The Journey Read online

  FAMILY PORTRAIT I

  Ah, how far translated by now, how abstracted,

  Marina, are we even at heartmost pretext.

  Signal givers, no more.5

  RAINER MARIA RILKE

  I’ve spent the last few months reading Marina Tsvetaeva. Among my Russian books I have editions from Moscow from 1979 and 1984; all of the Spanish translations, owed to the passion of Selma Ancira; the Italian ones prefaced by Serena Vitale; her poetry in French; and a large volume of English prose with an introduction by Susan Sontag; as well as the biographies by Anastasia Tsvetaeva, her sister; Simon Karlinsky; and Veronique Lossky. I began to acquire them several years ago; however, I had only read fragments, without any continuity. I became familiar with her name during the years of the Thaw, the period that followed the revelation of Stalin’s crimes. Ehrenburg in his memoirs underlines her importance in Russian poetry and becomes her shadow council, like those of Mandelstam and Babel, to republish her works and exhibit them to a generation that knew nothing of her journey through life and of the splendor they introduced into the language. During my stay in Moscow I was present at endless meetings where there was always someone debating until late into the night the enigmas her life and family attracted. Whether it was true that in her final days in Moscow, during her years as an exile, an outcast, she had met with Anna Akhmatova, and if so, what happened during those visits, what they talked about, in what tone, with what results. Some said that during a long walk through the woods, on a winter afternoon, wrapped in woolen shawls, Akhmatova recited from memory her Requiem, while Marina moved her lips and hands pretending to be talking, or arguing about something, to confuse professional witnesses. Others argued that those evenings meant nothing, that Akhmatova feared Tsvetaeva, that she was aware of her harsh temperament, her arrogant recklessness, so the only two times they met, she stayed on the defensive, treated her politely, because she was a true lady, and also with compassion because of her tragedy, because her heart was immense, and so everyone gave different but always complimentary versions for Akhmatova, a woman beloved by all, and swore that they came from absolutely reliable people: the doctor of one of them, or a friend of Anastasia, Tsvetaeva’s sister, with whom she shared her house, or a teacher who knew them both, and could spend whole nights listing the loves that Tsvetaeva was known to have had, and how disastrous she could be in that regard, a pest, a pain, because of the persecution to which she subjected beautiful young men who admired her as a writer or for her unique personality, for everything genuine there was in her, but could not and would not respond to her demands because they had a different sexuality that placed them in impossible situations. And they could go on about this topic to infinity because some of my friends were students of theater and had been students, and somehow also friends, of those who half a century before had been the ephebes who were targets of the excessive libido of that intrepid Amazon. And if one spoke of the Efron family, of Marina, of her husband Sergei, of Ariadna, the daughter who had just died around that time (when I worked in Moscow), of Mur, the son, it was a never-ending event. One of the biggest mysteries that surely no longer is, since one can check the archives of the KGB, is why, if Sergei Efron, her husband, was an important agent of Soviet espionage, as some say, he always lived with his family in a poverty that teetered on beggary. I had read poems in anthologies of Russian poetry, a story or two and many articles about her. At the insistence of Selma Ancira, I began to read the great poetess this year; I began with the press proofs of a 1929 book on the painter Natalia Goncharova, whom she had just translated, and I have continued reading her to this day.

  The next book in my reading marathon was A Captive Spirit, recently published by Galaxia Gutenberg, in Barcelona. The most important essay in the book is a splendid portrait of Andrei Bely, written in 1934 when she learned of the death of the celebrated author of Petersburg. Tsvetaeva’s writing in the thirties attained a remarkable distinction and her prose was absolutely original; every essay from her pen becomes a search for one’s self and its surroundings, which in itself is not new, but the formal treatment, the certain and bold narrative strategy is. She invents a different discursive construction. In her writing of this period, the thirties, always autobiographical, everything dissolves into everything, the minuscule, the jocose, the digression on the task, on what is seen, lived, and dreamt, and she recounts it with unexpected rhythm, not without a certain delirium, an alacrity, which allows the writing itself to become its own structure, its reason for being.

  A Captive Spirit is the perfect example of this type of essay that she wrote during her final years; it consists of the creation of an atmosphere—incomplete portraits—she is not interested in creating biographies—few details, more or less tics, eccentricities, digressions on writing, her surroundings, fragments of conversations, a sense of montage as effective as Eisenstein; nothing seems important, but everything is literature. The friendship between Bely and Tsvetaeva was brief, a few months, no more than two or three, in the dynamic Berlin of 1922, while Marina awaits her husband whom she has not seen in seven years, who is to come for her and take her to Prague where he is studying philology at the Charles University. Bely implored her to get a room near his, because Berlin depressed him, he feared dying, it brought him bad memories at all hours, his wife had run off with someone disgraceful, he said, she had left him forever, and he did not dare return to Moscow, since before leaving he had burned all bridges forever, so a return could be dangerous, fatal. Tsvetaeva got the room, but he did not receive her letter because in his desperation he had returned to Russia, whence he never left. Tsvetaeva was infuriated by this false step, without realizing that she would do the same, in worse circumstance and, of course, with fatal results.