The epigraphs are taken from Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), 157 and 255.

1. Benjamin, Illuminations, 157.

2. Hilary Fink has demonstrated the French philosopher's strong influence on the Russian intelligentsia's rejection of linear time, causality, historical materialism, and the neo-Kantian segregation of phenomenal and subjective worlds, in favor of Bergson's organic model of time and its corollary aesthetic of simultaneity. See Fink, Hilary L., Bergson and Russian Modernism, 1900-1939 (Evanston, 1999).Google Scholar James Curtis has shown the formative link between Viktor Shklovskii's reading of Bergson's Laughter in 1911 and his pioneering formalist notion of art as the “defamiliarization” of habitually deadened and automatized experience. See Curtis, James M., “Bergson and Russian Formalism,” Comparative Literature, 28 no. 2 (Spring 1976): 109-21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Comparable Bergsonian influences have been analyzed in Vladimir Nabokov's aesthetic philosophies of “cosmic synchronization” and comic/cosmic parody. See, for example, Glynn, Michael, Vladimir Nabokov: Bergsonian and Russian Formalist Influences in His Novels (New York, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a thorough investigation of the Russian philosophy of spirit and language as it developed from its German phenomenological and Orthodox roots, see Seifrid, Thomas, The Word Made Self: Russian Writings on Language 1860-1930 (Ithaca, 2005).Google Scholar

3. On gaiety, see Bergson, Henri, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Brereton, Cloudesley and Rothwell, Fred (Copenhagen, 1999), 18.Google Scholar

4. Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire: Essai sur la relation du corps avec Vesprit (1896; trans, into Russian by B. Bazarov, 1914), and Bergson, Le rire (1899, trans, by A. E. Ianovskii as Smekh v zhizni i na stsene, 1900), both in Sobranie sochinenii Henri Bergson, vols. 1-5, ed. M. I. Semenov (St. Petersburg, 1913-1914). See Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism, 142-43 and xvii for full publication data. For Bergson, I will quote from Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York, 1991) and from Laughter.

5. Among Smith's many acute observations, she notes that “Prakticheski Bergson zameniaet lineinoe vospriiatie vremeni na prostranstvennoe vospriiatie vremeni, to est’ v ego ponimanii vremia mozhet byt’ predstavleno kak nekoe fliuidnoe sostoianie, v kotorom starye formy organichno protekaiut v novye formy. Poistine v Bergsonovskom kliuche zvuchat nazvaniia vospominanii [Zinaidy] Gippius ‘Zhivye litsa’ i tsvetaevskogo ocherka o Maksimiliane Voloshine ‘Zhivoe o zhivom.“’ More specifically, Smith points out that in his essay on Bergson, “Teatral'noe snovidenie,” Voloshin suggested that soulful contact takes place in a theatricalized space, a mise-en-scène that Tsvetaeva embodied in her early lyric, “Idesh’ namenia prokhozhii” (1913). See Smith, Alexandra, “Vzgliady Mariny Tsvetaevoi o tvorcheskoi evoliutsii i intuitivnom myshlenii v svete teorii Anri Bergsona,” in Beliakova, I. Iu., ed., Stikhiia i razum v zhizni i tvorchestveMariny Tsvetaevoi (Moscow, 2005), 25–36.Google Scholar

