The Voice Over

The conditions of Tsvetaeva’s life in Moscow in the four years after the Revolution (she left Russia on May 11, 1922) may be considered simply typical, if only because all of Moscow and all of Russia wound up the same. Her reaction to them was also typical in its way: remaining in her emptied Moscow home—without money (her mother’s estate, on whose interest the Tsvetaeva sisters had been living, was confiscated in 1918), with no help from outside (the paid help left along with the money), with two small daughters, Tsvetaeva tried to continue living as before

. The turn this life had taken could have frightened her, if not for her habit of embedding her biography in an elevated series of literary models. She tended to treat everything that happened to her in those first revolutionary winters as an Adventure—like dramatic chapters from Hugo novels: the growing poverty, and the apartment that quickly turned into a shell of its former self, and the attempts to sell everything that could have even the least value; the extreme disorder of everyday life—and, despite all that, the triumphant ceaselessness of higher being.

The quantity written in those years is impressive. What’s more, she had never written so much: eighty-seven poetic texts in the year 1917, a hundred and fifty-two in 1918, a hundred in 1919, a hundred and eleven in 1920, a hundred and eight in 1921, eighty-nine in 1922. We’re looking at a lyrical machine, producing—in the Stakhanovite mode, as it would be called later—unthinkable quantities of high-quality product, working independent of external circumstances or even in inverse dependence—producing more as things got harder for the person operating it. That same machine is revved up in her notebooks at this time—to process the living raw material of her heart’s and soul’s life. And inasmuch as the highest virtue of authorship is exactitude, this inevitably leads here to ethical maximalism of the soul, which doesn’t want to take into account what the body is doing at the moment, reduces the body to the function of experimental object—and lucky if not taking it to the anatomical theater. An extreme, uncompromising scrupulosity of analysis and a harshness of conclusions obtained remain in the notebooks, while the heart and the body keep on doing what they want, obeying their own caprices—and, therefore, providing new material for the notebooks.

Three constants are present in Tsvetaeva’s new life: the independent, autonomous work of the poetic machine; an endless series of half-accidental affairs, accounted for in the department of caprices or extravagances, but in actual fact essential for keeping the machine in working order; and the hateful necessity of existing “in days,” which Tsvetaeva was less and less capable of managing. In hindsight, she herself recollected the junkyard of amorous relationships that she worked through in those four years, the mash of human lives she tried to make use of in propelling her own historical drama, as a bad dream. Many things may be explained here only if we keep in mind Tsvetaeva’s persistent need to look upon her everydays as a text of which she wasn’t the (sole) author—evidently, unconsciously also keeping in mind that the laws of plot construction ensure any darkness comes to an end, that in sum everything should straighten out by itself—without her own participation, obedient to the authorial sense of measure and justice.

As we know, that didn’t happen either then or later; one lesson Tsvetaeva learned herself and was ready to share with others was that “in life […] no-thing is permitted—nichts—rien.” In November 1919, tempted by rumors of a wonderful children’s shelter where there was no end to the chocolate (and, apparently, hoping for a breather, free time for the notebook, her soul, and her heart), she registered both her daughters there—seven-year-old Ariadna (Alya) and two-year-old Irina. Here again the theme of Adventure arises: “the great Adventure of your childhood is unfolding,” as Tsvetaeva tries to ease the separation for herself and her older daughter. There’s famine in the shelter; both girls get sick, but for some reason their mother is slow to bring them home; this drags on until mid-January, when Alya’s condition becomes threatening and she’s quickly taken away. Little Irina remains in the shelter and dies on February 2 or 3 (Old Style). She’s buried somewhere there, in an unmarked mass grave. Tsvetaeva did not attend the funeral.