Death and Reciprocity in Tsvetaeva 'S Poems to Rilke*

ALYSSA W. DINEGA (Notre Dame, IN, USA)

THIRSTING FOR ANGELIC: DEATH AND RECIPROCITY IN TSVETAEVA 'S POEMS TO RILKE*

The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song.

Wallace Stevens, "Of Mere Being

Just a few days after the death of Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Ma- rina Tsvetaeva recalled in a letter his experiments in writing poetry in French toward the end of his life: "He was tired of the language of his birth. He was weary of omnipotence, began longing for apprenticeship, seized the language . most inhospitable to poets - French ... and again he could, once more he could, and he immediately tired of it. The problem turned out to be not with German, but with Human. His thirst for French turned out to be a thirst for Angelic [Delo okazalos' ne v nemetskom, a v chelovecheskom. Zhazhda frantsuzskogo okazalas' zhazhdoi angel'skogo]."2

* This project was assisted by a grant from the Eurasia Program of the Social Science Re- search Council with funds provided by the State Department under the Program for Research and Training on Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union (Title VIIn. This article is a revised and shortened version of a chapter in my book, "A Russian Psyche: The Poetic Mind of Marina Tsvetaeva," forthcoming from The University of Wisconsin Press, copy- right 2001.1. ' 1. Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Paerns and a Play, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), p. 398. ' 2. Marina Tsvetaeva, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh (Moscow: Ellis. Lak, 1994-95), 6: 267. All translations from the original in this article are mine unless otherwise noted. Rilke was born in 1875 into the German minority community of Prague, which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His lifelong interest in Slavic cultures was first piqued during his formative years in Prague. For a concise biography of Rilke and introduction to his works, see Patricia Pollock Brodsky, Ratner Maria Rilke (Boston: Twayne, 1988). For a discussion of the During the spring and summer of 1926, Rilke and Tsvetaeva had carried on an intense correspondence that had lapsed abruptly just a few months be- fore Rilke's death from leukemia at the end of December.3 Tsvetaeva had loved and revered Rilke since her youth; he was for her the very incarnation of Poetry (in her first letter to him she terms him "Poetry embodied"4). Although Rilke was one generation her senior, Tsvetaeva, who in any case never consented to the tyrannical limitations of time, interpreted his age more as a sign of his spiritual superiority than as any barrier to an equal friendship. Tsvetaeva's correspondence with Rilke has been largely ignored in the scholarship on Rilke, but has been much discussed and debated in Tsvetaeva scholarship.5 Most commentators have read Tsvetaeva's and Rilke's letters to one another as an imbalanced contest between Tsvetaeva's importunate longing and Rilke's genteel, polite, but perturbed and detached resistance to her desires. Rilke's very willingness to engage in the correspondence at all has been viewed as a condescension to Tsvetaeva's perceived desperation. In my

importance of Russia to Rilke, see Anna Tavis, Rilke's Russia: A Cultural Encounter (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1994). 3. The correspondence between Tsvetaeva and Rilke, all of which was conducted in German, is published in Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Zwetajewa, Boris Pasternak,: Briefwechsel (Frank- furt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1983). Tsvetaeva had been trilingual in Russian, German, and French since early childhood, a fact which allowed her to read in a deeply meaningful way not only Rilke's German poetry, but also his French collection Vergers, which he sent to her shortly after its publication. For a perceptive discussion of how Tsvetaeva's trilingualism is evinced in her poetry, see Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour, Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the "First" Emigration (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989). All in all, the known Tsvetaeva-Rilke correspondence includes nine letters and a postcard that Tsvetaeva wrote to Rilke during his lifetime; he sent her six letters and his "Elegy to Marina Tsvetaeva-Efron." 4. Briefwechsel, p. 105. 5. Konstantin Azadovskii [Asadowskij] provides a wealth of factual and background infor- mation in his notes and commentaries to both the German edition (Briefwechsel) and the Russian edition (Rainer Mariia Ril'ke, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva: Pis'ma 1926 goda [Moscow: Kniga, 1990]) of the Tsvetaeva-Rilke correspondence. For other commentaries, see Olga Peters Hasty, Tsvetaeva's Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word (Evanston, IL: Northwestem Univ. Press, 1996), chs. 6 and 7; two works by Anna Tavis, "Russia in Rilke: Rainer Maria Rilke's Correspondence with Marina Tsvetaeva," Slavic Review 52, no. 3 (Fall 1993), 494-511 1 and Rilke's Russia: A Cultural Encounter, ch. 9; and Patricia Pollock Brodsky, "On Daring to Be a Poet: Rilke and Marina Cvetaeva" (Germano-Slavica 3, no. 4 [Fall 1980]), 261-69. Tavis's ref- erence to Tsvetaeva's "[increasing self-indulgence and] demands for personal intimacy (zhutkaia intimnost)" ("Russia in Rilke," p. 503) and Hasty's perception that Tsvetaeva is "aggressive" (p. 162) and that her "claims and demands" on Rilke amount to a "siege" (p. 161 ) are characteristic of the very strong language that, unfortunately, has often been used in relation to the Tsvetaeva- Rilke correspondence. Brodsky, on the contrary, provides a clear-sighted and balanced view of both correspondents: "Rilke found in Cvetaeva an unexpected and challenging late friendship; she found in him an artistic equal and a friend whose letters helped her survive her degradations" (p. 262).