I

Pasternak said that Marina Tsvetaeva achieved just what the Symbolists wanted to achieve and did it better. The early Tsvetaeva was

exactly what all the other symbolists, taken together, wanted to be and couldn't. Where their literary efforts helplessly thrashed about in a world of thought-up schemes and lifeless archaisms, Tsvetaeva soared easily above the difficulties of genuine creation, solved its problems effortlessly, with incomparable technical brilliance. ["Three Shadows," in Autobiographical Sketch, 1958].

Simon Karlinsky says [in his Marina Tsvetaeva, her life and work, 1966] that she did what … the Futurists wanted to do, and, again, that she did it better:

In terms of language and versification, the poetry of Posle Rossii is a staggering accomplishment—a synthesis of meaning, word, and verbal music which the Russian Futurist poetry strove for and so rarely achieved to such a degree.

Where then does Marina Tsvetaeva belong in Russian poetry? She never joined any school or movement, nor did she consider herself to be a member of either. She was born in the early 1890s, years in which many other great Russian poets were born. She was already writing poetry during the period dominated by Symbolism (her first volume of verse appeared in print in 1910). She lived and wrote in Russia during the emergence of two very vocal new schools of thought about the nature of poetry—Acmeism and Futurism, both of which came into being in 1909. They introduced poetic methods and philosophies which they saw as overcoming Symbolism. Tsvetaeva was still in Russia in the early post-revolution period when, after the demise of both Symbolism and Acmeism, and despite the brief proliferation of other schools, Futurism went on developing and establishing itself. In much of her work she often expresses passionate admiration for other poets, especially for Blok, the greatest of the Symbolists, and for Vološin, also a Symbolist; for Mandel' štam and Akhmatova, two very great poets who were both, in their early writing years, closely associated with Acmeism; for Mayakovsky, the best-known and most talented of the Russian Futurists; and for Pasternak, who, like herself, belonged to no school.

A new school means a new description of the act of creation and of the nature or status of poetry, self-consciously distinguishing itself from previous descriptions, as well as an intentional concentration upon and development of certain chosen techniques. Tsvetaeva, though she gives a new description of creation, and though she very powerfully develops new techniques, does not consciously classify herself while doing so. I want to show what I think are 'symbolist' and 'futurist' elements in her view of what the poet is, and what poetry means. But first I shall discuss under these two headings some of the qualities and devices of her own verse.

The Symbolist sought to evoke, by a central use of symbol, and the conveying of a powerful sense of symbol, some meaning greater than that of the words and phrases of his poem—whether 'the subtlest overtones of things' (Annesky) or the 'sensibly real and the mystical … fused in an indissoluble unity' (Volynsky). In brief, it is the way things are more than how they seem. They point to a reality 'more real' than the ordinary one. Acmeist and Futurist both attacked this notion. The former demanded, instead, the lucid evocation of tangible non-mysterious phenomena of this world, stressing that a poem is a verbal construction; the latter also insisted, but much more violently and militantly, that the word itself, not its vague connotations and indications, is the object the poet deals with. They demanded too that the poet be not merely this-worldly, but also modern—urban, technological and political.

There seems to be little of the Acmeist in Tsvetaeva. The tangible things of this world scarcely mattered to her. 'Everything I love', she writes (in a letter in 1926), 'from the moment of my love stops being external and … loses its "objective" value. For example, I have got from the sea, brought by the flowing tide or left by the ebb, a petrified chestnut—a talisman. It isn't a thing. It's a sign. What of? Well, if only of the ebb and flow of the tide.' Unlike some poets, (among her contemporaries most notably Pasternak) she does not see afresh the physical world, hardly cares about Nature; things come into her poetry only as signs and similes. Her bitterest complaint of her lover is that he rejects her as if she were a 'thing':

To throw away, like a thing,
Me, who didn't respect

A single thing in this
Inflated world of things!

