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When Marina Tsvetaeva writes The Poem of the End in 1924, she lives in exile in Prague. She has experienced the end of the old regime during the Russian Revolution and then, through her migration, the end of her life in Russia. At the same time, she has also felt the implications of the allegedly “new” life in Soviet Russia and of her personal “new” exilic life in Europe. Although these ends and beginnings are highly present in her sensibility at the time, they form first and foremost a referential and thematic background to the lyrical treatment of the acute end of The Poem of the End: the end of a love story. Konstantin Rodsevich, who had been her lover for some months in autumn 1923, ended their affair at the turn of the year. In the beginning of 1924, Tsvetaeva wrote two longer poems: first The Poem of the Mountain, in which she grieves the end of their love, and then The Poem of the End, in which she rises instead against this very end as well as the grief after it. By this very personal revolt, she also profoundly criticizes the belief in the productivity of endings and beginnings in love, life, society, exile, and literature. The ending of the love story comes out as an almost perfect parallel to, or perhaps as a personal consequence of, the ending of the old regime—in the sense that both the revolution and the separation meant the end of a world, of a place of meaning. More so, both endings, as Tsvetaeva will suggest, resulted from a myth or utopia of the possibility of replacing the old world with a new one. Now Tsvetaeva faces the ending as an expulsion from the common places of meaning without the possibility of a transition to the new ones. She takes us into a human movement without anywhere to go, and into a lyrical writing without a direction. There she tries to reach a language to bespeak her suffering in a world that has become all but too excited by the idea of the end as a promise of new beginnings.

In an intense modernistic lyrical diction, Tsvetaeva brings out a critique of how the scheme of ending and beginning, which is the scheme of modernity par excellence, places life in exile from itself. She shows us how this scheme works both in a conservative way—preserving the idea that there positively was a world that could be ended, and as an impulse for the avant-garde—promising the possible birth of new meanings and new mornings. Although Tsvetaeva shares a certain revolutionary or poetic discontent with conventional meanings, she demonstrates at the same time that language can neither be ended nor invented. Meaning is always already present in language, but it is not equal to the conventional use of words. Therefore, her way of heeding that meaning often brings form and expression to burst, or “break off.”1 Her way of working her way through poetic language by showing the limits of conventional meanings in their incapacity of containing her experience can be likened to a phenomenological reduction. She brackets conventional meaning by fleshing out the implications of words and by illustrating how poetic language offers a dwelling place for an experience beyond these conventions, precisely by bringing out to the full how “language speaks,” as Heidegger formulated it.2 At stake in The Poem of the End is, as mentioned, the very notion of the end in its conventional use and in the meaning that it has in her poetic treatment of her experience. In her modernist diction in the poem, language and verse are constantly on the verge of breaking down in face of the pain of saying the meaning of the end as the end of meaning and therefore of facing the impossibility of a new beginning.

In her refusal to accept the end in The Poem of the End, Tsvetaeva ultimately comes to lyrical terms with the end of their love story by showing that ending means placing life in exile—with nowhere to go. Life is neither in what was nor in the prospect of what will be, “neither before, nor after” as she writes in the poem. Life is only in the being together of love and meaning, and therefore, after the end, life itself is in the outside, life is an exurb, a non-place or a ghetto, a place “that cannot be lived.” We follow Tsvetaeva in the poem as she realizes through poetic language that when love and meaning end, she does not only lose her home as a place in the world but also herself as a home or a place in a self and in a body. She loses her means of attaining the inner and therefore, together with her language, she disintegrates and dismembers as a “lyrical I” too. However, in the discovery of this lack, language will offer her a home. The consequence is a radical modernist break in The Poem of the End with lyrical language and meter, because here she breaks with the idea that language, or a better language, will offer a rescue or a home as the birthplace of a higher self. Poetic language, as we learn from Tsvetaeva, only offers a home in the words if it bespeaks this utter homelessness of the inner self that is being disintegrated and dismembered.

From The Poem of the End to The Poem of the Mountain

The Poem of the Mountain and The Poem of the End constitute a diptych. In a letter to her close friend “in the craft,” Boris Pasternak, she called the first poema, The Poem of the Mountain, the male poem of the two.3 Masculinity stands for the attempt to embrace the male logic of Rodsevich’s speech, his eagle-like position, as she writes in The Poem of the End. In the Poem of the Mountain, her coming to terms, or coming to words, with the grief (in Russian góre) after this ending is portrayed from her position on the poetic mountain (gorá) of Smichovski, where she lived. The pun on syllables, góre-gorá, is typical for Tsvetaeva, who constantly in her poetry tries out words in relation to all levels of meaning—metaphorical, symbolical, folkloric, literal, and often to the point of their morphology.4 And in The Poem of the Mountain she brings the two words together so that only the emphasis separates them in graphic form and expression: góre goré. With “grief” in nominative and “mountain” in dative, the expression says “grief to the mountain,” which means let the mountain grieve. Now, in The Poem of the Mountain, this grief is something that the poet seems to be able to come to terms with or even to overcome, for it states that memory gives her a focal point, a perspective and an intonation from which to deal with this end—it gives a mountain from which to overlook the loss. She states:

Но зато, в нищей и тесной

Жизни: «жизнь, как она есть»—

Я не вижу тебя совместно

Ни с одной:

—Памяти мест!