6. The external plot of their childhood, as recounted much later in Anastasiia Tsvetaeva's memoir, differed in numerous facts and especially in its atmosphere from Marina's. The sisters were born, in 1892 and 1894, into the sociable, haute-bourgeoise home of Professor Ivan V. Tsvetaev, eminent classicist and art historian, and his second wife Aleksandra Mein, a high-minded, artistically and musically gifted woman twenty years his junior, who had renounced her first romance and the unrespectable career of a concert pianist to devote herself to her children's education and her husband's lifework, the imperial sculpture museum. Tsvetaeva simply called what she was doing “lyrical prose,” but Anastasiia contested her older sister's representation of their mother as “simplified, schematic,” concluding: “This was characteristic of Marina's self-will—she had no consideration for the past, creating her own.” Anastasiia Tsvetaeva, Vospominaniia, ed. M. I. Feinberg (Moscow, 2005), 77-78. What was missing from Marina's story was the sisters’ joyful experience of childhood and youth, replete with music and their mother's masterful storytelling, recalled with vivid specificity in the (counter)-memoir's 800 pages, over which their mother's lingering tuberculosis, European peregrinations in search of cures, and death in 1906 cast painful, but humanly shared, not fatal shadows. Also erased from Marina's version were several times when she accompanied her mother in her last years: the revolutionary stirrings, which Anastasiia repeatedly likens to a “funeral march,” foreshadowing the “rivers of blood” of 1905; Marina's passionate adolescent attraction to the young revolutionary circles, featuring a new breed of “revolutionary girls,” where her poetry found its first admiring public—and which her mother tried to forbid (203); Marina's creation, during the years of boarding-school “exile” from Russia, of a jealously guarded Napoleon-cult, whose idolatrous images and “dolls” (one even thrust into the family's corner icon!) presided over her poetic “oblivion in the gift of rhythmic conjuring” (328). According to Anastasiia, their mother foresaw Marina's poetic attainments and mourned that she would not live to see them. Tsvetaeva, by contrast, puts music and poetry, her mother and her childhoodself at opposite ends of a black-and-white game-space configured by the piano, playing the match of wills out move-for-move before her live audience. See Viktoria Schweitzer's sensible discussion of the “factual” versus “mythopoetic” controversy kindled by the publication of Anastasiia's memoir, Tsvetaeva, trans. Robert Chandler and H. T. Willetts, ed. Angela Livingstone (New York, 1992), 44-66.

7. Compare this to her disappointed note after her reading of Moi Pushkin: “Nikto ne ponial, pochemu Moi Pushkin, vse, dazhe samye sochuvstvuiushchie, poniali kak prisvoenie, a ia khotela tol'ko: u vsiakogo—svoi, eto—moi” (No one understood, why [I called it] My Pushkin; everyone, even the most sympathetic, took it as an appropriation, while I wanted [to express] only: each has his/her own [Pushkin], and here—is mine). Letter to Vera Bunina, 19 February 1937, in Marina Tsvetaeva, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh (Moscow, 1994-1995), 7:298 (emphasis in the original).

8. “Chitala ia, Vera, Mat’ i Muzyka—svoiu mat’ i svoiu muzyku (i ee muzyku!) i— pustiachok, k[otor]yi ochen’ ponravilsia, p. ch. veselyi (ser'ezno-veselyi, ne-sovsem-veseloveselyi)—” Skazka mated“—maloletnim Ase i mne. Nadeius', chto iz-za uspekha (iavnogo) voz'mut v Posl [ednie] Novosti. Chistyi dokhod, Vera, (Vas vkliuchaia) 500 frfankov].” Letter to Vera Bunina, 2 November 1934, in Tsvetaeva, Sobranie sochinenii, 7:276.

9. Bergson, Laughter, 18.

10. Vladimir Nabokov's last Russian novel Dar (The gift, 1938), indeed his whole oeuvre, acknowledges his philosophical affinity with Bergson and tests its limits.

11. Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism, 5-8. “Russian childhood” was already a traditional genre. Andrew Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Stanford, 1990) is generally credited as the pioneering study. See Anna Brodsky's more nuanced discussion of the literary subset we have in mind in her dissertation, “Poetic Autobiography in Russian Literature: Turgenev, Bunin, Nabokov” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1995); and also Sara Pankenier's wide-ranging exploration of the conceptualization of children's creative psychology and artistry across the domains of modern psychology, linguistics, formalist theory, the fine arts, and literature in her dissertation, “infant non sens: The Infanulist Aesthetic of the Russian Avant-Garde, 1909-1939” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2006). Karin Grelz analyzes Tsvetaeva's use of presymbolic language in relation to Vygotskii's work on children's psychological development in Beyond the Noise of Time: Readings of Marina Tsetaeva's Memories of Childhood (Stockholm, 2004). For related treatments of the “child's eye” poetic memoir, see Bjorling, Fiona, “Child Perspective: Tradition and Experiment. An Analysis of ‘Detstvo Ljuvers’ by Boris Pasternak,” in Nilsson, N. A., ed., Studies in Twentieth Century Russian Prose (Stockholm, 1982), 130-55Google Scholar; Mnacakanova, Elizaveta, “O roli detskogo vospominanija v psikhologii chudozestvennogo tvorcestva (na primere prozy Mariny Cvetaevoj i dvukh otryvkov iz romana F. M. Dostoevskogo ‘Brat'ja Karamazovy,“’ WienerSlawistischer Almanack, vol. 10 (1982): 325-50.Google Scholar

