by Sergio Pitol
The Tsvetaeva editions, as well as her biographies, are illustrated with photographs of the writer and the other dramatis personae who surround her. To see the faces of the characters in this tragedy, throughout the temporal circumstances, means reading a much deeper writing. The first photo that appears in A Captive Spirit is the one I prefer; it is of an elegant couple, with an inner harmony that illuminates the figures and landscape. The characters are sitting on the grass in a forest possibly near Moscow. It appears to be well into autumn or the soft start of winter. They are wearing heavy coats, woolen scarves, and head coverings. At that moment it is evident that they are happy; this can be seen in every inch of the photo, certainly because they are together in that beautiful forest, I imagine, and, above all, because they have reunited once again in their home country, which they had abandoned many years ago. They are father and daughter, Sergei and Ariadna Efron, the husband and daughter of Marina Tsvetaeva. The date of the photo is 1937, when the daughter decided to return to Moscow to work at a news agency, and also the year in which Efron arrived, months later, fleeing the French police that believed him to be involved in a political crime. Not a shadow of care can be seen in the photo that brims with happiness: a sheer idyll. There was even less of a glimpse of the tragedy that was soon to rain down on them. During the moments of that happiness, Marina Tsvetaeva and Mur, her young son, remain in France in desperate economic conditions, friendless, homeless, surrounded by a general hostility. Two years pass and the family finally reunites in a village just outside Moscow. Two months later, Ariadna is arrested and later sentenced to eight years of hard labor in Siberia; a few days later Sergei Efron suffers the same fate, but his sentence is harsher: capital punishment. The family’s pro-Marxist element disappears unexpectedly, and not in enemy space, but in what is supposedly their own. In contrast to Marina, the aristocrat, who has written elegiac poems to the White Guardsmen, who is planning a collection of poems in which she will sing the greatness of the tsar’s family, the enemy of the Bolsheviks, escapes unscathed; but she is unprotected in Moscow, with appalling economic difficulties, in a world of terror, where many of her close friends have disappeared, also kidnapped by the political police. The Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky, her friend, the most subtle historian of Russian literature, the first who praised her abroad and thereby attracted the tribal hatred of Russians in Paris, also returned to the homeland and converted to Marxism, disappeared like her daughter, her husband, and her sister Anastasia, of whose support she was certain. Some other friends are in danger, their homes have been seized, and they cannot help her. She does not understand anything. She assumes, as do all Russian exiles in Paris, that any intellectual who did not openly fight the government possessed special powers in the interior. The World War arrives; the Germans cross Soviet borders. The chaos is immense. Marina and her son move from one small room to another in an increasingly precarious Moscow. Georgy, her beloved Mur, whom she has treated all her life as a mere extension of her body and spirit, rebels: he accuses her of having destroyed his father and sister due to thoughtless attitudes, a lack of tact and arrogance; such that, they would also most certainly be killed soon. This is the harshest blow. That son who had always been wrapped in cellophane not to be touched, not even by air, rebukes what little intuition she has left to survive; he badgers her, makes her responsible for having done everything that should not have been done. Indeed, they do not survive, Tsvetaeva eventually commits suicide in 1941, and Georgy is sent to a boarding school for children of enemy parents of the country, he later joins the army and marches to the front, where, of course, he succumbs, it seems in 1944. Of them only Ariadna survives and endures eight years with unimaginable courage in a concentration camp. In 1948, after completing her sentence, she is released, only to be arrested again months later and sentenced to live for the rest of her life in an atrocious region of northern Siberia, in a climate where the temperature falls to fifty degrees below zero, where she survives another six years, to be rehabilitated on the death of Stalin. In subhuman conditions, Ariadna begins to establish, from a place that does not even exist on maps, contact with relatives and friends of her mother, contemporary writers, publishers, editors, whoever might have knowledge of the whereabouts of her mother’s papers. Before returning to Moscow, Tsvetaeva had deposited in a Swiss literary institution some folders with writings that could endanger the family—political poems in praise of the Whites: The Demesne of the Swans, Perekop, and fragments of one not yet finished: Poem of the Tsar’s Family—writings so intimate that it would be fatal to know that they had been read by enemies’ eyes, a tiny drop in the vast sea of her production. Everything else, everything, it can be said, was scattered throughout the homes of friends, or people who were friends and became enemies, or who refused her access for fear of implicating themselves. After returning from exile, Ariadna dug for clues about writings from Moscow, Berlin, Belgrade, Prague, Paris, and uncovered hard-to-find editions and texts published in magazines and newspapers that had not existed for decades, as well as those unpublished. Thanks to her daughter’s methodical and selfless activity, the body of the work remained complete, except for a few minor pieces. Almost everything recovered has been published. Ariadna, before dying, placed in the custody of a Soviet Institute of Literature various folders that she deemed inconvenient to be made public before the year 2000. This legacy may provide immense surprises. It is possible that some enigmas will be cleared up.