Yet, in base and dense

life (life as it is)

I cannot see you with another

The revenge of memory.5

The revenge of memory is the vantage point of the poet, and she seems in The Poem of the Mountain to be able to “get on top” of the sorrow.

I will not go into a deeper comparison of the two poems, but the Poem of the Mountain serves well as a background image against which the radicalness of the second poem becomes clearer.6 Tsvetaeva began writing The Poem of the End on the very day she finished The Poem of the Mountain, and in the same letter to Pasternak, she called this second one the “feminine” poem. The reason is that she here develops her grief as a revolt against the end, against the possibility of grief and against the notion of “life as it is,” as she wrote in The Poem of the Mountain. Tomas Venclova convincingly showed that The Poem of the Mountain centers on references to the Old Testament and ends as a metaphysical transcendence from earthly love to lyrical heights, whereas The Poem of the End is construed with reference to the New Testament as a Via Crucis that ends with “the end to writing” (“konets Pisaniia”), meaning also the end to sacral writing. However, The Poem of the End also comprises a considerable critique of “this most Christian world,” as she calls it in the poem. The “end to sacral writing” is but one aspect of Tsvetaeva’s break away from the tradition of lyrical poetry and its escape into a strong lyrical perspective, which stems from a metaphysical tradition. Indeed, as much as she in The Poem of the End rises against Rodsevich’s ending of their love, she departs from the central idea of The Poem of the Mountain that she can find a perspective in the after. In The Poem of the End she will use the same grammatical construction of dative and nominal as in góre goré, this time to state that she has overcome the end—that there is an end to the end—kontsu-konets. However, this overcoming is a kind of coming under or coming through in the loss after the end, almost as the triumph of the loss. For The Poem of the End can be read as a kind of correction of the monumentality of the mountain poem, perhaps as its appendix—just as Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime was conceived as an appendix. The parallel with the sublime is not a coincidence—the correction of The Poem of the End to The Poem of the Mountain because it signals the loss of a firm position from which to grieve and indicates a deeper involvement in the abysmal night. In The Poem of the End, Tsvetaeva directs all the power of her lyrical mastery not only to underscore the notion of a productivity of the end, that this end could result in something new, but also—and this is perhaps the more radical and critical moment—to question the conditions of a world obsessed by productivity and progressivity, while portraying the way that the lyrical perspective of The Poem of the Mountain, and really any claim to a strong lyrical perspective, goes under.

The Beginning of the End

The poema is a specific lyrical genre in the tradition of Russian poetry that Tsvetaeva much appreciated. The poema consists of several lyrical poems, and this allowed her to develop a story or a theme. In this poema, Tsvetaeva develops the theme of the end by telling the story of their ending. It is construed as a lyrical dialogue between the lyrical I of Tsvetaeva and the lyrical you of Rodsevich, and it recounts the stages of the ending scenes—from agreeing on a meeting to the final good-bye. The parting is structured as an intense and ferocious lyrical walk on the bridges and embankments of Prague during one evening. The bridges and the embankment on which the two departing lovers are walking are as floating as the river, also poetry or language as the home of the world and a source for appeasing meaning is disintegrated in the flow of tears. The air is heavy with endings and deaths, and the river reminds her of Lethe in several respects: First, Rodsevich is ending their common world, their love, their life; second, Tsvetaeva in this poema also approaches the end of the world in the sense of approaching a language that finds no relief from this end.

The first scene of the first poem is ominous and full of premonitions of what is to come during the evening walk:

В небе, ржавее жести,

Перст столба.

Встал на назначенном месте,

Как судьба.

(168)

In the sky, rustier than tin,

Is a lamppost like a finger.

He rose at the appointed place,

Like fate.

(51)7

The moment of the first poem is the moment of time, the moment of fate, the moment when “death does not wait,” as she writes. The first poem consists of strophes with four lines, alternating the dactylic trimeter and iambic endings of the uneven lines with trochaic dimeter of the even lines. The short rhyme endings form an abundance of stresses in the meter and, not rarely, a peonic clash of stresses that enhances the opposition between the two speakers. The alternation both emphasizes the presence of time and creates a perfect ground for the dialogue. The first speaker, which we can often identify with Tsvetaeva, seeks contact in the lengthier dactylic form, and the second speaker, often the male other, cuts her off with the short laconic trochaic form. The rhythm illustrates the way in which he constantly separates himself from the forms of privacy—a life, a home, an aim—when she attempts to approach him. While he is full of determinations and destinations, she is the movement into the non- or indeterminate (and this is how she sees love), while he is the composed face of good behavior and courage; he also denies the negativity of the moment—denies that this is an end. From his point of view, the end seems ripe with continuations of other things, of new beginnings.

