Marina Tsvetaeva: Time’s Émigré
In Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry, the distance between the speaker and her addressee—lover or friend—is often felt as an experience of exile. This is perhaps unsurprising. Tsvetaeva spent most her adult life in exile, first in Prague and then in Paris, departing for the former in 1922; she returned to Russia in 1939, only to leave in and commit suicide in 1941. But we would expect a poet of exile to address her homeland, her exile measured by a distance in time. The displacement in Tsvetaeva’s poetry, on the other hand, cannot be oriented so clearly. It runs on an axis from “I” to “you,” but neither “I” nor “you” has a clear mooring in place or even in time (since the poems journey through memory). Knowing her biography, we assume that the chasm across which she speaks is brought on by physical distance—but the poems jarringly do little to confirm this. And this is why it is so strange that they are felt as exile. The exile is personal, but the locations of the speaker and the addressee do not matter. They might even occupy the same town, the same street, the same house. Exile is made jarring by becoming, in her poetry, intensely personal. That it is exile owes to a yearning to return, and to the persistent apprehension that what prevents such a return is not the will, or feelings, or desire of either, but something circumstantial, unstated. If it were otherwise, it would not be exile but estrangement.
Here is “It’s not like waiting for post,” from 1923, in Elaine Feinstein’s translation[i]:
It's not like waiting for post.
This is how you wait for
the one letter you need:
soft stuff bound with
tape and paste.
Inside a little word.
That’s all. Happiness.
Waiting for happiness?
It’s more like waiting for death.
The soldiers will salute
and three chunks of lead
will slam into your chest.
Your eyes will then flash red.
No question of joy.
Too old now, all bloom gone.
Waiting for what else now but
black muzzles in a square yard.
A square letter. I think
there may be spells in the ink.
No hope. And no one is
Too old to face death
or such a square envelope.
It is not difficult to discern traces of revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary) violence in the second stanza of this poem. It would not be satisfying, though, to read it as being “about” such violence: the stanza in which the shooting by soldiers, whether in open conflict or execution squad, features depends on a simile that asks us to recognize such violence as being not-the-subject of the poem. We see instead what might have been: the political experience is an alternative path that the poem might have traced explicitly. But it is the recognition that the poem might have traced this path explicitly that encourages us to see that the political surrounds the poem: it is “about” the poem, even though the poem is not “about” it. In other words, we are encouraged to sense the political reality as something that the poem does not take up, even though it is an experience available to the poem, and it is this availability to the poet that makes us recognize it as contributing to the relation of “I” and “you,” the “I” and the letter, of the poem. The untrodden path of political engagement makes the I-You axis one of exile.
Even if both “I” and “you” occupy the same city or same street, the condition of exile can be said to define their relationship. The circumstances of exile can intrude on proximate relationships, and, in the reverse direction, the circumstances of proximate personal relationships can define the experience of exile, so that it is felt as a personal matter.
It will seem that, in any poem I select to substantiate this point, I am stacking the deck in my favor; perhaps without even realizing it, I am selecting a poem in which the possibility of political experience opens out in a single word or break of a line, conspicuous by virtue of what we know of her biography, and not properly a feature of the poem, not essential to its strength. Be that as it may, the strength of the poetry depends often on a refusal to diagnose the distance of “I”-“You” as a function of exile and instead to represent that distance as a form of exile in and of itself, concomitant with, but not merely a result of, the other, political experience. Here is the first section of “Epitaph” (the spaces in the middle of the lines are authorial, deliberate in Feinstein’s translation):
Just going out for a minute—
left your work (which the idle
call chaos) behind on the table.
And left the chair behind when you went where?
I ask all around Paris, for it’s
only in stories or pictures
that people rise to the skies;
where is your soul gone, where?
In the cupboard, two-doored like a shrine,
look all your books are in place.
In each line the letters are there.
Where has it gone to, your face?
Your face
your warmth
your shoulder
where did they go?