The response to Tsvetaeva’s work has taken on in the past two decades an epiphanic quality, an immense and unexpected revelation. During the years of War Communism, during the time of famine, chaos, uncertainty, alone in a chaotic Moscow, when Sergei Efron was away, a conscript in the Tsarist regular army and then the White Army of General Wrangel, little Ariadna was her mother’s closest friend, her confidante. At times, Marina became a little girl, and her daughter transformed into a rare phenomenon that surprised everyone; she read what her mother read, spoke as she spoke, recited Rilke and Homer; Tsvetaeva’s friends were left speechless in her presence. She was the first person to whom her mother read her poems, her prose, her letters to her family, colleagues, friends. And the little girl commented as if they were peers on the rhythm, or the effectiveness of this or that effect that could perfect her writing. A decade later, in Czechoslovakia, when Georgy was born, called Mur from birth in honor of Hoffmann’s fictional cat, Ariadna was pushed aside and placed for a time in a boarding school for Russian children in the Czech countryside. Upon returning home, the child prodigy who handled rhetoric with unimaginable virtuosity had become a girl on the brink of adolescence, who had become almost normal. She grows distant from her mother, for whom Mur is everything, and increasingly closer to her father, that melancholy being, always in delicate health, tossed aside by everyone, powerless before life, whom she chose to view this way. Thereafter, she lived in his shadow, and adopted his ideas. For Efron, the years in the White Army were a nightmare; they left him traumatized. On his father’s side, he was Jewish; his mother, an aristocrat, a runaway from a very young age, a militant in terrorist societies, spent various periods of time behind bars, and ended up committing suicide, just as her eldest son had, at the end of a trial in which she would surely have been convicted. Anti-Semitism was endemic in the reactionary sectors of the country; in Crimea, in Ukrainian Galicia, pogroms were the order of the day. Cutting off the beards of Jews, destroying their businesses, beating them were everyday occurrences, an amusing sport, regardless of whether the victims were old men, women, or children. If one died from the beating, it would not anger Our Lord; on the contrary, it might even mean an indulgence to forgive the batterer’s sins. To be a part of and live for years among those people who hated someone like him as if it were totally natural, a Jew, sickly, a literato, not leaving sooner was one of the greatest mistakes of this story. Of course, there were many others.