As she goes through the stages of their farewell, Tsvetaeva tries to come to terms with the way that her lover ends their common roads, and it is precisely by invoking his language and his terms that she is also able to undo his terms and conditions for ending; that is, that she is able to undo his language of ending. Tsvetaeva’s undoing of the lover’s terms for ending here can be likened to Heidegger’s insistence on bracketing the way that we are always already implied in, folded, or appropriated in language. Language, as Heidegger writes in his reading of Stefan George’s Das Wort in “The Nature of Language,” must “break off” from the ordinary relation between word and thing in order to make the world appear through the word.8 Just as the philosopher insists, Tsvetaeva undoes Rodsevich’s logos, or reason, by bringing us to an experience of language and of how language speaks in its implications. She brackets Rodsevich’s ending by showing how this ending really speaks, really appears in her interiority. She does so by ferociously dismissing the way in which his language of the end implies her reaction to his scheme of endings and beginnings. Throughout the poem, the language of Rodsevich resonates and implodes in her lyrical speech that examines, seeks, and doubts its meaning. She explores the limits of his logic in its true meaning in her world—and here ending does not come to mean end but dissolution, disintegration, life falling apart or falling away from the world.

Like the moment of death, this moment of the end presents itself as a moment of gathering, in the sense of a moment of looking back to a past and completed story. Tsvetaeva emphasizes that this is a moment of exaggeration, because it is the “Exaggeration of life / In the moment of death”:

(Преувеличенность жизни

В смертный час.)

То, что вчера—по пояс,

Вдруг—до звезд.

(Преувеличенно, то есть:

Во весь—рост.)

(169)

(The exaggeration of life,

In the final hour.)

What yesterday was waist-high,

Suddenly reaches the stars.

(Exaggerated, that is:

To its full height.)

(53)

This exaggeration of life in the face of death is in this first poem written in brackets. The bracketing of the phrases is not simply rhythmical. It also tells us in this lyrical dialogue what is not present as a thought lingering in the background, as a thought that cannot be outspoken. Here in the first poem it is the “lyrical you” who dictates the poem, and its other is not receptive to the life that he claims to live, the life in its fullest. He is heading “home:”

Мысленно: милый, милый.

Час? Седьмой.

В кинематограф, или?

—Взрыв: “домой!”

(169)

Thinking: darling, darling.

“The time?” “Seven.”

“To the movies, or?”

Exclaiming: “Home!”9

(53)

Tsvetaeva constructs the dialogue without any indications of the interlocutor. She leaves it to the reader to interpret on the basis on the form and logic of the language, or in the way that the other person is apostrophized. The lyrical I “thinks”: “darling, darling,” which in Russian is rendered in the male form: milyi. Then there is a short almost anonymous exchange of words, which leads to the question that we only in its logic and address can attribute to her: “To the movies, or?” (“V kinematograf, ili?”), and his equally anonymous dismissal: “Exclaiming: ‘Home!’” (“Vzryv: ‘Domoi!’”). His exclamation is even more anonymous in Russian, because it is given not as a verb—that is, as the action of an interlocutor—but in the form of the noun vzryv (“explosion”). In his constant move away from her, the notion of a separate home comes as the logical end of the first poem, because it is the logical end of his language of the end—the logical end of his understanding of separation.

His language, the language of the end, is characterized by separation, differentiation, property, and measures. His is the world where something that positively has been can cease to be and, therefore, also become replaced by something else. His is the perspective of the Roman eagle. Her perspective is from within, and her language is as if also from within—from within the potential meaning of the words he uses. Her voice is lyrical, reading and interpreting the surroundings, faces, sounds, bodies—inner and outer perceptions. In the beginning of the poem, his diction determines the lyrical speech, and she appears as a surface of lyrical reflection often bracketed in his speech. Gradually, as the end becomes more and more unquestionable, the world also becomes more and more unreadable, through her loss of a perspective in tears. However, as she at the same time undoes his folding or bracketing of her, she becomes more and more certain of the meanings of her dis-perspective and of her own diction, and her voice becomes more dominant toward the end of the poem.

Homes

Now, as his intention to depart for his home ends the first poem, there is a pause until the second poem, marking the difficulty for her to swallow this—to integrate his idea of a separate home into her lyrical speech. The tone of the second poem is consequently that of intimidation of the lyrical I, who asks: how could you, and how can you speak of a home? As she says, there can be no home but that of the night, and a homeless and roadless being together:

Мой брат по беспутству,

Мой зноб и зной,

Так из дому рвутся,

Как ты—домой!

(169)

My brother in sin,

My fever and fervor.

They dream of running away,

The way you dream of home.