II

The programme and the paraphernalia of Symbolism are utterly lacking in her work. But when we see in the Russian Symbolists' poetry and in their statements about poetry that they communicate, through a careful verbal 'music' and deliberate beauty, finely perceived states of mind, and, more, an elusive something else which is often expressed as the presence of the divine in, or seen through the earthly, then we shall find something of this in Tsvetaeva's earlier verse. There are the simple radiant cosmic images of Romantic and Symbolist poetry—sun, moon, snowstorm, angel, hell, or there is the selecting of the beautiful as subject-matter—the burning domes of Moscow churches, the eyelashes of a charming minstrel. There is, too, the mainly smooth-flowing melodious line and lulling repetition of stressed vowels in a verse that is made (unlike much of her later, more rugged verse) of entire sentences in which the syntax is relatively inconspicuous so that sounds, feelings, hints and evocations may dominate:

We dressed every morning in
fine Chinese silk, and we would
sing our paradisal songs at
the fire of the robbers' camp.

I shall lead you as a guest from another
country into the Chapel of the Inadvertent Joy

where pure gold domes will begin to shine
for you, and sleepless bells will will start thundering…

Many of her Poems about Moscow, the cycle Insomnia, poems addressed to Mandel'štam, and a cycle of Poems to Blok are melodious and evocative in these ways.

A typically Symbolist feature, moreover, is the adoption of an attitude of adoration. This is found in many of Tsvetaeva's poems of the early period. She adores particularly persons rather than the world, or the other world, or God. She expresses her love or admiration as worship and deifies the person. 'Divine boy' she calls Mandel'štam in one poem and is never afraid of being as outspoken as this. She uses the language of prayer—'Zaxodi—grjadi…' (Drop in—be manifest…). This is not just a hyperbolic trick; nor is it an exaggerated piece of flattery which would suggest no more than itself and make one think at most about the strength of the poet's emotions. Throughout the Poems to Blok—whom she often deifies, or sees as a priest, the eccelesiastical language is used with a rigour and firmness that prune it of excess, and make one think rather of the nature of admiration and the nature of genius. In writing of her admiration for men who were poets she is writing about poetry itself, about the inhering of that other, 'divine', element in human beings. These poems always centre upon a person. They are not philosophical, but express rather the 'divinity' in terms of how Tsvetaeva feels about it. They are, however, just as much the assertion of something 'more', but perhaps expressed with a deliberate bluntness and vigour, neglecting the delicate but worn-out effects of Symbolism. They move away from the earth, not because of any spiritual longing, but rather as if they were leaping away from it with both feet.

In a short poem in 1916 Tsvetaeva confesses that she loves people more than she loves God, but people as angels. 'God' is humanised—he is 'bent from worry' and he 'smiles'—but the angels are angels, 'with radiant bodies', 'with vast wings'. The divine element is transferred—without becoming less divine—from 'God' to 'angels'.

which is why I weep
so much
because more than God
I love his fair angels.

It is easy enough to point out such similarities, less easy to demonstrate too that peculiar sweep and force one senses in her early poems, that sense of the poet herself walking fast through them.

Most theories of poetry speak of getting back to what is real and genuine. The Symbolist too wanted to lift the veil of familiarity and ordinariness from the world and reveal its pristine strangeness or divinity (similarly, the Futurist wanted to tear all the masks and pretences from everyone (—his 'sryvanie masok'). Perhaps the special quality of Tsvetaeva's poetry derives from the way she does this instinctively and unprogrammatically, and as if there never were a veil or mask. Characteristic of all her work is this: the declaring and exhibiting of immediate feeling in all its undisguised detail. The unleashed, point-blank, absolutely unintimidated quality of her poetry is perhaps what makes it her own and unlike either of those schools through which she marches like a walker with rucksack and climbing stick who, though he breathes the air and climate of the lands he is tramping through, keeps his eyes fixed on his road.

III

"My Sister Life"!—The first thing I did, when I'd borne it all, from the first blow to the last, was spread my arms out wide, so that all the joints cracked. I fell under it as under a downpour.