12. See Freidin, Gregory, A Coat of Many Colors: Osip Mandelstam and His Mythologies of Self-Presentation (Berkeley, 1987)Google Scholar; and Harris, Jane Gary, “An Inquiry into the Function of the Autobiographical Mode: Joyce, Mandel'stam, Schultz,” in Flier, Michael S. and Debreczeny, Paul, eds., American Contributions to the Ninth International Congress of Slavists: Kiev (Columbus, Ohio, 1997), 2:201-21.Google Scholar

13. See Nalbantian, Suzanne, Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience (New York, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lehrer, Jonah, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Boston, 2007)Google Scholar; and Oliver Sacks's recent neuropathological investigation of extreme amnesia mitigated only by intact musical recall during performance, in “The Abyss: Music and Amnesia,” The New Yorker, 24 September 2007, 100-111.

14. This purging occurred partly through the official Soviet genres of anketaand public samokritika. See Lahusen, Thomas, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia (Ithaca, 2002)Google Scholar for a sensitive study of the self-revision of memory.

15. For one such partisan version, see Kliukin, Iu., “Tsvetaevskii Parizh,” in Etkind, E. G. and Lossky, Veronique, eds., Marina Tsvetaeva: Pesn’ zhizni/Un Chant de Vie: Marina Tsvetaeva (Paris, 1996), 77–101.Google Scholar For the opening salvo in the discussion of the literary elite's role, see Khodasevich, Vladislav, “Konets Renaty,” republished in Nekropol': Vospominaniia (Brussels, 1939).Google Scholar

16. Paul Fussell argues that the unprecedented nature of World War I's trench warfare destroyed survivors’ capacity to remember and describe it but replicated itself in their unconscious epistemological categories for sifting present experience: always binary, conflictual, and absolute. Arguably, the Russian civil war perpetuated itself in the same way. See Fussell, Paul, The Great War in Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975).Google Scholar

17. See Raeff, Marc, Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration, 1919-1939 (Oxford, 1990), 95–117 Google Scholar, on this conservative trend—also vividly satirized in Nabokov's Bar (1938).

18. Pierre Nora famously writes: “There are lieux de memoire because there are no longer milieux de mémoire” where group memory can be filtered and rehearsed. See Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, no. 26, Special issue on Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989): 7.

19. Osip Mandel'shtam, review first published in “Literaturnaia Moskva,” Rossiia, 1922, no. 2. Cited and perceptively analyzed in Irina Shevelenko, Literaturnyi put’ Tsvetaevoi: Ideologiia, poetika, identichnost’ avtora v kontekste epokhi (Moscow, 2002), 215—16. Elena Korkina published Tsvetaeva's outraged response to Mandel'shtam's Shum xrremeni in 1927; see Alexandra Smith's discussion of this in her article, “Surpassing Acmeism? The Lost Key toCvetaeva's ‘Poem of the A\r,'” Russian Literature, 45 no. 2, Special issue on The Silver Age (15 February 1999): 209-22. Schweitzer discusses M. Osorgin's critique of the “provincial over-intimacy” of her prose in Tsvetaeva, 270, as well as Jane Taubman's account of Mandel'shtam and Tsvetaeva's creative interaction in Viktoria Schweitzer, A Life through Poetry: Marina Tsvetaeva's Lyric Diary (Columbus, Ohio, 1989).

20. Marina Tsvetaeva, Cherdachnoe, in Izbrannaia proze v dvukh tomakh 1917-1937 (New York, 1979), 1:87. See also Tsvetaeva, Marina, Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries 1917-1922, trans, and ed. Gambrell, Jamey (New Haven, 2002), xviii–xxiv,Google Scholar on the work's reception; as well as Kliukin, “Tsvetaevskii Parizh,” 77-101.

21. Shevelenko, Literaturnyi put’ Tsvetaevoi, 336. Marina Tsvetaeva, “Moi otvet Osipu Mandel'shtamu,” Sobranie sochinenii, 5:305-16 and annotations, 688-92.

22. See the review “M. T Molodets. Skazka. Praga. 1924 g.,” cited in Shevelenko, Literaturnyi put’ Tsvetaevoi, 317.

23. The article's strident political equation of the betrayed child with the White Guard officer ostensibly betrayed by Mandel'shtam did not endear her to the public. Ibid.

24. Khodasevich, Vladislav, Sobranie sochinenii, ed. Malmstad, John E. and Hughes, Robert P. (Ann Arbor, 1990), 2:344.Google Scholar

25. Joshua Landy persuasively argues for the fictive rather than the mnemonic nature of the madeleine, in Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004), 3-49.

26. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 160. See “The Image of Proust” (first published in Literarische Welt, 1929), and “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (first published in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 8 nos. 1-2, 1939), both in Illuminations, 201-16 and 155-200.

27. Tsvetaeva, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:230, cited in Shevelenko, Literaturnyi put’ Tsvetaevoi, 359, 354.

28. Tsvetaeva as quoted in Shevelenko, Literaturnyi put’ Tsvetaevoi, 352-53. Shevelenko points out that, for the first time, Tsvetaeva shifted from her radically separate “I” to “we,” the common subjectivity of “our generation.” Ibid., 374. On the mythopoetic and linguistic dialogue with her contemporaries that Tsvetaeva conducted in her prose, see Mark Hamprecht's comprehensive study, Prosa der Poeten: Erinnerung und poetische Faktur in Texten Marina Cvetaevas und ihrer Zeitgenossen (Frankfurt am Main, 2001).

29. Bergson was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. See also Fink, Bergson and Russian Modernism, 101-11.

30. Kudrova, Irma, Put’ komet, 2d ed. (St. Petersburg, 2007), 2:402-19.Google Scholar How acutely felt was the “moment of danger“? On 21 November 1934, Tsvetaeva wrote to Anna Teskova of her desire to write a will. From 1934 on, in Anastasiia Tsvetaeva's words, her sister was “mentally measuring every place for a hook.” Anastasiia was living in Russia and had been separated from her sister for years; the excessive clarity of hindsight is of course notorious. See in “Poslednee o Marine,” Anastasiia's analysis of her sister's first suicide attempt in 1914 and her last in 1941 in Tsvetaeva, Vospominaniia, 813-14.

31. Pushkin employed the same tactic in Moia rodoslovnia (1830).

32. See Bergson, Matter and Memory, 162. See also Kumukova, D. D., “Ideia ‘dukha muzyki’ v estetike M. Tsvetaevoi i russkikh simvolistov,” in Beliakova, I. Iu., ed., Marina Tsvetaeva: Epokha, kul'tura, sud'ba: Desiataia tsvetaevskaia mezhdunarodnaia konferentsiia (Moscow, 2003), 61–66.Google Scholar Belyi's death in 1934 and his exemplary intertwining of music, the image of his mother, and music's prelinguistic access to Bergsonian “memories of memories” in Kotik Letaev were surely present in her and her audience's mind when she performed Mat’ i muzyka. See also Fink's analysis, Bergson and Russian Modernism, 45-53.

33. “Khozhdenie po slukhu” evokes its own echolalic source in Orthodox legend, the Virgin Mary's apocryphal “khozhdenie po mukam” (pilgrimage into the torments to intercede for sinners), another version of the classical descent into the underworld. I thank Tom Roberts and Anna Muza for these observations. Aleksei Tolstoi's historical novel Khozhdenie po mukam had been published in the first issues of Sovremennye zapiski (Paris, 1921).

34. See Ariadna Efron's eyewitness account of Tsvetaeva's daily writing practice, “Kak ona pisala,” reprinted in L. A. Golushkina, ed., Borisogleb'e: Dom-muzei Mariny Tsvetaevoi (Moscow, 2007), 49; and Tsvetaeva's poem “Stol” (1933), which awards her desk the same axial role in her world as the piano had held in her mother's. Anastasiia gives her mother's gala edition of Dante's Divine Comedy, illustrated by Gustave Dore, pride of place in her descriptions of favorite family reading. See Tsvetaeva, Vospominaniia, 63, 457. Ariadna Efron recalled that Marina kept her mother's favorite three children's books, the Dore-illustrated Perrault Fairy Tales and “Sviashchennaia istoriia” (either Dore's Bible or the History of Holy Russia, Dore's 1854 satire of the Crimean War), together with a gala edition of Nikolai Gogol“s works, lying on a separate shelf in their Moscow apartment. See Efron, “Kak ona pisala,” 113. Tsvetaeva quotes her mother's words shortly before death: “I will regret only music and the sun.” Marina Tsvetaeva, Mat’ i muzyka, in Izbrannaiaproza, 2:190. All translations are mine.

35. Ariadna Efron, “Stranitsy vospominanii,” in Golushkina, ed., Borisogleb'e, 47.

36. Tsvetaeva, Marina, “Idesh’ na menia prokhozhii,” Stikhotvoreniia i poemy v piati tomakh (New York, 1980), 1:139 Google Scholar, cited in Smith, “Vzgliady Mariny Tsvetaevoi,” 27. Smith continues, “Tsvetaevskaia forma ‘smeiat'sia, kogda nel'zia’ mozhet byt’ prochitana v ramkakh russkoi kul'turnoi traditsii, kak destabiliziruiushchii element, poryvaiushchii ustoi russkogo samosoznaniia.” She also points out that in a later essay, “Iskusstvo pri svete sovesti” (1932), Tsvetaeva emphasized the role of the comic in Pushkin's “Pir vo vremia chumy” (34-35). Smith independendy suggests the general connection of Tsvetaeva's musical and comic conceptions of fluid consciousness with Bergson's, especially in Laughter. “Smekh razoblachaet avtomatizm sovremennoi zhizni,” 31. She gives two formulations I have found particularly fruitful: “Po mneniiu Bergsona, osnovnoi funktsiei vospriiatiia iavliaetsia umenie uvidet’ seriiu elementarnykh izmenenii” (28-29) and “Takim obrazom, Tsvtaeva obnaruzhivaet v svoei mated imenno takoe tvorcheskoe soznanie, o kotorom pishet Bergson. Mat’ Tsvetaevoi, buduchi muzykantom, obladala osobym chut'em, kotoroe davalo ei vozmozhnost’ vosprinimat’ odnovremenno s real'nym vremenem i nekoe absoliutnoe vremia, ulavlivat’ kak by vibratsii nepreryvnogo tvorcheskogo potoka” (34). I am grateful to her for sharing her article with me.

37. Tsvetaeva's prose has been rightly probed for its poetic, metaphysical, tragic, psychoanalytic, and mythopoetic dimensions. See M. V Serova, “Avtobiograficheskaia proza v obschchem kontekste poeticheskogo samoopredeleniia M. Tsvetaevoi,” and Maslova, M. I., “Tsvetaeva i psikhoanaliz,” both in Kataeva-Lytkina, N. I., Krasovskaia, E. S., and Revzina, O. G., eds., Vse v grudi slilos’ i spelos': Piataia tsvetaevskaia mezhdunarodnaia nauchnotematicheskaia konferentsiia (Moscow, 1998), 175-86, 421-31Google Scholar; N. S.|Kavakita, “'Matriarkhat’ Mariny Tsvetaevoi (Materinskaia arkhetipika v obrazno-tematicheskoi sisteme tvorchestva poeta),” in Beliakova, , ed., Marina Tsvetaeva: Epokha, kul'tura, sud'ba, 432-43Google Scholar; and Liza Knapp on Tsvetaeva's identification of her child-self with Pushkin's black “otherness” in the prose memoir of her Parisian exile, in “Tsvetaeva's ‘Blackest of Black’ (Naicherneishii) Pushkin,” in Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, Nicole Svobodny, and Ludmilla A. Trigos, eds., Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness (Evanston, 2006), 279-301.

38. Bergson, Laughter, 39. At the end of Revizor, the mayor famously interjects, “Chemu smeetes'? nadsoboiu smeetes'!” Nikolai Gogol', Revizor, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1951), 4:94.

39. Bergson, Laughter, 18. In “Teatral'nyi raz“ezd posle predstavleniia novoi komedii,” Gogol’ specifies the type of laughter the audience failed to notice in Revizor: “tot smekh, kotoryi ves’ izletaet iz svetloi prirody cheloveka.” Gogol', Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 4:169.