(53)

The Russian word for sin is the same as roadlessness, besputstvo. In Russian, the first phrase in the first strophe “Moi brat po besputstvu” does not only mean “My brother in sin” but also “my brother in roadlessness.” Further, in a chiastic figure, she turns around the meaning of home. As she states, people head away from home, as you (that is, Rodsevich) head home. What happens by parallel is that she also turns the idea of the end around—ending is not to come home (to make an end to an external relation and then return to what really is), but it is to be thrown out of the becoming of what cannot ever be in the day, in the separate home. Thus, as a consequence of the way that his ending excludes her from their common home in the night, her world begins to crumble in the third and fourth poems, which are lyrical monologues, and she writes that she now only “holds on to the water” (“Vody derzhus’/ kak tolscshi plotnoi”) (170). The night is not a comforting home, a place of rest and recovery—because recovery would mean the possibility of the productivity of the end—but that poem/song is too simple, as she says. For the lyrical I, being at home in the world really means to leave home and go out into the night:

Конем, рванувшим коновязь—

Ввысь—и веревка в прах.

—Но никакого дома ведь!

—Есть, в десяти шагах:

Дом на горе.—Не выше ли?

—Дом на верху горы.

Окно под самой крышею.

—Не от одной зари

Горящее—Так сызнова

Жизнь?—простота поэм!

Дом, это значит: из дому

В ночь. (О, кому повем

Печаль мою, беду мою,

Жуть, зеленее льда?) . . .

—Вы слишком много думали.

—Задумчивое:—Да.

(170)

Like a horse jerking at its tether—

Up!—and the rope’s in shreds.

“But we have no home!”

Ah, but we do. Ten paces away.

The house on the mountain. “Not higher up?”

The house at the top of the mountain,

The window under the roof.

“Burning not only with the light

Of dawn?” “So we start over again?”

“The simplicity of poems!”

Home means: out of the house

And into the night.

My sorrow, my grief,

(Horror, greener than ice?)

“You’ve been thinking too much.”

Pensively: “Yes.”

(53–55)

I have quoted this rather long sequence of the poem because it is here that Tsvetaeva breaks with The Poem of the Mountain and breaks away from the idea of a lyrical perspective that can transcend or overcome the world. The idea that home is at the top of the mountain, capturing the first lights of the new day, is now refuted as the “simplicity of poems.” Instead, she asserts that home must mean “out of the house (or out of home—T. L.) / And into the night.” This conclusion, which is not so uncharacteristic of Tsvetaeva’s early romanticism, is nevertheless a turning point in the poem, in her grief, and really perhaps also in her entire poetry. She reaches the term or realization of the modernist loss of lyrical orientation that perhaps always was present in her language. Lyrical language no longer guarantees a stronghold, and the poet is not someone who can resist the world, but only bring out and thus attain the experience of the loss of the world on his skin in a more powerful and meaningful way because she attains being in language. She comes to a night where there is really nothing at all to hold on to, and in a fantastic lyrical stream, she writes how she holds on to this water as the blind to the wall, or as the madman to the borders of the roof.10

He does not recognize this notion of home and of night, although these are the amorous loci par excellence, and she comes all the more to sense the expulsion of her night in her loneliness. When he, now from his perspective of the “eagle, overlooking the vicinities,” asks her: is this your home? She answers that this night, and her home, is the home in the heart, and that this is the home of literature:

(Орлом озирая местность):

—Помилуйте, это—дом?

—Дом в сердце моем.—Словесность!

(172)

(He surveys the scene like an eagle):

“You call this home?

“My home is in my heart”—“Literature!”

(59)

In a phrase preceding Heidegger’s statement in Letters on Humanism and thematized again in On the Way to Language that “Language is the house of being,”11 Tsvetaeva asserts that “My home is in my heart—Literature.” In this night, where there is no other access to the world, language becomes her dwelling place because of the way that it at the same time is a non-place, or a pre-place to the framing of conventional meaning. Indeed, Tsvetaeva literally stages this home of literature for the house of being. In looking for meaning in this “house in her heart, which is language” when the rest of the world, due to endings, is falling apart, she turns every phrase, gesture, word, and morpheme around to find how they include and exclude the world. Literature thus becomes the home for her nocturnal homeless roamings.

The End of Inner Life

When Tsvetaeva moves into the night, and into the complete loss of anything to hold on to, she not only moves away from the idea of a lyrical diction that will transcend the world, but also from the idea of a lyrical subject that remains intact vis-à-vis the experience of the world. As mentioned, Tomas Venclova insisted that Tsvetaeva in The Poem of the End reaches the end of sacral writing (“konets Pisaniia”). This is really a consequence of the breakdown in the poem of the very idea that has been present in Western lyrical poetry for ages and that became highly prominent in Symbolism: the transcendence of the lyrical subject into a metaphysical realm. More so, Tsvetaeva shows this end of sacral writing to be the very consequence of the idea of sacral writing; that is, she shows how the idea of a transcendent writing has entered a dead end. The breakdown of the lyrical perspective is parallel to the breakdown of the lyrical subject, and of its inner life and its soul. The only thing that remains is a sensitivity and sensuality fumbling for a sense and for something to sense:

Гнезжусь: тепло,

Ребро—потому и льну так.

Ни до, ни по:

Прозрения промежуток!