No religious, political, or even psychological explanation is offered: the poem eschews the line of thinking that would insist on “why” or reasons; it begins in an absence and rather than fill it in with the past, it extends its reach. “Paris” is named but the possibilities for where the “you” has gone are not even guessed at; elsewhere is anywhere, nowhere, and the present is a narrow strip between unhabitable memories and hopes. The poem’s achievement is two-fold: plotting a territory that is always almost lost to time, to yearning, and to speculation, and then standing upright on it. This, we will see, is because “the present” is not the right word for where she stands.
This poem turns on a repeated question. “You went where” is the first instance, and Feinstein as translator knows that the difference between “You went where” and “where did you go” is the difference between a momentary lapse of attention (“you went where” as if “you” just said) and helpless disorientation, total loss. “You went where” moves from the sudden recognition, “you went,” to the bafflement of “where?” It happened surreptitiously, a loss that was not experienced as a loss at the time, but only belatedly, after it has happened, so that time itself has been lost too. The only explanation was an apotheosis, a rising to the skies, which is why she asks all around Paris, because such an explanation could not be right—but it was the first thought because otherwise, she wants to say, she would have noticed, or else because with this thought, she would have been reassured. What she cannot bear is that the departure was sudden, unattended, or else that the departure was to another place, one that she does not know. The traces are there: “look” with a space because the imperative has no subject, there is nobody but herself to look. What she sees are the remains of the “you,” and the poem becomes about just what was lost as much as the loss itself: the soul, the face, the warmth, the shoulder—these, recognized after the fact, were one person, the “you” that is gone.
From the perspective of the speaker, it is a poem about abandonment, but because it is without blame, resting entirely on perplexity, it is really, beneath that, about something else: a realization of distance, of absence, of the inability to find one’s direction, let alone to pursue a course. At no point does “where” yield to “why.”
“Where” though is an interesting question because it pulls us towards the political as “why” does not, at least in the sense of “why did you go, what did I do wrong,” or “why did you go, why do you want something else.” In the sense of “what made you leave” the question “why” is potentially political. But the question “where” intimates without seizing on the deeper political question: what is this place where you had to go? Knowing where a person had to go is to know a great deal about their experience of exile, since the place of exile indicates something of its circumstances, as well as its prospect. “Where do I go?” or “where do I go now?” or “where do I go next” are the questions that drive exile. Asking “where,” she assumes she might follow; she does not wonder whether he would have her follow, or whether she could follow. It is a question asked by someone denying her rootedness to another who is without roots at all (“How could you go” is the question one would ask another firmly rooted in place). Nothing political needs to be stated for the questions of the poem to orient their disorientation in a political direction. In the end, the poem asks, “Where did they go” and not “where did you go.” “You” is unity itself that has been lost, and because with the word “they,” she relinquishes the intimacy of “you” and prevents the poem from ending on a note of yearning.
Exile is a state as well as a category of person, but Tsvetaeva recognized that not all who live in exile are exiles. In Angela Livingstone’s translation of her essay “The Poet and Time,” we find instead another word. Reflecting on her life as a poet in western Europe, she reflects on her distance from Russia and what it entails:
Also, despite my isolation, my Russian works—by their will, not mine—are designed for multitudes. Over here, as a physical fact, there are no multitudes, only groups. Just as, instead of the arenas and terraces of Russia, there are little salons, instead of the ethical event of a public performance—though it be an assault!—there are literary evenings, instead of the irreplaceable anonymous listener in Russia, there’s a listener with a name, even with a distinguished one. All this belongs to literature, not to the current of life. The wrong scale, the wrong response. In Russia, as in the steppes and on the sea, there is room to speak from and into. If they’d let people speak.
The whole thing is simple: over here is—that Russia; over there is—all Russia. To people here, in art it’s the past that’s contemporary. Russia (I mean Russia, not the authorities), Russia the land of those who are in the lead, requires of art that it should lead; the emigration, the land of those who have remained behind, requires that art should remain behind too, which means—roll uncontrollably backwards. In the order of things here, I am a disorder of things…
And it was not much easier, then, to take the decision to go there—with all the pre-war blandishments—than it is now, through all these prohibitions. Russia was never a country on the earthly map. And those who went there from here really went over the frontier: of the visible.
It’s on that Russia that poets stake their bets. On Russia-entire, Russia of all time.
But even Russia isn’t enough. Every poet is essentially an émigré, even in Russia. Émigré from the Kingdom of Heaven and from the earthly paradise of nature. Upon the poet—upon all who belong to art, but most especially upon the poet—there’s a particular mark of discomfort, by which you’ll know him even in his own home. An émigré from immortality in time, a non-returner to his own heaven. Take the most various of them, line them up in your mind: whose face shows presentness. All of them—over there. Kinship with soil or people, nationality, race, class, and that contemporality which they create—all this is only surface, the first or the seventh layer of skin, which the poet does nothing but try his utmost to shed. “What time is it?” they asked him here, and he answered the curious: “It’s eternity”—Mandelstam on Batyushkov; and “What millennium is it, my dears, out there?”—Boris Pasternak on himself. All poets of all times say essentially one thing only. And that one thing remains on the surface of the world’s skin in the same way as the visible world itself remains on the surface of the poet’s skin. Next to that emigration, what is ours?[ii]
Not an exile, an émigré. But she is an émigré twice over, an émigré in history, having left behind the daily life of Russian in the wake of the Revolution, and also an émigré from time, owing to her being a poet, all of whom, she says, live in eternity. The word “émigré” itself is perfectly foreign, its accents refusing to allow it to find a home in the English of Livingstone’s translation, but it is also a word of self-sufficient pride as proclaiming “I am an exile” is not. To call oneself an émigré is to proclaim agency, if not to return then at least to set one’s course.
Nor is this mere face-saving, titling oneself an émigré rather than an exile: an émigré finds freedom in their loss, so that even if a return is impossible or the initial departure had been compelled, it is not wholly regretted and is not felt anew with each subsequent departure from resting spot to resting spot. To embrace the identity of an émigré is to embrace the ephemeral and the freedom from commitment it permits, and just as Tsvetaeva’s thought of Russia become a thought of time and the timelessly eternal, so later in the same essay her thought of time and the “contemporary,” the time to which one is yoked (the “with” of “con”), becomes an intimate relationship of imposed commitment that it is impossible not to betray, so long as one accepts it:
A poet’s marriage to his time is a forced marriage. A marriage of which—as of any suffered violence—he is ashamed, and from which he tries to tear loose. Poets of the past tear into the past, those of the present into the future, as if time were less time for not being my own…
The poet’s marriage to the time is a forced marriage, consequently, an unreliable one. In the best case, bonne mine à mauvais jeu, in the worst case, continual and actual, it’s one infidelity after another with always the same liver—the One under a multiplicity of names.
However much you feed a wolf, it always looks to the forest. We are all wolves of the dense forest of Eternity.
“There is no marriage.” Yes, there is marriage: the same as the wedlock of a convict to his fetters. But when we have thrust upon us not only a marriage with time-in-general, within the concept of time, but also marriage with our own time, this time, marriage with some kind of sub-time, and, most important, when this violence is forced on us as a love, when this hard-labour is described as service according to our vocation, when we are fettered spiritually as well...
Violence endured is weakness. Spiritual legitimation of violence endured is a thing without name, of which no slave is capable.
To defend against time what is eternal in time, or to eternalize what is temporary in it—however it’s put: to time, the age of this world, another age is counterpoised.
Service to time as such is service to change—betrayal—death. You can’t keep up with it, you can’t oblige it. The present. Is there such a thing? Service to the recurring decimal figure. I think I am still serving the present, but I’m already serving the past and already—the future. Where is it, the praesens, and in what?[iii]
Tsvetaeva—like any person, poet or not— cannot help but live in time; she cannot help but live apart from Russia, in the awareness of her distance from Russia. Behind these thoughts is another, that she cannot help but live in history, history as a present-tense phenomenon of political upheaval. She cannot help but live as an exile in time, in history, suffering exile as a part of history, married to time, but she can refuse to acknowledge the force of the commitment, dissolving it by the strength of a will, as any commitment can be abolished if one wills it enough. Strength is required, of course, because to merely disown a commitment to time in one moment is itself an ephemeral gesture, subject to time’s vicissitudes. What this means is not repeating the words of a disavowal but instead of dwelling in the absence of the present—dwelling in the absence of “praesens” and presence. She settles on nearly the same question to which she returns in “Epitaph”: “Where is it, the praesens, and in what?” in the essay, “Where has it gone to, your face” and “where did they go” in the poem.