This was Marina Tsvetaeva's reaction in 1922 to the first volume of verse by Pasternak that she read. The sentence tells us much about her attitude of worship and praise. Worship involves action, reaction, movement and the opening of one's self—'spread my arms out wide'. It also shows her method: the disturbing effect of the sentence comes from the last phrase: 'so that all the joints cracked'. How much more familiar this sentence would have been, how much easier to absorb, had that phrase been left out. She conjoins in one conception not only the emotion with the physical action—its sign and silent language—but also with the more precise details of the action, which, though they do emphasise its wholeness and abandon, are really irrelevant. 'So that all the joints cracked'—this is not just physical—the spreading of arms was already that—but it is uncomfortably detailed, and this is not the absurd detail which another poet might have included in order to debunk the emotion. Yet, why is the emotion not debunked by the cracking of joints? Because of that fearless entirety of body and soul that Tsvetaeva believes in, and because it is an example of telling the truth, not about feeling in a material world but about her feeling in body. She is instinctively unconcerned by what we traditionalist readers are looking for.

The attitude of worship is far from being typical of Futurist writing, and it is by no means Tsvetaeva's only attitude. Just as she readily, wholeheartedly, glorifies, so she readily attacks and vilifies—especially the bourgeois philistine, that complacent 'reader of newspapers' in the Paris train, or the stuporous suburb-dweller on the hills of Prague. Her friend and critic, Ivask summed her up as the 'poet of eulogy and slander' ('Poet xvaly i xuly'). And just as clearly she expresses her complete certainty about her own knowledge and gift. Is she arrogant, over self-assured? Among the miseries and disasters of her life, the lack of recognition and her being repudiated by so many people, the poet's inner certainty of Tightness stands up—strangely like a column in a falling building. Every poet must have this certainty, which becomes a theme instead of an impulse or implication felt only in particular circumstances, for example, in the poetically permissive atmosphere of Futurism, in an epoch of violence and noise where one has to shout to be heard, in an age where the poet is misunderstood, even rejected by most people. Her speaking of the assurance of genius shows the influence of the age, while her feeling it is something ageless. Mandel'štam [in his essay Morning of Acmeism, 1913] virtually defines the poet as the one who is sure he is right. From Tsvetaeva we hear something like that quite unreasonably convincing claim of D. H. Lawrence (in a letter about matters which are otherwise irrelevant here): 'You tell me I am wrong … I am not wrong.' For instance, comparing the poet's creating with the child's playing, she addresses the grown-up (the critic with moral objections): 'By bringing in your conscience you will confuse ours (a creative one). "That isn't the way to play" (you say). But yes, that is the way to play.' From the early Tsvetaeva one hears the shout: º know the truth—give up all other truths! ' In her later work we find both the repeated declaration that she is not writing for those who cannot understand and the brilliant analysis of 'rightness' as the poet's central experience. She compares the writer to the dreaming sleeper:

A series of doors, behind one of them someone—something (more often terrible) is waiting. The doors are identical. Not this one—not this one—not this one—that one. Who told me? No-one. I recognise the one I need by all the unrecognised ones (the right one by all the wrong ones). And so it is with words. Not this one—not this one—not this one—that one. By the obviousness of the wrong I recognise the right. Native to every sleeper and writer is the blow of recognition…

IV

The 'blow of recognition'. The language of violence and of action is characteristic, and this reminds us of Mayakovsky. In one of her letters to Anna Teskova Tsvetaeva writes that she hates the ocean because it takes away her freedom: to engage with it she has to swim—to become horizontal; she prefers the vertical engagement with mountains; and she hates love because it makes her passive—'waiting to see what it will do for you',—preferring the perpendicular of friendship. Elsewhere she expresses a boundless admiration for Pasternak who 'will never wait for death: much too impatient and eager—he'll throw himself into it head-first, chest-first…'; and she writes of creation: 'We throw ourselves under the scourge, like leaves … under the rain … Sheer joy in the blow as such…' Of poems she writes: 'I don't trust poems that pour forth; ones that tear forth, yes!' This dynamism is felt in the rhythms of her poetry. Andrej Bely spoke of her 'unconquerable rhythms'; Vladimir Orlov, editor of the Soviet edition of her poems, says that in these you are kept 'incessantly to attention' by the rhythm, and he describes her with words she used of Mayakovsy: 'The physical heartbeat—the blows of the heart—of a horse that has stood still too long, or of a man who is tied up.'

