, while writing my biography of Tsvetaeva, he was a handsome, well-dressed man in late middle-age. His wife was so jealous of him that he would only agree to meet me when he was sure she would be out. He talked of his love for Tsvetaeva as un grand amour and showed me a portrait he had painted of her which he kept in a locked drawer. Why then had he ended their affair? He attributed this to the great affection he felt for Seryozha. I was sceptical, but I was already suspicious of him. He had fought in the Red Army in the Civil War, but told the émigrés in Prague that he had been part of the White Army, a well-judged subterfuge which did not suggest he was particularly trustworthy.

  He had two other secrets, however, which I have only recently discovered. I knew he was an enthusiastic member of the Eurasian movement, along with Seryozha, who drew a salary from it, and my old Cambridge friend Vera Traill’s husband Peter Suvchinsky. I knew, too, that this became a front organisation for the NKVD. What I had not guessed was that Rodzevich was himself working as a Soviet agent. Nor did I guess that he was Vera Traill’s lover. That last is evident in an intimate and long-running exchange of letters discussed in Irma Kudrova’s Death of a Poet and throws new light on Vera’s irritable dismissal of Tsvetaeva’s womanliness, even as she praised her genius as a poet.

  About one thing Rodzevich was accurate enough. The distress of Tsvetaeva’s affair drove Seryozha to the point of leaving her. When he suggested separation to Tsvetaeva, however, she was distraught. ‘For two weeks she was in a state of madness… finally she informed me that she was unable to leave me since she was unable to enjoy a moment’s peace.’7

  Tsvetaeva has often been accused of preferring to make her closest relationships at a distance, usually inventing th
e qualities of their recipients. Indeed, she was locked in an epistolary romance with a young Berlin critic whom she had never met at the very moment she entered her affair with Rodzevich. Her important relationship with Boris Pasternak is another matter. For one thing, it was initiated by him and his enthusiasm was equal to hers.

  She and Pasternak had only known one another slightly in Moscow; though he was one of the poets she most admired. Pasternak wrote to her after reading a copy of Tsvetaeva’s early poems, overwhelmed by her lyric genius. His words – ‘You are not a child, my dear, golden, incomparable poet,’8 – restored her sense of her own worth. Their correspondence continued with mounting warmth, as poems and plans for poems were exchanged. She had found a twin soul. Soon, he was suggesting that she join him in Berlin where he was visiting his parents. She failed to arrange the correct papers in time, and he returned to Russia without meeting her, though they continued to plan for it. In 1931, when she heard that Pasternak had separated from his wife, she seems to have experienced a kind of panic. She wrote to her friend Raisa Lomonsova: ‘For eight years Boris and I had a secret agreement: to keep on until we can be together. But the catastrophe of a meeting kept being postponed.’ It seems likely that she was afraid of being rejected as a woman. Her cycle of lyrics, ‘Wires’, is an extraordinary example of the poems he drew from her. Two of these appeared in my earlier selection, but both are amended here, and the other eight are now included.

  The only other poet to whom Tsvetaeva wrote with comparable excitement was Rainer Maria Rilke, in 1926. The correspondence came about after Leonid Pasternak, Boris’s painter father, received a letter from Rilke, whose portrait he had made when the German poet visited Moscow. In his letter, Rilke praised the poems of Leonid’s son, which he was able to read in a French translation in a journal edited by Paul Valéry. Pasternak was overwhelmed with joy to hear as much, and was eager to include Tsvetaeva in the exchange. She took up the opportunity enthusiastically, perhaps a little too eagerly for Rilke, who was lying mortally ill in a sanatorium. She was unhappy to discover that he was unable to read her poems in Russian and, after a few exchanges, he fell silent, which she took as rejection. There is a sad postcard from Bellevue dated 7 November 1926 on which Tsvetaeva writes simply: