by Sergio Pitol
While in Paris the Efrons lived in conditions of extreme poverty, in squalid neighborhoods on the city’s outskirts; changing residences inevitably meant descending into an even greater squalor. At times, all four slept in one room, without sanitary facilities. And under these conditions, crushed by the needs of the household, she wrote unceasingly. The awareness of her genius never abandoned her. The intense correspondence she maintained with Rilke in 1926, and the elegy that he wrote for her shortly before his death, were for her the highest praise that her effort deserved:
Waves, Marina, we’re ocean! Depths, Marina, we’re sky! Earth, Marina, we’re earth, thousand times Spring, the larks which an outburst of song flings toward the Invisible! We begin it as jubilation, from the first it wildly exceeds us!18
That Rilke would sing her in one of his great elegies sheltered her from the cawing rooks who insulted her. By 1933, all sectors were against her: the Communists for her boundless praise of the old Russia, the crown, the Tsar and his family; and conservatives, on the other hand, for her admiration of Pasternak and Mayakovsky. Simon Karlinsky notes, “She had gone too far for the left and right at the same time. In the end no one spoke to her.” At the very end of their stay in France, Efron began working in a Soviet office of repatriation of Russian exiles, which left no doubt in the minds of the Russian exiles regarding his activities.
And then the big surprise! The body of a Soviet agent who had defected was found in Lausanne. One of the murderers was arrested. There were witnesses that saw him on different occasions enter the office of repatriation where Sergei Efron worked. Efron is summoned to a police station for questioning, after which he disappears and reappears months later in Moscow, where Ariadna was already living. Soviet intelligence services organized his flight to protect him, it was said, fearing perhaps that he would give details about the case, and perhaps about others. Would it not seem that the direction his life had taken was revenge, even if unconscious, for the humiliation he suffered years ago in Prague, for the accumulation of grievances, for the scorn in which Marina held him in every sphere, intellectual and sexual?
As Sergei and Ariadna moved increasingly closer toward Communism, Marina wrote relentless tributes to the Whites. The first, The Demesne of the Swans, was followed by another that had been conceived in Paris, Perekop, a long dark poem about the last battle fought by those crusaders who fascinated her so much and their final surrender in Perekop; in her final years she took notes to write a long elegy in memory of the Tsar’s family, of which only fragments remain. The two halves of the marriage gradually radicalized their positions. During her last period in Paris, she was no longer able to publish. For the first time, she began to feel devalued and out of place. The few letters she sent to distant friends reflect her disenchantment. Her housing conditions were atrocious, sordid rooms in squalid hotels; alone, she began to feel that even poetry itself was abandoning her. And in this condition of delirium, seeing no outlets in France, without friends, without means of subsistence, she committed the biggest mistake of her life: she returned to Russia, to live in a society that she hated and where she was hated, where she reunited with her family, a few friends from her youth—Ehrenburg, Pasternak, Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky, who had converted to Marxism and repatriated—her sister Anastasia, her sisters-in-law and, above all, Sergei and Ariadna. She lived with her husband and daughter only a few weeks, later both were arrested, as well as her sister Anastasia, and for two years she led a ghostly life in Moscow, a shadow of other shadows. Mur rebels. He accused her of being responsible for the family’s misfortunes, for his father’s and sister’s imprisonment, for the absence of destiny that is being constructed for him. Then came the war, and she committed suicide.
In her lifetime, some of those who dealt with her, loved and admired her, were amazed by the conspiracy that existed between her genius and her inability to perceive reality.
Pasternak, one of her closest friends, sketched some features of Marina in his An Essay in Autobiography:
That Marina Tsvetaeva had always held her work between herself and the reality of daily life; and when she found this luxury beyond her means, when she felt that for her son’s sake she must, for a time, give up her passionate absorption in poetry and look around her soberly, she saw chaos, no longer screened by art, fixed, unfamiliar, motionless, and, not knowing where to run for terror, she hid in death, putting her neck into the noose as she might have hidden her head under her pillow.19
12 This and other translations from Russian Life do not give the name of the translator. —Trans.
13 Translated by Max Hayward.
14 Translated by Philippe Radley.
15 Also translated by Radley.
16 Russian Life.
17 I was unable to find the entire quote in English translation. The first sentence was translated by Elaine Feinstein. —Trans.