Rhythm is the most assertive and noticeable element in Tsvetaeva's poetry altogether, and she is particularly original and skilful in finding ways of basing poems upon the rhythms of physical or emotional 'reality' (or in precisely evoking those realities through the invention of suggestive rhythms). This she does with more realistic exactness and consistency than Mayakovsky, despite his theory about it. In the essay How to Make Verse (1926) Mayakovsky demanded that the rhythms of poetry should be produced by the actual rhythms of life, and, describing the sources of one of his long poems (To Serge Esenin) he mentioned the rhythms of walking along streets and of riding on trams, getting on and off them. Yet the relation between those 'real' rhythms and the rhythms of that poem has to be expounded and is nothing like so direct as that between some of Tsvetaeva's poetic metres and the rhythms of the movement or feeling that is her poem's subject.

Much of Tsvetaeva's originality lies in this combining of something undisguisedly, extraordinarily simple and basic—the shouting or sobbing throat itself, the very stamping feet of her life—with an intellectual sharpness, with poetic conceits, with literary-technical complexity. She has in common with Futurism the element of violence, the shout about herself, self-assurance as a theme and an attitude—hatred of the conservative and philistine mass.

In all this, she is especially like Mayakovsky; but she is unlike him in that she did not 'tread upon the throat of her song' and her emotional range is far wider than his. She remains lyrical, personal, sensitive, private and scornful of those who limit their sensibility to what they conceive to be 'modern' (she says, in another context 'He is of the twentieth century, but I am before all centuries').

V

Between Tsvetaeva's poetic techniques and those of Futurism there are many more affinities. Karlinsky says that after 1916 she 'entered the language-conscious area of the Russian literary tradition'. Now Tsvetaeva differs from the Futurist experimenters in that, like Pasternak, she preserves strict traditional stanza forms (generally quatrains) and rhyme schemes. Her metres are often highly original and complex, but they are almost always contained in a very regular pattern. Indeed, the regularity or rigidity of the pattern, contrasting with the oddness of the metres, becomes so conspicuous as to seem a novelty.

Another new device, belonging more to the category of rhythmic than of verbal inventiveness, but having the same effect of novelty and strength and of focus upon both the physicality of the word and the inalienability of its meaning, is the emphatic isolation of the monosyllable. Russian is given to polysyllabic words while English abounds in monosyllables—the bane of English translators from a complexly inflected language. But the English monosyllables are, in the main, articles, prepositions, conjunctions and various particles, which in Russian tend to be either represented by longer words or, more often, omitted altogether. Where Russian does have one-syllable words, these are more usually nouns or parts of verbs, which seem to gain a quite inimitable strength from being in a naturally polysyllabic context and not being drained of their originality by a surrounding of unemphasised grammatical monosyllables. Here is an example from lyric 2 of Poem of the End which goes, in the original, (with a word-forword version—in which words joined by hyphens represent a single word in the Russian):

Burning? Thus again-from-the-start
Life?—The-simplicity of-poems!
House, this means: out-of house
Into the-night.

There are several ways in which monosyllables are highlighted in Tsvetaeva's verse; the exploiting of this natural feature of Russian is one of them. Another is the repetitive placing of such words at the beginning and end of lines. This is most noticeable in an early poem, the remarkable third lyric in the Insomnia cycle. Not only does every line end with a monosyllable, but the latter rhymes four times, i.e., there is only one rhyme to each quatrain. Moreover, in almost every case this monosyllable is separated by a dash from its line (which, scanned a little differently, could be complete without it). Here are the first two stanzas, with the English translation which has, as far as possible, preserved this oddity:

In my enormous city it is night.

As from my sleeping house I go out

And people think perhaps I'm a daughter or wife
But in my mind is one thought only—night.

The July wind now sweeps a way for me
From somewhere, some window music though faint
The wind can blow until the dawn too
In through the fine walls of the breast rib-cage.

One more device used by Tsvetaeva for the isolating of the monosyllable is the use of an extraordinary hyphen to divide a word into its component syllables—each of them stressed. In lyric 8 (Poem of the End) it has essentially a rhythmic-imitative purpose. In lyric 10 there is something similar, but it is there for a semantic purpose. Tsvetaeva separates the first syllable (the prefix) of the word (meaning 'separation') by a dash from the rest of the word, so that the word, with the variants of it used in the poem, graphically represents its own meaning: 'Rasstaemsja; ras-stavanie…' (The effect is not metrical as the word does not acquire two stresses.)

VI

Two devices remain to be discussed: ellipsis and the basing of a poem upon one dominant syntactic pattern. In her later poems Tsvetaeva uses an elliptical style more and more frequently. An example is the opening lyric of Poem of the End. The subject is the beginning of a last meeting with her lover:

Sky of-bad omens:
Rust and tin.
Waited at the-usual place.
Time: six.

This kiss without sound:
Lips' paralysis.
Thus to-empresses the-hand,
To-dead-people—thus…

The effect here is different from that produced in the poem by Fet starting, 'Sopot. Robkoe dyxanie. / Treli solov'ja. (Whispering. Timid breathing. / Trills of the nightingale…)', with which it is comparable for its omission of parts of speech. Fet's poem is famous for a skilful creating of atmosphere without the use of verbs, and the reader does not specially notice their absence. He may even check with surprise afterwards to find there are no verbs. When, as in this case, Tsvetaeva omits verbs almost altogether, or, as very often, she omits the small auxiliary words, she makes their omission as perceptible as possible. Their absence jolts and increases the oddness and vigour of the rhythm. What is the connection between 'rust' and 'sky'? Who 'waited'? The time of day is told as if by telegram. 'Kiss' is omitted from 'thus the hand of empresses'; and so is 'hand' from the last line with its meaning of 'Thus one kisses dead people's hands'.

The pruning away of particles from the imagery is accompanied by the parallel device of a sharp reduction of environment: 'Sky', unspecified 'rust and tin', 'empresses' (or rather, more generally, 'grand ladies'), 'the dead'. The 'furniture' of the poem is existential; emotions are as fiercely laid bare among the sharply selected words, as rhythmic stresses are.

VII

Tsvetaeva is most original of all in her syntax. Sometimes, in the fundamentally elliptical poems (like the one quoted above), verbs are omitted, so that there is no clear syntax at all. More often, syntactic forms are not only fully present, but there is an intensification of the normal, if poetically compressed, syntactic unit intensified by an extravagantly unvarying repetition of it. Very often this is done in phrases dominated by the instrumental case (a noun case in Russian—rendered not only by 'through' or 'by' or 'by means of but also, or alternatively, by 'like' or 'as'). A simple example is lyric 2 of Poem of the End. After the first two lines,

A gipsy brotherhood,
That's what it's led to!

there come six lines, forming a single unit, in which the poet talks of what she sees has happened to the word 'house' (or 'home') now that she has to part with her lover. The irony of the last word in the preceding lyric: 'home'—for they have no home—recalling these images of lyric 2; and it is characteristically an obvious, not specially subtle irony:

Thunder onto the-head,
Sword drawn,
All the-horrors
Of-words which we-expect
House collapsing—

'thunder', 'sword', 'horrors', 'house' are all in the instrumental case, so we ask what is the word that will be likened to or identified with these things; and when we read the last line:

The-word: house.

we are surprised by the least expected of all words, for it has just been said to be like, or to be, 'a house collapsing'.

Karlinsky has discussed Tsvetaeva's 'maximal exploitation of the expressive possibilities of two oblique cases, the instrumental and the dative', finding that she uses the instrumental 'with a frequency that seems to exceed its average occurrence in Russian', that she shows a 'definite preference for prepositions and verbs that govern the instrumental' and that she often gives us a set of nouns in an 'energetic-sounding instrumental case', to which no verbs are supplied and the meaning of which is never made clear, or perhaps much later in the poem…. I want to draw attention to something not mentioned by Karlinsky, to the fact that almost all the lyrics in Poem of the End are based, each one, upon an extraordinary repetition of a single syntactic form. Lyric 3 may be quoted here as an example of this. The following is a word-for-word translation of the first four stanzas of the poem. They are not divided up (a double stroke indicates the end of each quatrain, a single one the end of a line) because I want to emphasise only the varied repeating of the unvaried syntactic unit within the whole statement of the emotion. This repetition itself and its distribution is, and before one deliberately considers its meaning, enthralling at first reading:

… To the water / I hold, as to a solid thickness / Gardens of Semiramis / hanging—so there you are! / / To this water—it's a steel strip / of mortuary colour /—I hold, as to the sheet of music / The singer (holds), (as to) the edge of a wall / / A blind man (holds) … Won't you give it back? / No? If I bow down, will you hear? / To the all-quencher of thirsts / I hold, as to the edge of a roof / / the lunatic (holds) … But the shiver is not from the river / I was born a naiad! / To hold to the river as to a hand / When your beloved is beside (you)…

And there are instances of this device that, far more than merely enthralling and beautiful, will, when looked at closely, show us how the delighted play with syntax, the sheer controlled dance of grammar, belongs at the very heart of the poet's creation; poetry itself is revealed in the brilliant syntax of Tsvetaeva.

VIII

Tsvetaeva shares with all the major poets of her time an intense concern with the origin of poetry, or with the nature of inspiration. Many poets have made this, implicitly or explicitly, the subject of their poems. Tsvetaeva wrote about it mainly in her works of prose, the remarkable essays on her own life, on literature, and on poets she knew, written in the years of her emigration.

For the Symbolist the source of poetry lay in a dimension of reality other than and higher than this ordinary one; on a divine or ideal or supernatural level, 'more real' than the everyday level. The poet, transported by a more than individual, more than earthly ecstasy, participated in a higher truth. He received it, and, in imperfect form, communicated it to others. In the years after his properly Symbolist period Blok modified the otherworldliness of such a notion of the origin of poetry, and developed a concept of 'music' that had less to do with the transcendental realm than with the dynamic essence of history, culture and things happening in the world. But he still saw the experience of inspiration as a kind of reception, something immense, rationally unfathomable, and taking place outside ourselves. In our best moments we listen to it, become one with it and discover symbols for it.

"There are … two times, two spaces; one is that of history, that of the calendar, the other is incalculable, musical … we live in the second kind only when we give ourselves to the wave of music issuing from the world orchestra…'

The Acmeist, in opposition to this notion, saw the poet as a craftsman who, like a sculptor or architect, or—if we make an analogy with music—like Bach setting up the logical frameworks of his fugues and constructing his order of words. The words were as real as bricks; they referred to ordinary tangible realities and the work was ultimately logical, rational, coherent, explicit, unmysterious; they asserted existence against non-existence as (in Mandel'štam's image) a church steeple asserts physical presence against space, cutting into and assaulting the void of the sky.

The Futurist too insisted that the word itself was the reality rather than some higher than verbal sphere of which it could become an imperfect reflector or to which it could point. He insisted that poetry had to be about, and related to not merely everyday things but up-to-date ones. As for the origin of poetry there was no such thing as inspiration; it was, on the contrary, entirely a matter of work. This idea was most consistently developed by Mayakovsky in his essay "How to make Verse" (1926) and in a number of poems, notably "Conversation with the Inspector of Taxes" (1926), where he defends the poet as a worker no different from other workers, labouring away with language as others do with steel and iron, producing rhymes with the difficulty of sodium extraction. The rhythms of a poem come from the ordinary rhythms of physical activity; its words are those of the verbal stock accumulated by the poet in his everyday observations; its themes are prescribed for him by palpable social and political necessities.

What seems the essential distinction here is this: where for the Romantic or Symbolist, poetry comes from 'outside', and is received by the poet, the Acmeist and the Futurist, in their different ways, both denied any 'outside', any other reality than 'this' one and insisted that poetry is made by us, inside the world and of world.

To some extent Tsvetaeva shares the Symbolist experience. The thing that makes poetry, happens, for her, outside the poet. Yet, her formulation of this experience is quite un-symbolist, and, in fact, very much in the language and tone of the Futurist. The loudness and violence with which the latter affirms this world and himself in it is, in the case of Tsvetaeva, joined to a quasi-religious conception of inspiration, in a way that may be unique.

I am talking, of course, of her formulation of that experience. The experience itself is not new. What is interesting is the way different poets, for all sorts of (usually discoverable) reasons, choose to emphasise different aspects of their creative experience (an emphasis much easier to analyse in their statements about poetry than in their poems).

Tsvetaeva's formulation is also different from that of Pasternak, whose view may be roughly summed up as differing from the Symbolists', in that, where they say 'inspiration' comes from outside and we must receive it, he says it happens outside and we must copy it:

Reality arises in a kind of new category. This category seems to us to be its own condition, not ours … We try to name it. The result is art … Focussed upon a reality that has been displaced by feeling art is a record of the displacement. It copies it from nature … Art is realistic by virtue of the fact that it did not itself invent metaphor but found it in nature and faithfully reproduced it.

Tsvetaeva, now, says something like this: inspiration comes from 'outside' but the poet resists it. What is her notion of 'resistance'? In Art in the Light of Conscience she writes:

Genius: the highest degree of subjectedness to inspiration—one; control of this inspiration—two. The highest degree of mental disjunction and the highest—of collectedness. The highest—of passivity, and the highest—of activity.

To let oneself be annihilated right down to some kind of a last atom; from the survival (the resistance) of which will grow up—a world.

For in this, this, this atom of resistance (resistivity) lies the whole of mankind's chance of genius. Without it there is no genius—there is the crushed man, who (it is the same man!) strains the walls not only of Bedlams and Charentons, but also of the most prosperous dwellings.

There is no genius without will, but still more is there none, still less is there any, without inspiration. Will is that unit to the countless milliards of inspiration thanks to which alone they are milliards (they realise their milliardness) and without which they are zeros—that is, bubbles above the drowner. But will without inspiration—in creation—is simply a stake. An oaken one. Such a poet would do better to go for a soldier.

The fundamental structure of the experience Tsvetaeva refers to here is not so very different from Vjačeslav Ivanov's Dionysian-Apollonian diagram of the ascent of the poet to the place of mystical communion with the World-Soul, to which, he says, 'many go up' but from which 'few come down',—i.e. few make a work of art of that knowledge. Tsvetaeva seems to believe that many may be annihilated but few (she implies) possess the 'atom of resistance', which is the only thing that counts.

In the same essay, a little later on,—after saying that art does not teach anything, for 'all the lessons which we draw from art we put into it', she adds:

Art is a series of answers to which there are no questions. All art is the sole givenness of the answer … All our art is in our being able (managing in time) to put to each answer, before it should evaporate, our own question. This outgalloping of you with answers is what inspiration is. And how often it is a blank page.

If the Symbolist waits for revelation, accepts the vision when it comes, falls back into the boredom of the everyday when it passes, while the Futurist, far from waiting for, or passively recognising anything, actively asserts himself in the labour of making verse, then Tsvetaeva is like both in her combination of revelation and self-assertion, of overwhelming vision and the ego's resistance to it.

The interesting thing is that, again unlike those poets with whom in some ways she has so much in common, Tsvetaeva is not concerned to make any metaphysical statement about reality. Ivanov states that the poet ascends into another realm, or, that on level he becomes one with the universal mind. Pasternak says that reality 'arises in a new category', gets into a new 'displaced' condition where all is—'objectively'—symbolical. These views, though exact accounts of states of mind, are expressed as accounts of the world (which is not to belittle them: they are, after all, about states of mind of a kind that can hardly be distinguished from kinds of reality, or they are about the very awareness—not always available—that states of mind are real). Tsvetaeva, however, does not resort to philosophy. By sticking to the experience she indubitably knows, she is able to describe to the full the inner dynamic of her inspiration. She does not decide what is real, what is unreal or what is more real. By the same token, she is unlike those Futurists who decided that 'this world', or the social world, is real, while somehow what is subjective is not, or is less so. They found too that 'life' was more real, or more valid than 'art', as Mayakovsky implicitly does in his Sergej Esenin poem: 'First we must change the world, and then sing it'.

A final comment: both Symbolist and Futurist rejected the idea of poetry as an individual activity: the Symbolist believed he escaped the bonds of individuality and communed with the universal consciousness, the world-soul. The Futurist, or at least Mayakovsky, wanted to see his poems as written not by himself alone, but by the whole mass of the people (the title of his poem, 150 Million, purports to be the number of its authors, and the poem was left unfinished for everyone else to continue). But Tsvetaeva, despite her idea about annihilation, constantly stresses that her art is individual and personal, that it is her own, and is herself. 'Why out of all those who walk along the streets of Moscow is it just me that it comes upon…?'