Ни рук, ни ног.

Всей костью и всем упором:

Жив только бок,

О смежный теснюсь которым.

Вся жизнь—в боку!

Он—ухо и он же—эхо.

(178)

I nestle. It’s warm.

Adam’s rib—that’s why I cling.

Neither before, nor after:

An interval of insight.

No arms, no legs.

All bone and pushing.

Only my side is alive.

Pressing against you.

All my life is in that side.

It’s an ear and it’s an echo.

(71–73)

Here in this night, this heart and this language, what is left of the subject is a kind of bare or naked life world with bare and naked bodies, but they are devoid of life, devoid of becoming, and their body is falling apart. As she writes, only her body is alive and feels. It has no “before and no after,” it is “an ear and an echo.” In this interval, she is neither life nor soul, but a body trying to reach for her sense of life in her very sensual feeling of life:

Я не более, чем животное,

Кем-то раненое в живот.

Жжет . . .

Как будто бы душу сдернули

С кожей! Паром в дыру ушла

Пресловутая ересь вздорная

Именуемая душа.

Христианская немочь бледная!

Пар! Припарками обложить!

Да ее никогда и не было!

Было тело, хотело жить,

Жить не хочет.

(180)

I am no better than a beast,

Wounded in the gut.

It burns . . .

As if my soul were torn

Away with the skin. Like a stream through a hole,

It vanished, that notorious silly heresy

Called the soul.

That Christian anemia!

Steam! (Cover it with a poultice!)

There never was any such thing!

Only a body which wanted to live,

And no longer wants to.

(75–77)

Tsvetaeva takes us to a phenomenology of the senses, and she breaks with a traditional way of thinking the soul and the subject, which stems from Aristotle and is germane to Christianity. She turns away from Aristotle’s thought that the soul is the mover of itself as something separate from the body and nevertheless placed in the body.12 Thus she refutes the idea of a form of inner life that is something in itself, not only as the ground for Christian metaphysical tradition, but also for the understanding of the lyrical subject. The lyrical I, after this ending of their love, is not left as a subject or as a soul. The lyrical I and its inner I live in the exposure to the other, and when this other refuses her, she is no longer. She is in a state of burning, which is emphasized by the abundance of the letter zh in zhiz’n (“life”), zhivot (“stomach”), and zhzhët (“burns”), as well as the broken line. She is as if emptied or, rather, “hollow,” and she can but hold on to the bits and pieces of burning bodily sensitivity that remain. Thus Tsvetaeva works her way into a phenomenology of the sexuality of the sexes in this poem, where Rodsevich represents male stability, force, dryness and she, female softness and humidity. The one cannot live without the other here, because without him there is no stability to hold on to in her bodily experience.

He is not simply the access to her inner life (as something capable to move itself)—because inner life can only be through him, his ending of their love also ends her inner life. This is how she can disclose the “sublingual, sacred” secret that she, as a woman at the moment of this end, is no more than an animal hurt in the stomach, which actually also could be translated as an animal hurt in what animates it. The words for animal (zhivotnoe) and stomach/gut (zhivot) are very similar in Russian. The word zhivot, however, not only denotes the abdomen or the womb, that is, the place where new life is formed, but in old Russian zhivot was also a synonym for “life.” Here is someone who is not hurt as a soul but who is hurt in life and as a life. Thus Tsvetaeva is telling us that now—that is, after this end—there is no one left in her who can live, and therefore she does not want to live anymore: “There was a body, it wanted to live / and it does not want it anymore” (“Bylo telo, khotelo zhit’ / zhit’ ne khochet”).

The Meaning of Separation

After these poems, Tsvetaeva has reached the utter point of the breakdown of lyrical orientation vis-à-vis the ending of their love, and from here she develops the poem in different forms of asking into the meanings of separation, of life and of man. Now her lyrical I is strong—it has found its way to undoing his ending, because it has found a language to bespeak her own loss as the subject that he assumes her to be.

When the second part of the tenth poem begins with bewilderment—saying that she has not really understood, not really remembered correctly—this is first and foremost a rhetorical way of bracketing his language:

Не довспомнивши, не допонявши,

Точно с праздника уведены . . .

—Наша улица!—Уже не наша . . .

—Сколько раз по ней!—Уже не мы . . .

(182)

Half-remembered, half-grasped,

As if taken too soon from a party . . .

“Our street!” “No longer ours . . .”

“How many times we . . .” “No longer we . . .”

(79)

The prefix do that Tsvetaeva likes to play upon means to come to the end, come to the right place, arrive. In an essay, she writes that in her poetry, “I cry, leap, roll my way to meaning”: (“dokrikivaius’, doskakivaius’, dokativaius’ do smysla”).13 Here, however, this do is negated. Here she seems to suggest that she cannot arrive, on the contrary, that she is taken away from coming to meaning by the implications of his language. This is, however, a concealed statement about his language—stating that it constantly leads away from the implications of language—constantly distracts, disjoins. The streets that they are walking on are no longer theirs, they are no longer them, because they cannot be them in his language. He, as always, asserts in reply that the sun will rise again tomorrow; that is, that it does not matter if they are they or not, because they can always be replaced:

—Завтра с западу встанет солнце!

—С Иеговой порвет Давид!

—Что мы делаем?—Расстаемся.

—Ничего мне не говорит

(182)

“Tomorrow the sun will rise in the West!”

“David will break with Jehovah!”

“What are we doing?” “Separating.”

“That word means nothing to me.”

(81)

The idea of a new day as well as the idea of separation means nothing to Tsvetaeva. This absurd world set apart is, however, the world as it is conjured in Rodsevich’s language of ending. In a furious line of argument, she can therefore unfold to us the way that the word “separation” (in Russian, rasstavanie) is built on the idea of different entities; on setting apart; in other words, on the idea of humans not having their being in common:

Сверхбессмысленнейшее слово:

Расстаемся.—Один из ста?

Просто слово в четыре слога

За которыми пустота.

(182)

The over-meaningless word:

We separate.—As one on a rate?

No more than a word with four syllables

After which comes emptiness [my translation – T. L.].

(81)

As mentioned above, it is characteristic of Tsvetaeva’s intonation to explore kinship between words on the level of morphemes to bring out an incredible intensity of sound and an excess of meaning. Thus she can also suggest several layers on the level of syllables and morphemes, and undercut the conventional meaning of words. In the word “separation” (rasstavanie), Tsvetaeva hears the word raz (“one time”) and the genitive of “hundred” (sto-sta), and concludes that separation means that she could be one out of a hundred. The potential meanings of the syllables thus implode in the word, only to undo or shed doubt on common meaning. In the verb rasstavat’sia she hears no meaning in the morphemes and therefore concludes that there is only emptiness behind. So she asks, in a rather cheeky tone, in what language the word rasstavat’sia actually could mean something, because Russian is the language of meaning at stake here. And she concludes that “separation” must be a word made up as the progressive words of the avant-garde:

Расставание—просто школы

Хлебникова соловьиный стон

Лебединый . . .

(182)

Separation: it’s like Khlebnikov’s

Nightingale moans,

Swanlike . . .

(81)

Here we can also hear a certain critique against the progressivity of the Russian avant-garde. By contrast to her method of bringing out meanings that are already potentially at hand in common words, the Russian futurist Khlebnikov fused different words or morphemes to form new words in a transrational language.

Later, she stops the stream, and the meter is broken in the question that she asks herself: How could it have happened? And what does it really mean to separate? “Separation” has to be, for Tsvetaeva, the world falling apart. Separation is the conclusion that overthrows everything, precisely because it means “a-part”:

Опрокидывающий довод:

Расставаться—ведь это врозь,

Мы же—срошиеся . . .

(183)

This overpowering argument:

Separation means a-part,

We, who had grown to be as one . . .

(83)

The final line is separated in the poem stylistically and logically. It breaks the ferocious lyrical stream of lines aimed at undoing the terms for an understanding of separation, and it has no ending, neither in sound nor in punctuation. Tsvetaeva concludes: “We who had grown to be as one . . .” (“—my zhe srosshiesia”). The word srosshiesia is the perfective participle of the word rasti, to grow; it is a status, something that has become, but this status is the very movement of growing together. The Russian word for “growth” (rost) stands in contrast to the word for “part”—and for counting one—raz in vroz’. That makes the contrast of the form of the words even stronger—the one-syllable and mute vroz’ contrasts the long and as if never-ending srosshiesia. The mute a-part contrasts the growth together. They are something, a growth, which in being can have no end in the sense of a ceasing to be, because ending would be to undo the way that it was a growth.

Life as Exurb

We now understand that because there is no longer any common growth, Tsvetaeva has reached a final position of the position-less, where life is really the exurb of life. The ending is the ending of inner life, and therefore also of being inside of life. As she has realized this by bringing it out in the words of the poem, in the subsequent poems, we are therefore already entering the locus of the after, and she now begins to ask what this tells us about love and life as such. Indeed, ending their love places life in the outskirts—in the outside, in what is beyond. The basic theme of the eleventh poem is set by the continuous repetition of the word zagorod with its emphasis on the prefix za (beyond, trans, outside):

Разом проигрывать—

Чище нет!

Загород, пригород:

Дням конец.

Негам (читай—камням),

Дням, и домам, и нам.

Дачи пустующие! Как мать

Старую—так же чту их.

Это ведь действие—пустовать:

Полое не пустует.

(Дачи, пустующие на треть,

Лучше бы вам сгореть!)

(183)

Losing everything at once—

There’s nothing neater.

Suburbs, outskirts:

End to our days.

End to our joys (read “burdens”),

The days, houses, and us.

Empty dachas: I revere them

As I would an aged mother.

This is an action, after all,—to vacate:

What’s empty cannot be emptied.14

(Dachas, one-third empty,

You’d do better to burn!)