No more can she efface and deny some relationship to time, to history, and to Russia in her existence than she can deny or efface some relationship to the “you” of the poems. But she can dwell in the betrayals, without decrying them, as necessary costs of the émigré from time, from history, and from Russia. The “you” of the poems is unnamed and general, because it is any present, any presence; at the same time, it is specific, a singular person, because it is a present that must be particular to some moment, some instantiation, some relationship. It is always the same, always different. In her account of lyric poetry, she opposes the lyric poet to the genius of an age, the latter resembling a river, and the former a sea: always the same, always different. From another essay, “Poets with History and Poets without History”:
When you approach the sea—and the lyric poet—you are not going for something new, but for the same again; for a repetition, not a continuation. Lyric poetry, like the sea, even when you’re discovering it for the first time, is something invariably re-read; while with a river, which flows past, as with Pushkin, who walks past—if it’s on their banks you’ve been borne—you always read on. It is the difference between the crossways, lulling, lyrical motion of the sea, and the linear, never-returning moving of a river. The difference between being summer and passing by. You love the river because it is always different, and you love the sea because it is always the same. If you desire novelty, settle by a river.
Lyric poetry, like the sea, rouses and calms itself, happens within itself. Not in vain did Heraclitus say: “Nobody steps twice into the same river,” taking, as his symbol of flowing, not the sea which he saw before him every day and knew well, but—a river.
When you go to the sea and to the lyricist, you are not going for the never-returning flow of the current, you’re going for the ever-returning flow of the waves; not for the unrepeatable moment, not for the intransient, but precisely for the unforeseen in sea and in lyric, for the invariability of changes and exchanges, for the inevitability of your amazement at them.[iv]
The images here are more honest than the language of the eternal and the temporal—the paradoxes those introduce into human thought, whereby there is no possibility of consistently reasoning about, or sustaining rational thought upon, the eternal, given that the very form of thought itself is temporal in its conceptual implications of aspect and tense. But the language of the sea, as opposed to Heraclitus’ river, allows for an elaboration of what Tsvetaeva says about her relation to the present. Since the sea is ever-returning, but also ever-receding, it offers a temporal movement that does not insist on a present as a momentary interlude between past and future, always having been, always becoming. An émigré from time is, the image here suggests, an émigré moving from time-as-a-river to time-as-a-sea (moving, that is, from one conception of time to another), where in place of a “present,” there is an incessant but constant coming and going, constantly inconstant. The sea lacks the movement and orientation that would allow one to claim to stand in it as one would stand in a sequence of events. In the river, the question, “where is it, the present” is impossible to answer: it is always past and always future. In the sea, as she figures it, the question “where is it, the present” can be answered: always there and never fully there, always in a movement towards and away. It is, like the space in “Epitaph,” a present absence and an absent presence, where one can stand without movement.
Tsvetaeva seeks revolution as repetition rather than revolution as a continuation of events forever onward. But this is a crudely political gloss for a distinction that has political implications without being a political statement in itself. She can retain her pride in being an émigré from time, while also being an exile from time. Though she claims that “service as time as such is service to change—to betrayal—to death,” she could not generously be taken as asking that all authors be lyric poets. Lyric poets occupy the latter class, but to be assigned to the former, as Goethe and Pushkin are, is not damnation. The key word in Tsvetaeva’s complaint is “service.” The difference that she could plausibly draw between lyric and, say, epic poets would be a distinction between those who refuse to serve time without being exiled to the sea, and those who refuse to serve time in such an exile, finding in their exile the redemptive possibility of an émigré.
Tsvetaeva dwells somewhere essential and too rarely inhabited, a place that is a time that is not time as we think it, and that always contains an awareness of the time it is not. In “The Poet and Time,” she writes:
Even if we concede that communism, as an attempt at the best organization of earthly life, is a good—is it alone in being a good, is it alone all goods, does it include in itself, define through itself, all other goods and powers: of art, science, religion, thought? Include, exclude or—on equal terms—coexist?