18 Translated by Edward Snow.
19 Translated by Manya Harari.
28 MAY
At the Iveria Hotel. I’ve been in Tbilisi one full day. My room is on the seventh floor. The view is superb. I did a vast number of things today and I feel tired. Yesterday, I still didn’t know if I would come to Georgia. But I sent word to the literary chieftains that I was fed up with their vagueness and their mysteries, so the best thing to do would be to interrupt my trip though the USSR and return to Prague. I was given to understand that would happen, but a short time later a ticket to, yes, Tbilisi arrived by messenger, an employee from the bottom of the hierarchy, or so he referred to himself; I don’t know whether to apologize or scold myself for my thanklessness, because they had bestowed so many kindnesses on me and I had not responded in kind, I was now getting what I deserved, that is, his humble company. Even on the plane I found it hard to believe that I was heading to Tbilisi, Tiflís in Spanish (an obsolete name, even in Spanish publications the Georgians write Tbilisi), where I arrived at ten at night, replete with a splendid moon. Sensation of treading on royal ground! From what I was able to glimpse by moonlight, it is a splendid city, different from all other Soviet cities. Today I started my tour, I began to touch the strata that make it up, a constant process of mental construction or deconstruction, a trip through various cultural layers that have been superimposed on the region, leaving vestiges of what it has been: Hellas, Byzantium, Persia, the Slavs of the first millennium, the Christian churches of the fifth century, the influence of Central Asia, Sufism. Visually, bathed in evening light, Tbilisi is an Andalusian town nestled in the Caucasus. The Persian presence is equivalent to the Arab presence in Andalusia. By day it has other attributes, a majestic topography, a city of hills and canyons crossed by a river that can be seen from everywhere. The houses appear to rush toward the void, terraces and balconies fly through the air, over cliffs, through which flows the mighty Kura. I was just with the writers at their organization’s headquarters. They are truly the rebellion; at least the handful with whom I spoke. They have invited me to a banquet, a supra, at two in the afternoon. Last night, after arriving at the airport, I knew my stay in Georgia would be wonderful. Despite recent disappointments and inconveniences, I can say that it has been a memorable journey, and that the obstacles to reach my goal had a noticeable effect: they caused my interest in the region to grow. In The Tempest, Prospero magically devised an intricate plot so that Miranda, his daughter, and the heir to the kingdom of Naples will fall in love. It is the first step towards the unmasking of his enemies and their asking for forgiveness for having dethroned and exiled him. Many years have passed, and it is time to repair the wounds. The young couple’s love, and their subsequent marriage, is the bond that reunites the separated parties. It was enough that the two young lovers look into each other’s eyes to become bewitched. Prospero is happy because this event is an essential part of his strategy, but, as an intelligent man, he decides to thwart the lovers’ conversation, punish their love, knowing that when the triumph of love is easy, its value decreases. If they had read Shakespeare well, Russian w
riters would not have placed so many obstacles and difficulties in my way to reach Georgia. Their strategy was wrong. They destined that I find all the virtues of the world in this place. At the airport, I already noticed that the standard of living is much higher than the two major Russian cities: Moscow and Leningrad. As soon as I left the airport my sinusitis disappeared. And throughout the morning I have breathed beautifully.
29 MAY
Into what world have I stumbled? Last night I couldn’t write anything about my visit to the Writers’ House, my walks, the supra on the riverbank, and something else that I find hard to describe. In the morning, I continued to enjoy the splendid view that the balcony affords me. I had already spent a while there before bathing. The climate is perfect, like Cuernavaca’s. Around the hotel, brick houses of two or three stories with red roofs abound, which contrast with the architecture of cement or reinforced concrete that is now fashionable in the world and is abused in socialist countries. In the distance, all around, towers with conical metal roofs dot the landscape. Some buildings with Moorish elements, possibly from the last century, with a more or less artificial appearance, stand out. The towers of the Orthodox churches and monasteries have the air of minarets trimmed mid-growth. Yesterday, an interpreter, who will be my guide to take me to the Writers’ House, came to pick me up. I walked into a room where there were a dozen Georgians; a few more arrived later. On the tables there are big ceramic bowls overflowing with fruit. During our conversation we are invited to eat giant pears and apples; they peel them with knives in slow, precise gestures, cut them elegantly, and ceremoniously offer each other pieces of fruit as if fulfilling an ancient rite, then offer them to me and my guide. I learn that the first book of literature written in Georgian dates to the fifth century, an extremely remote date, and their ecclesiastical literature is even older. I ask them to repeat the date for me, because it seems all but impossible that the Georgians already had books in their language in the final days of the Roman Empire, five centuries before the Romance languages had produced a literary text. Could it have been the fifteenth century? I ask again, and they answer no. They also explain to me that the golden age of Georgian literature was the twelfth century, in which the great classic of the nation, The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, was composed by Shota Rustaveli. I gather from the conversation that Georgian literature as well as cinema and theater are based on three elements: a strict sense of form, an effort of imagination that in no way dismisses the mythological, an attachment to reality, and at the same time the criticism of that very reality. They repeatedly complain that for a long time Georgians have not been considered as thinking beings, but rather as a national group that expresses its happiness vacuously by singing, dancing, and drinking wine all the time. “For many it has been very eye-opening to know that we Georgian writers and filmmakers are tremendously self-critical. We are not only a hedonistic nation, it must be stressed, but also a tragic one,” says the writer who chairs the meeting. Another man, in his sixties, short, plump, with a sensual mouth and skin that has been cruelly punished by smallpox, or by juvenile acne so pernicious that it destroyed his face, protests in a muffled voice, because the fair sex, the blessed ladies, above all the Nordic and German ones, consider Georgians as mere sex objects and not as subjects capable of making poetry, and this had ruined the prestige of the nation. “Pasternak was a great enthusiast of our poets, he wrote about them and translated the best. The French translations have been based on his translations, they have been published in France and Switzerland, and it has been very difficult to get out of their head that their splendor is owed to Pasternak alone and not to the authors themselves, whom they regard as mere raw material. But what can we do, their wives, their daughters come to Georgia and when they return to their countries what they want to talk about is the muscular strength of our boys, what they have between their legs, and not that they read poems here or there. They come in the summer, not like lobsters—not at all!—they come like packs of cougars, and they pounce hungry and ferocious on our defenseless bodies; not even the old men are safe. We endure them for three months during summer, and they leave us looking like skeletons. Our brains dry up and it takes us a long time to recover our vitality and remember our language properly. There is a lack of respect in such a crude way of behaving, don’t you think? One of my cousins who is older than I, his legs amputated in the war…” And there they all stop him mid-gallop. He acts a little stunned, apologizes, everyone then laughs, they talk among each other, discuss something that the interpreter doesn’t want to translate for me, peel more apples and pears, cut them into pieces and share them again. “Perhaps,” says a playwright, Shadiman Schamanadze, the youngest of the group, “no country in the world feels dissatisfaction for its achievements like Georgia. They label what amazes them about us as experiments in the avant-garde, we’re either the children of Beckett, or the surrealists or the minimalists; okay, yes, some may be, but I think we are instead the result of a different tradition, which goes far back in time.” Someone explains that the new generation feeds on ancient Georgian literature, and that’s why it seems so new. “What is being written today,” the playwright insists, “is a tragic literature, characterized by its acceptance of pain. The recognition of a moral code that comes from antiquity. What differentiates us from the West,” he concludes, “is our wish to build.” Before leaving the Writers’ House they showed me a list of Mexican books translated into Georgian in the last ten years: Rafael Muñoz’s Let’s Go with Pancho Villa; The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela; and The Death of Artemio Cruz, by Carlos Fuentes, along with some ghosts of socialist realism, which nobody in Mexico reads—least of all the left: Lorenzo Turrent Rozas, José Mancisidor and others…I then had a few hours to begin my city tour and my rudimentary apprenticeship about things in Georgia. In the year 337 (the source comes from museum brochures), Christianity was officially accepted in Iberia (Eastern Georgia), that is, surprisingly long before Rome. Its great religious art flourished from the eighth to the eleventh century. They showed me wonderful icons, in one of them St. George slays the Emperor Constantine with a spear, evidently before his conversion to Christianity. A linguistic relationship has been found between Georgian and the Basque language. One of the oldest names of the region was Iberia. This first day in Georgia was equivalent in intensity to a quarter of my usual life. What a radiant representation of life! What faces, what eyes, what movements while walking, what voices! No praise is enough to describe them. It would certainly be sparing. What is most striking is their naturalness. These are people who have made great strides. The street shows it. The women and the men, the old and the young, all seem to own the space in which they were destined to live, perhaps the entire world. The group that met at the restaurant at noon was made up of the writers I met in the morning plus a few others, as well as visual artists. There were several very beautiful young women whom no one was able to identify for me, whether wives or daughters of the attendees, or writers or actresses; the truth is, they all looked like actresses of a single role, that of Carmen la de Triana. I compare this encounter to the lunch with the Muscovite “writers,” who seemed like somber mummies, pompous caricatures compared to the flesh and blood people with whom I am meeting now. Before eating I made a short speech of gratitude. I spoke of the happiness I had noticed in the city, and concluded by saying only that a State that succeeded in bringing happiness to its people, that had at hand the resources to meet the physical and spiritual needs of society, justified a political and social system. The same young playwright from that morning replied that I shouldn’t let the solar aspect of this Southern country fool me, that Georgians were far from being the swarm of voluptuous heathens that the world reveled in seeing, but rather thinking people, serious and critical of their own shortcomings. I liked his answer, but by then I rejoiced in everything that was being said at the table. It was a Pantagruelian banquet that lasted five hours. Solemn at moments but always entertaining. The villain of every story was socia
