Cvetaeva’s writing is largely powered by her elaboration of accepted cultural or mythological narratives. One of the most essential/basic/underlying of these is the heterosexual romance, which glimmers through other, more local topics almost as dependably as the narrative of poetic creation which it largely shapes. As Diana Burgin has suggested, important keys to the psychology and origins of this narrative pattern lie in Cvetaeva’s 1914-1916 love affair with Sofia Parnok. This paper will examine the shape of the heterosexual romance in Cvetaeva’s work, arguing that its stages (the “immanent” stage of girlhood followed by the clash of the encounter with the “enemy,” a man, which leads to impregnation/inspiration and from there returns to solitude or a space that is all feminine-gendered) create a loop that the poet can replay almost indefinitely. Cvetaeva begins by carrying out the various stages of this progression in her poetry (becoming quite conscious of it by the early 1920s), while later in her career she describes it, particularly in the 1934 “Lettre ŕ l’Amazone.” My reading is informed both by a critique of fin-de-sičcle works on gender and creativity (Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character; Maričtta Šaginian’s extensive review of Cvetaeva’s first book), and by recent scholars who have studied Cvetaeva’s approach to gender.
References
Burgin, Diana Lewis. Marina Cvetaeva i transgressivnyj čros. St. Petersburg: INAPRESS, 2000.
Ciepiela, Catherine. “Inclined Toward the Other: On Cvetaeva’s Lyric Address.” Critical Essays on the Prose and Poetry of Modern Slavic Women. Ed. Nina Efimov et al. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998, 117-34.
Dinega, Alyssa. A Russian Psyche: The Poetic Mind of Marina Tsvetaeva. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.
Feiler, Lily. Marina Tsvetaeva: The Double Beat of Heaven and Hell. Durham/London: Duke University Press, 1994.
Forrester, Sibelan. “Daphne’s Tremor: Tsvetaeva and the Feminine in Classical Myth and Statuary.” In Other Words…: In Celebration of Vadim Liapunov. Ed. Stephen Blackwell et al. Indiana Slavic Studies 11 (2000): 367-80.
Irene Masing-Delic. “Creating the Living Work of Art: The Symbolist Pygmalion and His Antecedents.” Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism. Ed. Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, 51-82.
Sandler, Stephanie. “Embodied Words: Gender in Cvetaeva’s Reading of Puškin.” Slavic and East European Journal 34:2 (Summer 1990): 139-57.
Shevelenko, Irina. Literaturnyj put’ Cvetaevoj. Ideologija – počtika – identičnost’ avtora v kontekste čpoxi. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002.