(83)

The lyrical intonation is dictated by the many exclamations, and by the alternation between the long dactylic endings and the short and harsh beat of the trochaic lines. From here on, Tsvetaeva comes to develop the theme of hollow being, preceding T. S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Hollow Men” (1925) also thematizing the end of the world. She is not someone who is empty, as the verb pustovat’ implies, and she refuses to be half-inside in a half-empty life. Polyi in Tsvetaeva’s vocabulary as she is here developing it, means something or someone that has a potential for fullness, but that this potential is not actualized. She is hollow because there is an inner life, a fullness, which can no longer be, and there is no half inner life, or half-fullness. Therefore, what he has done, in a parallel to ending a life, is that he has ended her inner life, and she asks him not to tremble when he uses the knife. What he is cutting up is not a body, or a life, but the link, the joint or stitch that holds this life together:

Только не вздрагивать,

Рану вскрыв.

Зáгород, зáгород,

Швам разрыв!

Ибо—без лишних слов

Пышных—любовь есть шов.

Шов, а не перевязь, шов—не щит.

—О, не проси защиты!—

Шов, коим мертвый к земле пришит,

Коим к тебе пришита.15

(183)

Love is a joint that keeps her on Earth like the force of gravity. It is the joint of exposure to the other that makes the experience of the inner possible. This joint is broken by separation, which leads the human out into the outskirts of life. Tsvetaeva thus brings out a paradox that is kin to the thought in existential philosophy understanding the ex- of existence as exile.16 At least she points at a double-edged exile of existence. There is an exile of life without love. In this exile there is no inner life. On the other hand, life in love is being in life, being in the world, but this love is immediately or at the same time a form of exit from exile into a being-together, into a world, and from the ordinary form of exile:

Жизнь есть пригород.

Зá городом строй!

Эх, проигранное

Дело, господа!

Всё-то—пригороды!

Где же города?!

(185)

Life is an exurb:

Build it way out of town.

Ahh, the game’s lost,

Ladies and gentlemen!

Suburbs everywhere!

Where are the real cities?

(87)

Tsvetaeva’s outskirts are not the outer limits made city—that is, inhabited suburbs—but what lies outside of the city. Life is outside of the city in the sense that it lies outside of a common dwelling, outside of the built world. The built world is the stuffed world, but there is no hollowness and no fullness, no exposure and no inner life as Tsvetaeva understands them. The outskirts are, on the other hand, the place of movement, of life, of growing and of the inner, and the idea to build, settle, or establish something in the outskirts is doomed to fail. The place cannot be built, because life in itself cannot be inhabited as a continuous resting place. This is what leads Tsvetaeva to the conclusion, that “life is the place that cannot be lived”:

За городом! Понимаешь? Зá!

Вне! Перешед вал!

Жизнь—это место, где жить нельзя:

Ев—рейский квартал . . .

Так не достойнее ль вó сто крат

Стать Вечным Жидом?

Ибо для каждого, кто не гад,

Ев—рейский погром—

(185)

Out of town! You understand? Outside!

Out! We’ve breached the walls.

Life is a place where you cannot live:

The Jewish quarter . . .

Wouldn’t it be a hundred times better

To become a Wandering Jew?

For anyone not scum,

Life is a pogrom.

(87)

The exclamations are now abounding, and Tsvetaeva is really writing out the paradox of life as a non-place in the outskirts that cannot be built and not be lived to the fullest. Hélène Cixous suggested that: “One could imagine—although this is also a phantasm—that the Jews would be the keepers of a certain memory in which they would live since there is no other place for them in the world.”17 Indeed, the poem develops the Jewish theme of exodus and of expulsion from living in the towns of several countries of Europe, and who therefore were constrained to living outside of the city gates or in ghettos. She, however, confirms it not as a memory, but as her own eternal and real existential condition as a poet. If we listen to language, we will understand that inside cannot be lived in an individually inhabited way.

The End of the End

At the end of the poem of the end, Tsvetaeva has in her specific sense come to terms with this end, or come to a language in which she can say the meaning of the end in the way that ending for her undoes meaning, undoes life. In reaching her meaning of this separation, her own non-position, she can in a last movement of the poem also reach the lyrical you of the poem and touch him so that he begins to cry. This cry, which sets the theme to the two final poems, becomes for her a grace because it means that they are together again in a becoming. This togetherness is now not that of making love but of shedding tears, and she concludes the poem:

ибо совместный Плач

—больше, чем сон!

—И в полые волны

Мглы—сгорблен и равн

—Бесследно—безмолвно

—Как тонет корабль.

(187)

For our weeping together,

Surpasses sleep.

So, into the hollow waves,

Of darkness—hunched-over

Without a sound, without a trace,

As a ship sinks.

(91–92)

Tsvetaeva’s ending to their love is not “an end” but the way that the ship goes to the ground: “Without a sound, without a trace” (“Bessledno, bezmolvno”). This is only because the whole world is stirred up in the “hollow waves of the storm” (“polye mgly”), in their tears without any meaning but for them. Perhaps one could say that Tsvetaeva could reach an end to the end, when the world could be world, or at least, when her lover—in the end—no longer was the Roman eagle with the perspective of ending and beginning but a co-cryer, with the ability to be exposed to the other.