list realism—its mere mention provoked uproarious laughter. Both malicious and humorous anecdotes were recounted of some literary figures from Soviet Central Asia, local heroes who in their youth had written poems or novels, and who in recent decades did nothing but write speeches at conferences like the one that was being prepared. Bottles of an almost black wine were circulated endlessly. There was a moment when everyone was talking without knowing to whom. My interpreter translated into French loose phrases here and there, words that did not connect with anything, or instead of translating things that interested me, he described instead the gestures and movements of the characters, which made me feel on stage acting in a piece by Ionesco: “What did the young lady who made everyone laugh say?” I asked, and he replied: “That woman is not as young as you might think, she ended up sitting down, look, she finally took the spoon to her mouth,” or, in response to the question about what the director of the Union said during his toast, he said: “The tamada raises the horn of plenty with his right hand; his neighbor was served caviar and now he’s running his hand along his jacket sleeve to remove the crumbs.” “But what is the tamada saying at this moment?” I insisted. “He is saying that nature is taking revenge on us, and with each passing day the revenge will be greater. Look at the woman there, across from us, she’s an architect, although she doesn’t look like one. They are serving grape leaves stuffed with ground beef again. He’s talking about a confusion of the sexes, because an American woman who was here recently combed her hair like a cowboy and didn’t allow anyone to call her girl but rather boy, and used the masculine gender; she said, for example, ‘We Oklahoma boys…’” I began to speak in very bad Russian with another table companion. I think I understood that Bob Dylan and some friends, one of which was the woman who insisted she was a boy, had eaten with them very recently at the same restaurant, as guests of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and are probably at his villa right now, on one of the famous beaches: Batumi and Sukhumi, places I’d like to visit one day as a tourist. I glanced across the table and saw that the supra had taken on an air of bedlam. They’ve added tables and chairs and the group was becoming immense, we had taken over the entire terrace, at times the musicians approached us, played their instruments beside us, and everyone sang beautifully and endlessly. The laughter was explosive and contagious. Against all warnings from Dr. Rody, my physician in Prague, I drank like a fish without feeling the slightest discomfort. At times, I was annoyed by the excessive nationalism of some of the dinner guests; it seemed like as the liquor took over the sense of race grew, which caused me to make scenes, to quote Thomas Mann and mention his concept of citizen of the world. And when they squawked about the purity of their blood, I sang the praises of mestizaje, I reminded them that Pushkin was a mulatto and toasted to him. The protocol, the very conception of the Georgian supra, does not favor two-way communication. Only the tamada, the toastmaster, can concede the floor, and on this occasion it was the director of the Writers’ Union, a man of great stage presence and whose authority was accepted by the others. Every time I tried to participate, he allowed me to say four or five words, six at the most, then cheerfully interrupted me to allow someone else to tell a story in which everyone participated alternately with a comment. Of course, one could always talk privately with those at the table, but not for long. The unfolding of a Georgian meal can be both thrilling and fatiguing. The table must always be served, glasses filled, and the environment must remain lively and cordial. The hosts are princes…I started to feel fatigued, I desperately needed to urinate and wash my face, bathe it, soak my head, so I looked for the men’s room. A female employee made it known that on that day it was closed, she showed me a sign and told me in Russian that I should go down beside the river, where I’d find the great toilette. The pockmarked writer changed seats and sat next to me. Using macaronic Italian he continued to tell me about the persecutions in which he had been an object during the summers; soon he would retire to the mountains, to a village that is difficult to access, where it would be calmer, he would go with other old men to rest, or rather to hide, because last year he had to live locked in a barn where his grandchildren smuggled him food, “Because the German and Finnish women climb like goats, I swear, I’m convinced they would climb the Himalayas if they knew they would find a lost Georgian man there, and even if he were dying, they’d bang him, just imagine what they’d do in places that aren’t as inaccessible; they’re guided by smell, they say that the semen of the Georgians is gold; bah, nonsense, but that’s what they say, and that it’s also the most aromatic in the world, so they go around like little animals sniffing the ground, rooting for truffles, by the aroma alone, that’s how they are.” He offered to go with me to the restroom and bring me back to the restaurant. It is impossible for me to write more. The experience was almost traumatic, it was too disturbing, the smell of excrement makes me physically ill, and I had had tons to drink. I left the toilet alone and arrived back at the restaurant as best I could to find my guide to take me to the hotel, I think I didn’t even say goodbye to anyone. I’ll have to apologize. A very beautiful young woman stopped me to tell me that the man who went outside with me was her father, and that he had not returned. She asked me if he had said whether he was going straight home. I said I didn’t know, but that he had left, that I saw him leave. “To the right or left?” she wanted to know. I replied that I hadn’t noticed, that it seemed instead that he had gone to the river. If I had been honest, I would have had to tell her that the last place I left him was at the latrine, and that he was lowering his pants while talking to some boys who welcomed him with obvious delight.