For seven years it seems that they saw each other only once clandestinely, or he took advantage of some oth
er way to give Marina news of his life and announce that once the Tsar’s army was defeated he would join the White Army in the Crimea. Marina’s extremely harried life in Moscow at this time is well known, recorded in magnificent autobiographical essays. She endured hunger and extreme poverty, although it seemed to go reasonably unnoticed because almost everyone lived in the same conditions. With the help of an acquaintance, after the death of her second child due to a lack of money, she obtained a credential necessary to receive a modest living allowance and food vouchers. She wrote several books that helped affirm her literary presence. She had numerous affairs, hurried, intense, frenzied, and unhappy at the same time. She wrote a book with no hope of being published that she considered the best she had written to date: The Demesne of the Swans, civil and epic poetry, a salute to the best, the Whites, the warriors against the revolutionary hydra of a thousand heads, the knights of good among whom was her beloved Sergei. After having not seen him for so many years, she had transformed him into an epic figure—he was Siegfried, he was Parsifal—and very rarely the poor and sickly Sergei, that beautiful and docile creature whom she had married in her adolescence, whom she didn’t even know was still alive, fighting against evil and for the sake of Russia or buried in the south in an unmarked grave. When they finally reunited in Berlin, she introduced him immediately to Andrei Bely, the great Russian Symbolist, anticipating that they would become good friends. Tsvetaeva wrote the scene: “I remember Bely’s special, intensified attentiveness to him [Sergei Efron], attention directed to each word, attention for each word, that special avidity of the poet for the world of action, avidity with even a glimmer of envy…(Let us not forget, that all the poets of the world have loved military men.)”6 For Efron, the opposite was true, nothing seemed more repellent to him than his recent military past; he could not forget the humiliations he had endured during those years, the cruelties with which he had lived. Marina found it difficult to understand, much less hear him say, that the political movement that was unfolding in Russia was very complex and very difficult to understand from Europe, which is why the educated Russians, like they themselves and their friends, could not understand it; they were all educated as Europeans, she insisted. Russia is only half European; the other half of its spirit is Asian. When he arrived in Berlin, he read his wife’s dithyrambic poems to the swans whose elegant plumage alone was enough to defeat the Bolsheviks. He told her that none of it made sense, either aesthetically or ethically. To publish that book would be a moral error. Her reputation would be tarnished. It would be an affront to the Jews murdered by the Cossacks, and to the Russian peasants dispossessed by the Whites, “it would be an affront to your intelligence and poetry,” he said. “The best you can do,” he insisted, “is destroy, burn those papers, and forget about them. They are not swans, Marina, they are vultures, believe me.” Marina was very distressed; she stopped defending her work in public because Sergei demanded it. She loved his military tone, it was an order; but she did not destroy the poems.
During his years of absence, she had invented a husband. Afterwards, she did not know how to take him. Her love for him was not constant—it waxed and waned. It would always be this way. In 1915, she wrote to her sister-in-law: “I love Seriozha for life, he is my very own and I will never leave him for anyone. I write him at least every other day, he knows all about my life, though I try to write less about what is most sad [the death of Irina, their second daughter]. There is a burden in my heart always. I go to sleep with it and I wake up with it.”7
And yet, during those very days she was carrying on a tumultuous affair and for all to see, with a second-rate poet named Sophia Parnok.
The reunion in Berlin was difficult. Time had changed them. They had become different people and continued to be until the end. Sergei discovered that during the short time that Marina spent in Germany waiting for him, she had had a romantic relationship with someone else. He confided it in a letter to a mutual friend, the poet Voloshin, in whose house in Yalta the couple had met. In the letter, he said he had discovered that Marina had a lover; to be offended by it made no sense, seven years had passed without seeing each other, and in all that time she had been free as they had agreed when they married. He was writing to him about something more serious, to announce that he had thought about dissolving their marriage, that he had decided to leave Marina. Her stupid affairs made him ill, and the last lover, about whom she claimed to be more passionate than ever, was a despicable man, a second-rate Casanova; that his youthful passion for her had disappeared, that he had planned to leave her, but on later reflection decided to sacrifice himself, because Marina was weak and would not survive such a bad experience without his help. At the same time, Marina wrote to a friend that living with Sergei was impossible, that “his very presence gnawed at her soul.” But she knew that without her he would not be able to survive, “after all, I came abroad to join Sergei. Without me he would perish—from the simple inability to manage his life.”8 They both convinced themselves that they had each sacrificed for the other to save their marriage. For Marina the crisis was intense, serious, it left her shattered in body and spirit, but as everyone knew, each of these disasters invariably increased her creative powers. Thereafter, the marriage took on another character. Efron lost face with his friends in Prague; his closeness to Marina’s lover turned out to be extremely awkward for him, they had been friends since youth, they were both officers in the White Army, and studied together in Prague in the Faculty of Philology. From then on, the intimacy between father and daughter begins. A tacit pact of solidarity for life.
