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Engaging Sexual Demons in Marina Tsvetaeva's "Devil": The Body and the Genesis of the Woman Poet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Pamela Chester
Pamela Chester*
Affiliation:
Russian Research Center, Harvard University
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Extract

To liberate … feelings of loss is the peculiar function of myths of origin, which so invariably speak to our nostalgias

–R. Harrison, Forests

“Devil” is a key piece in Tsvetaeva's “anti-Eden” cycle of autobiographical prose, a phrase I have coined to describe her rewriting of both the creation myth of Genesis and its Russian incarnation in the Arcadian boyhoods of Tolstoi and Aksakov. In the series of memoirs which she wrote in the 1930s, she reworked the male myth to reflect twentieth century female experience and, most importantly, to inscribe her selfdefinition as poet.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 53 , Issue 4 , Winter 1994 , pp. 1025 - 1045
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1994

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References

1. Harrison, Robert Pogue, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. He examines the rural-urban dichotomy in western culture from ancient times to the present. Although he reaches many intriguing and provocative conclusions, he, like the majority of Slavists, excludes considerations of gender, producing a skewed picture of culture. This article aims in some small measure to redress the omission of this crucial category from earlier studies of autobiography.

2. In the later text, Tsvetaeva specifically identified the “red room” with the opening passage of Jane Eyre but then reprised her description of the room as her Garden of Eden; this is an example of the cross-references which abound in this cycle of childhood memoirs (in Proza [Moskva: Sovremennik, 1989], 17, 26). Hereafter Tsvetaeva's prose is cited in the text by page number from this edition; translations are mine.

3. The prose pieces in the anti-Eden cycle have received relatively little attention from critics. Janet King's commentary on the prose in her volume of translations, entitled A Captive Spirit (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980; 2nd ed. Virago, 1983), offers some of the earliest criticism of “Devil” and of the connections among the autobiographical pieces. Lily Feiler's paper on “Chert,” delivered at the Lausanne conference in 1982, has finally been published in “Marina Tsvetaeva: Trudy 1-go mezhdunarodnogo simpoziuma (Lozanna, 30.VI-3.VI1.1982),” ed. Robin Kemball (Bern: Peter Lang, 1991), 37–45; while her newer piece on the same subject, “Tsvetaeva's God/Devil,” appeared in vol. 2 of Norwich Symposia on Russian Literature and Culture, Marina Tsvetaeva, 1892–1992 (Northfield: Russian School of Norwich University), 34–41. Her psychobiography of Tsvetaeva has just appeared: Marina Tsvetaeva: The Double Beat of Heaven and Hell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). Svetlana El'nitskaia's article on Devil, Tsvetaeva's, “Tsvetaeva i chert,” Russian Language Journal xl, nos. 136–37 (1986): 75–93 Google Scholar, offers a more generalized treatment of the theme in all of Tsvetaeva's oeuvre. Barbara Heldt discusses the autobiographical prose in Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 98–102. A disciple of Cixous, Négron Marreo, deals directly with “Chert” in her article “Crossing the Mirror to the Forbidden Land (“Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Marina Tsvetaeva's The Devil,” in: Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminar of Hélène Cixous, ed. Susan Sellers (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), 66–70. Cixous's comments on “My Pushkin” are contained in “Difficult Joys,” The Body and the Text: Helene Cixous, Reading and Teaching, eds. Hélène Wilcox, Keith McWatters, Ann Thompson and Linda Williams (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 5–30. Stephanie Sandler treats “My Pushkin” in the context of Tsvetaeva's other “Pushkin texts” in “Embodied Words: Gender in Cvetaeva's Reading of Puŝkin,” Slavic and East European Journal 34, no. 2 (1990): 139–57. Late in 1993 Svetlana Boym's article “Loving in Bad Taste: Eroticism and Literary Excess in Tsvetaeva's, Marina ‘The Tale of Sonechka'” appeared in Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture, eds. Costlow, Jane, Sandler, Stephanie and Vowles, Judith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 156–76Google Scholar. Natasha Kolchevska's work on mothers and daughters in “House at Old Pimen” is in Engendering Slavic Literatures, eds. Pamela Chester and Sibelan Forrester (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming). Sibelan Forrester's work in progress on gender in Tsvetaeva's poethood will touch in passing on the prose.

4. Actually her half-sister, her father's child by his first marriage. Valeriia (1883–1966), with her younger brother Andrei (1890–1933), was also the legal owner of the house in which the red room is located, having inherited it from her late mother.

5. In “My Pushkin,” Tsvetaeva makes this identity very clear: “Having said wolfI have named the Pathfinder” (30).

6. In her 1992 article, Feiler compares these eyes with those of Tsvetaeva's mother, Maria Aleksandrovna (38); Sibelan Forrester has pointed out that, on the contrary, the poet herself describes them “like a Baltic baron's” (84), that is, like the eyes of her maternal grandfather. I myself do not see here a comparison to any member of Tsvetaeva's natural family; the point seems to be precisely that this devil is her “true” family, unique and disturbing, and unrelated to either mother or grandfather.

7. In “My Pushkin,” Tsvetaeva wrote of the lyric persona of Pushkin's “To the Sea “: “enchanted by powerful passion, he desires so hotly that he is rooted to the spot! (In this he confirmed all my experience with my own childhood desires, that is complete physical paralysis)” (49).

8. Her exile from the text means that her passion for Gothic terror is left eternally unsatisfied: “No moral frightfulness (physical coziness) in Gogol''s heroes ever satisfied my passion for horror” (85–86). Life can never quite equal the promised textual “experience “— a theme she returned to in “My Pushkin. “

9. This Gospel scene was intimately familiar to the child; it figures in the opening passage of “My Pushkin” as one of the oil paintings displayed in her parents’ home: “In the dining room, ‘Christ's Manifestation to the People’… .And all three were terrifying, incomprehensible, threatening and the baptism was no less threatening than the other two” (i.e., the murder of Caesar and the death of Pushkin; 18). Suggestive points include the title of the original, since Musia experiences something of an epiphany in this scene of demonic election and initiation; and the devil's thunderous voice announcing their betrothal, recalling God's affirmation of Christ's sonship: “You are my beloved Son, with you 1 am well pleased” (Mark 1: 11). Four pages later, the narrator announces Musia's own demonic daughterhood, which is simultaneously orphanhood: “When I was with him, 1 was—his little girl, his little devil's orphan [ego cherlova sirotinochka]” (90). There may also be connections to the mother's “semiotic,” presymbolic communication with the child by way of her early memories of these paintings. These pictures seem to have been selected by Mariia Aleksandrovna, not by Ivan Vladimirovich (unlike the portrait of his late wife which he hung in the family's livingroom after his remarriage); and they convey a powerful and frightening message without recourse to language. In keeping with Tsvetaeva's depiction of the anti-mother, these scenes, far from providing conventional nurturance or comfort to the child, depict fearsome and puzzling events which instead prepare her for the bloody events of the twentieth century. Compare Deborah Kelly Kloepfer's analysis of the paintings in Charlotte Bront ë's pseudo-autobiographyyarj Eyre, where visual art is read as Jane's way of figuring her own unconscious, “transfigur[ing] her world without passing it through the mediation of the text,” revealing the “rhythm of loss and access” which marks the relations of mothers and daughters (The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H.D. [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989], 31–42).

10. In her notes to the 1989 edition of Proza, Anna Saakiants has pointed out Tsvetaeva's error, saying that it is unclear whether the work in question is The Shalonskii Family or Serezha Bor-Ramenskii.

11. Valeriia described the morning of her graduation from St. Catherine's Institute, when her father took her out for an early breakfast in order to break some upsetting news to her: her step-mother had been carrying on a romance with her younger brother's tutor, who had already been caught writing illicit love letters to Valeriia herself (41). Valeriia's memoirs were completed in the early 1960s. Although they were prepared for publication, they never appeared. I would like to thank Iu. M. Kagan of Moscow for providing me with a copy of the typescript from her family archives. The original is in TsGALI (now RGALI).

12. In “Mother and Music,” for example, she tries to suppress an angry exclamation at Valeriia's endless hours of picking at the piano (74–75); she also asks Musia whether she “wants to be a musician or (swallowing ‘Lera’) … a young lady, who apart from the pedal and her rolling eyes …” (74).

13. This observation is made in connection with the later prose piece “Tale of Sonechka” (168).

14. Hélène, Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” New French Feminisms: An Anthology, eds. Marks, Elaine and de Courtivron, Isabelle (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 250 Google Scholar.

15. Sibelan Forrester has argued convincingly in her 1992 article “Bells and Cupolas: The Formative Role of the Female Body in Marina Tsvetaeva's Poetry” (Slavic Review 51, no. 2 [Summer 1992]) that in Tsvetaeva's early verse the poet was writing the female body in her treatment of the church architecture of the Kremlin (232, 236). In these prose pieces, written twenty years later, I believe that the body is treated in still more complex ways which simultaneously foreground and exceed carnality or female sexuality.

16. Cixous, “Difficult Joys,” The Body and the Text, 16.

17. Lily Feiler, “Tsvetaeva's God/Devil,” 38.

18. Sandra, Gilbert and Susan, Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 3 Google Scholar.

19. Liz Yorke finds a similar relation to the phallus in another bisexual woman poet, H.D. She notes that “it is (illusorily) assumed that what the mother lacks—owing to the ‘fact’ of her castration—is the real organ, the penis, which becomes confounded in the (Lacanian) imagination with the phallus as ‘key signifier': she lacks power because she lacks the penis. Thus, phallocentric theory … can assume a castrated (yet phallic) mother.” Further, “in H.D.'s vision, this wo (man)'s body, represented as ideally complete in itself, incorporates the paternal metaphor penis/phallus at the level of the text (yes, Lacan, it comes back…) but in terms that imply a radical transmutation” (Impertinent Voices: Subversive Strategies in Women's Contemporary Poetry [London: Routledge, 1991], 171, 179). In Tsvetaeva's case, the penis is entirely absent and, further, part of the power vested in the devil's body is that of a female animal, a lioness.

20. Margaret, Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986 Google Scholar, especially 1–29.

21. Tsvetaeva's “A Living Word About a Living Man” describes how the poet's pseudonym and romantic persona were conceived as a “mystification” by the poet Maks Voloshin, and how Cherubina was shattered when her male readers unmasked her entirely mundane and unbeautiful self (204–10).

22. One of the few times she uses the term “feminism” at all is to decry collective and therefore unacceptable reactions to the “woman question” in “Hero of Labor” (“Izbrannaia proza v dvukh tomakh” [New York: Russica, 1979], I: 199; hereafter IP, with volume and page number).

23. This episode is detailed in Ju.M. Kagan's “I.V. Tsvetaev. Zhizn'. Deiatel'nost'. Lichnost'.” (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), 142. She links Kobylianskii with the outlaw hero of Tsvetaeva's “Mother's Fairytale “; in “Devil” Tsvetaeva described him more directly and more lovingly. Cf. also Anastasiia's memoirs about Kobylianskii in “Vospominaniia” (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel', 1983), 106–23.

24. The violence contained in this image of her family's childrearing practices repeats, for instance, the claim in “Mother and Music” that her mother had “tested their resistance” by putting enormous pressure on their ribcages (63).

25. Kloepfer notes that this is a common fear among women: H.D.'s Iphigenia “must reject the mother to avoid … the same fate” (Unspeakable Mother, 51).