Concluding Words

What Tsvetaeva seems to suggest in her reading of the unreadability of the End, is that we should understand the End and the World as two incompatibles. The language of the world relates to communality of being a-part, of exclusion. Tsvetaeva’s being together is that of common growth, of common becoming, and this is for her the movement of the word and of the world, because it is the movement of life. Therefore she seems to suggest that we are living in a world that thinks movement as endings and new beginnings, but this is a world that cannot be (cannot become) in-being, because it sets life, growth, and the sense of the inner into exile.

Notes

1. I am here referring to Martin Heidegger’s article “The Nature of Language” in On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1971). Heidegger makes a close reading of Stefan George’s poem Das Wort and starts with the final line “Kein Wort sei wo das Wort gebricht” (“Where words break off no thing may be”). The “break off” of language as a starting point for a phenomenological reduction is a method that well applies to Tsvetaeva’s investigations of language as a dwelling place for a different experience of the world, as I will show further ahead.

2. Heidegger, “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstaedter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 188.

3. See Tsvetaeva’s poem to Pasternak from May 26, 1926, in Marina Cvetaeva. Boris Pasternak. Dushi nachinaiut videt’. Pis’ma 1922–1936 godov, E. B. Korkina and I. D. Shevelenko (eds.) (Moscow: Vagrius, 2004), p. 218.

4. Several studies have been written on Tsvetaeva’s linguistic explorations in general, for instance, Liudmila Zubova in Iazyk poezii Mariny Tsvetaevoi (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Sankt-Peterburgskogo universiteta, 1999).

5. Quoted from “Poema Gory,” Stikhotvoreniia i poemy v piati tomakh, tom 4 (New York: Russia Publishers, 1973), p. 167. Henceforth, reference to the poems will only be given in page numbers.

6. In his comparison of the references to myths and to the Bible in the two poems, Venclova omits, however, the very motivation for this end to sacral writing, as well as Tsvetaeva’s radical refusal of “this most Christian world” in the poem. In order to uncover the way that Tsvetaeva comes to this end, we must look deeper down into her revolt against Rodsevich’s language of the end, and her revolt against a Christian language which in the way that it folds and implicates the world has come to exclude poetry from life. Tomas Venclova, “Poema gory i poema kontsa Mariny Cvetaevoi kak Vetkhii Zavet i Novii Zavet,” in Sobesedniki na piru. Stat’i o russkoi literature (Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 1997), pp. 141–67. For an analysis of the interrelation of the two poems, see also Elena Korkina, Poemy Mariny Cvetaevoi, dissertation, Leningrad, 1990.

7. Quoted from Marina Tsvetaeva, Poem of the End: Selected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry with Facing Russian Text, translated by Nina Kossman with Andrew Newcomb (Woodstock and New York: Ardis, 1998), p. 51. References will henceforth be given in page numbers.

8. Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” p. 163.

9. A more correct translation of the Russian original “Vzryv: ‘Domoi!’” would be “An explosion: ‘Home!’”

10. In her reading of Tsvetaeva’s poetry and poetics, Hélène Cixous devotes much attention to The Poem of the End. She makes an interesting connection to the thought of Heidegger when she asserts that, in similarity to Heidegger, Tsvetaeva sees the task of the poet as showing that “Risk is the other word for life.” “Following Heidegger, we can say that being is without shelter (sans abri), without protection, but salvation is precisely in this risk.” See Hélène Cixous, “Poetry, Passion, and History: Marina Tsvetaeva” in Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector and Tsvetayeva, edited and translated by Verena Andermatt Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 113.

11. Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” p. 71.

12. In “Book II” in On the Soul, translated by J. A. Smith, p. 21, Aristotle writes: “The soul is the cause or source of the living body. The terms cause and source have many senses. But the soul is the cause of its body alike in all three senses which we explicitly recognize. It is (a) the source or origin of movement, it is (b) the end, it is (c) the essence of the whole living body.”

13. Marina Cvetaeva, Boris Pasternak. Dushi nachinaiut videt’, 2004, p. 240.

14. A more correct translation of this line would be: “What’s hollow cannot be emptied.”

15. Just don’t wince, / When the wound is open. / To the outskirts, way out of town, / To rip out the stitches. / For, to say it plainly, simply: / Love is a seam. / A seam, not a sling; a stitch, not a shield. / Oh, don’t ask to be shielded! / The stitch by which the dead are sewn to the earth, / By which I’m stitched to you. (83)

16. See Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback’s discussion of Heidegger’s notion of in-being with relation to exile in “Exile and Existential Disorientation,” in Dis-Orientations: Philosophy, Literature and the Lost Grounds of Modernity, Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback and Tora Lane (eds.) (London and New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), pp. 100–4.

17. Cixous, Readings, p. 131.