On behalf of all the other goods, I stand up for the latter. As one of the movers of contemporality, and precisely as an organizer of earthly life which had been getting more and more disorganized, it deserves an honoured place. But just as organization is no more all-important than spiritual, just as the science of communal life is no more all-important than a feat of solitude—so even communism, organizer of earthly life, is no more all-important than all the movers of the spiritual life, which is neither a superstructure nor an annexe. The earth is not everything, and even if it were everything, this organizing of communal life is not the whole earth. The earth is worth more and deserves more.
An honoured place—as to everything which knows its honour and its place.[v]
In her poetry, Tsvetaeva makes a plea, and offers recurrent glimpses, of this place in time that is an alternative to the contemporality of the historical. Lest we think she means something reactionary, she insists that all poetry is a forward movement; it is just not the forward movement of the historical river. There is a movement of time that is not what we often think it to be, an aspect of time to which the revolutionary fervor she left behind was blind; this is what she recovers or discovers in her poetry, with a keen sensitivity to what measure of time she refuses to fall into. From 1934, “Homesickness”:
Homesickness! that long
exposed weariness!
It’s all the same to me now
where I am altogether lonely
or what stones I wander over
home with a shopping bag to
a house that is no more mine
than a hospital or a barracks.
It’s all the same to me, captive
lion what faces I move through
bristling, or what human crowd will
cast me out as it must
into myself, into my separate internal
world, a Kamchatka bear without ice.
Where I fail to fit in (and I’m not trying) or
where I’m humiliated it’s all the same.
And I won’t be seduced by the thought of
my native language, its milk call.
How can it matter in what tongue I
am misunderstood by whoever I meet
(or by what readers, swallowing
newsprint, squeezing for gossip?)
They all belong to the twentieth
century, and I am before time,
stunned, like a log left
behind from an avenue of trees.
People are all the same to me, everything
is the same, and it may be the most
indifferent of all are these
signs and tokens which once were
native but the dates have been
rubbed out: the soul was born somewhere.
For my country has taken so little care
of me that even the sharpest spy could
go over my whole spirit and would
detect no native stain there.
Houses are alien, churches are empty
everything is the same:
But if by the side of the path one
particular bush rises
the rowanberry . . .
Homesickness: the sickness for home, and the sickness of a home that is not a settled place; a motion sickness, perhaps, standing still on a surface that will not come to rest. “I am before time,” not “before this time,” but paradoxically prior to when time became itself; the paradox recognizes that there is no human escape from time, but that there can be a human existence in time of another sort, one that recovers in “time” a sense that has been obliterated by the history of the contemporary. It is a lonely existence, saddened and saddening, but without even the self-pity of resignation, and instead possessed of a fortitude required to know where she is at, even if that is nowhere at all. The sadness is instead a detachment from the prospects of fulfillment that the landscape might offer others but cannot offer her; it is the sadness of and for what cannot be. But in the sameness—the sameness that is the monotony she perceived in the sea—there is something else to be discerned and cherished, something she arrives at not in the end, but as an end, a goal of the poem’s directionless, present-less movement. It is there in the final lines: “But if by the side of the path one | particular bush rises| the rowanberry…” And we need not even speculate: it is something else, somewhere else, apart from where she has been in this poem, but also within it, which is why at the end she elides what might come next. It cannot become a narrative or convert the presentless emptiness of the poem into a prelude to an event, a preparation for a climax; it cannot become enslaved to time. This also is why it is a conditional cause; it is the present possibility, a subjunctive reality, absent in its presence (worth comparing, for differences as well as similarities, the opening of T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” in the Four Quartets). The rest is silence because the rest is not history, but a fulfillment of something else, found far away, wandering without destination, departure, or progress.
[i] Marina Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems, trans. Elaine Feinstein (Penguin: 1994). All translations of the poems are from this edition.
[ii] Marina Tsvetaeva, Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry, trans. Angela Livingstone (Bloodaxe Books: 2012) 93-94.
[iii] Ibid, 102.
[iv] Ibid, 144.
[v] Ibid, 100.