26. In Russian this phrase is ambiguous. Because the present tense of the verb “to be” is a zero verb, these words can be translated either “God is a devil” or “God-Devil “; I have chosen the former translation because it reflects more of the blasphemy for which she seems to have felt guilty throughout her childhood.

27. Mariia Aleksandrovna died in 1906 from tuberculosis. Tsvetaeva studiously avoided any mention of her mother's corpse, although we know from a poem written by her friend Ellis during Tsvetaeva's adolescence that her father kept a photograph of her mother in her coffin on his study wall (see Viktoria, Schweitzer, Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. Chandler, Robert and Norman, Peter [New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1992], 55 Google Scholar).

28. I use this name to capture the half-rhyme and mild absurdity of Tsvetaeva's “kumira-Tamara “; however, my translation loses the hint that the author may have been linking her own verbal generativity to Lermontov's and her “Devil” to his “Demon. “

29. Kloepfer, Unspeakable Mother, 14.

30. See, for example, Hubbs's, Joanna Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988 Google Scholar; the introduction to Sexuality and the Body in Russian Culture, and especially Jane Costlow's discussion of the maternal breast (20; 231–36); and parts of Andrew Wachtel's discussion of mothers in childhood autobiography in The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

31. Note too that Musia addresses her devil a page earlier as “dear (m.) [golubchik],” a term of endearment very close to the “dear (f.) [golubka]” which Pushkin addresses to his nanny in his famous short lyric.

32. Some of the material in David Sloane's discussion of lyric cycles in Aleksandr Blok and the Dynamics of the Lyric Cycle (Columbus: Slavica, 1988) is useful in discussing the shape of this prose cycle. Tsvetaeva's prose includes many diverse pieces, including these memoirs of childhood experience, memoirs about other writers like “A Living Word about a Living Man” and literary criticism like “The Poet and Criticism.” All are complex and defy easy classification in traditional genres. The seven pieces listed here, however, deal specifically with the poet's childhood and can be fully understood only when read in the context of the other texts in this cycle. The pieces about her father and his museum do not contain the echoing and reverberating images of the anti-Eden pieces and operate at a much lower intensity; I therefore exclude them from this cycle.

33. This is of course Jane Taubman's term and the title of her book on Tsvetaeva's poetry: A Life Through Poetry: Marina Tsvetaeva's Lyric Diary (Columbus: Slavica, 1988). Karlinsky uses the similar phrase “poetic diary” in his study Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World, and Her Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 107. In 1913, in the preface to her third book, Tsvetaeva herself wrote, “My verses are my diary. “

34. One example is the third part of “The Sibyl” which is moved from May 1923 back to the poems of August 1922. See Marina Tsvetaeva, “Stikhotvoreniia i poemy v piati tomakh” (New York: Russica, 1980–1990), III: 25.

35. Kloepfer, Unspeakable Mother, 10.

36. Karlinsky, Marina Tsvetaeva, 9.

37. Cited from Marina Tsvetaeva, “Pis'ma k Anne Teskovoi” (Prague: Academia, 1969), 115.

38. This statement occurs in her article “Marina Tsvetaeva: Iz avtobiograficheskoi prozy” in Zvezda 10 (1970): 163.

39. Marina Tsvetaeva, “Pis'ma k Iu. P. Ivasku” (New York: Russkii literaturnyi arkhiv, 1956), 217.

40. Wachtel's The Battle for Childhood sets up Tolstoy as the first and most influential of Russian autobiographers of childhood.

41. Lidiia Ginzburg, “O psikhologicheskoi proze” (Leningrad, 1971), 314.

42. Wachtel, Battle, 226.

43. Heldt, Terrible Perfection, 6–7.

44. Wachtel, Battle, 239.

45. Lev Tolstoi, “Polnoe sobranie sochinenii” (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1928–1958), I: 7, 72. I deal with this subject in much greater detail in “The Landscape of Recollection: Tolstoy's Childhood and the Feminization of the Countryside,” Engendering Slavic Literatures.