It is somewhat paradoxical that, once they all disappeared, and in the atrocious way in which they met their end, Marina Tsvetaeva’s literary legacy continues to endure thanks to the daughter who was distant to her in the last fifteen years of her life, and that she put so much of the energy she had left after having suffered fifteen years in prison, to organize her file and collect and classify the unpublished texts and correspondence. Hers was not a vicarious life, but rather one of triumph. In her last twenty years, Ariadna was Marina’s mother, her guide, the master of her destiny. Without her, we would not be able to read her.
5 Translated by Walter Arndt.
6 Translated by J. Marin King.
7 Translated by Simon Karlinksy.
8 Also translated by Karlinsky.
23 MAY
Here I am again in Leningrad. Contrary to all expectations the weather is gorgeous, perfectly bright and almost warm. They booked me into the Evropeiskaya, the imperial hotel where I stayed seven or eight years ago, to attend the opening of the Orozco exhibition at the Hermitage. Mid-morning, I paid a courtesy visit to the city’s Writers’ Union, a beautiful palace with Rococo interiors that clash with the Soviet office furniture and especially with the functions of that graveyard. At no time was I able to broach any of the current topics. I’m wondering if Moscow reported how badly I behaved there and has given instructions to keep me quiet during my meeting with the writers. The writers who welcomed me talked only about literature (so to speak) and only on the importance of landscape in Russian narrative. They spoke and gesticulated with exuberance; as soon as one was about to finish his monologue, another would take his place—a game of questions and answers. Someone asked a rhetorical and contrived question like: Is Soviet Russian literature not, perhaps, that which has most exalted nature, from the revolution to the present day?—while the one facing me answered: But, certainly, of course, the forest, the river, and the sea are themes that we cultivate most, also the desert, the steppe, the tundra, lakes so big they look like oceans, we have it all and of it all we sing. The only thing missing were the balalaikas so they could sing in honor of each of these formations of the earth’s crust and also, in passing, the wildlife and minerals; in the meantime we drank coffee, ate cookies, desserts; and when the dishes were empty, they stood up, thanked me for the visit, accompanied me to the entrance, and before I realized it, I was already on the street. In the afterno
on, a work of contemporary Russian theater about family problems, the lack of communication between generations; it bored me so much that I took advantage of the intermission to sneak out. I ran out into the street and walked. I walked for hours and hours. What splendor! Truly! There is nothing as splendid, intense, and tragic as this city! What melancholy! I spent part of the walk chatting with an Uzbek journalist, whom I met in a second-hand bookshop on Gorky Street. We spoke, as far as my Russian allowed, about literature and cities. He was amazed that I knew his country: Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara. He didn’t want to talk about his country’s current political or social affairs either, and he avoided the few questions I ventured, as if he had no interest in what was happening at the time, which means he wasn’t pleased with the current moves, or that he was overly cautious and, because he did not know me from Adam, it was better to remain silent to avoid problems at work, for example. I got to my room half an hour ago. I read a few pages of The White Ship, by Chingiz Aitmatov, and I underlined these lines: “It is said, and not in vain, that people do not forgive the man who is unable to demand respect. He did not know how…He was softhearted, and that thankless human quality was apparent at first glance.”9 Later I pulled out another quote from one of Canetti’s diaries from an Italian magazine, which he wrote the day he turned fifty-five: “Learn to speak again at fifty-five, not a new language but speech itself. Discard all my prejudices, even if nothing else is left. Reread the great books whether I’ve actually read them before or not. Listen to people without lecturing them, especially those who have nothing to teach me. Stop validating fear as a means of fulfillment. Struggle against death without constantly pronouncing its name. In short, courage and justice.”10 I, who transcribes those thoughts, will in three years turn fifty-five, Canetti’s age when he wrote those words…Learn language, learn to speak, and learn that one does not have to want to be respected…that life is something much more mysterious and simpler…that should be the journey. I will make every effort, with courage and justice, as much as I can. ¡Ojalá! I hope!