40. Bergson, Laughter, 49, 65. Bergson's description merits comparison with Freud's description of the “fort-da game” that plays such a crucial role in Jacques Lacan's theory of separation and individuation governed by language; and more specifically with Freud's “psychoanalysis” of drearn-condensation, mirroring, and linguistic self-exposure in Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Joyce Crick (1905; London, 2002).

41. Bergson, Laughter, 90.

42. Tsvetaeva, Mat’ i muzyka, 2:172.

43. Belyi used the same synaesthetic image to describe Madame Ableukhova's pianoplaying in Petersburg. I thank Irene Masing-Delic for this note. Molly Bloom's surging associative, earthy “Yes” monologue at the end of James Joyce's Ulysses marked this first-person form as parodiably feminine. 44. See Hector Malo, Sans famille (1878), cited in Tsvetaeva, Vospominaniia, 89.

45. Tsvetaeva, Mat’ i muzyka, 2:172 (emphasis in the original).

46. The talismanic symbolist phrase originated in Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (1859). “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point” is one of Blaise Pascal's most famous Pensées (1662).

47. Tsvetaeva, Mat’ i muzyka, 2:172.

48. Ibid.

49. Bergson, Laughter, 76.

50. The machine is the epitome of Utopian futurist art, as is the Silver Age's related love of the fixed plots of commedia dell'arte and balagan.

51. Bergson, Laughter, 73-74.

52. Ibid., 89.

53. Ibid.

54. Tsvetaeva, Mat’ i muzyka, 2:179.

55. Ibid., 186. Buster Keaton's The Cameraman (1928) is the classic “metapoetic” treatment of this theme. Tsvetaeva's self-proclaimed affinity for silent film deserves separate analysis.

56. Tsvetaeva, Mat’ i muzyka, 2:187.

57. Ibid., 2:188.

58. Ibid., 2:184.

59. In PaleFire, Nabokov calls this game “word-golf.”

60. Tsvetaeva, Mat’ i muzyka, 2:184.

61. Tsvetaeva's play with her mother's feet and her wordplays on poetic feet recall Pushkin's “pedal digression” in Evgenii Onegin.

62. “Chromatic flight” marks the site of a wound, and also the Holy Grail's spiritual cure in Richard Wagner's last masterwork Parsifal (begun 1845, completed 1882), in opposition to the diatonic earthly world of Klingsor. Wagner's retreat, in Friedrich Nietzsche's eyes, from “txansvaluation of values” to Parsifal's Christian renunciation, precipitated The Genealogy of Morals. Two fanatical Russian Wagnerians were Belyi and Lev Kobylinskii-Ellis, a close friend of the Tsvetaeva sisters before the revolution, who undertook to translate Parsifal (and indeed, all of Wagner) into Russian verse for the publishing house Musaget. See Rosamund Bartlett, Wagner and Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), 168-77. When Tsvetaeva invokes her own khromatika she is also re-producing the aesthetic stamp of her time.

63. It was an instrument other poets had played on: Vladimir Maiakovskii in his “Fleita-pozvonochnik,” first publicly performed in 1915; and Mandel'shtam's grimmer image of “Vek moi, zver’ moi” looking back over its crushed spine in his poem “Vek,” first published in Rossiia, 1922, no. 4 (December) A pun allows a sound to pivot and enter a different “semantic series,” just as a note can pivot into a new key.

64. Tsvetaeva, Mat’ i muzyka, 2:177.

65. Ibid., 2:189. Wagner's open-ended chromaticism, as well as the eternal returns and evolutions of his leitmotifs, were lionized by the whole pantheon of modernist writers from Baudelaire to Joyce and Proust as the way to transcend temporal closure.

66. Ibid., 2:177.

67. Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, written 1908-1922, published sequentially (Paris, 1913-1927), the last three of the seven volumes posthumously.

68. Pushkin's kumiry have the same property, first identified by Roman Jakobson, in “Socha v symbolice Pushkinove” (1937), Jakobson, Pushkin and His Sculptural Myth, trans. John Burbank (The Hague, 1975).

69. The first of these is what Julia Kristeva calls the “choraic” communication of the preverbal, presymbolic mother-child dyad. Psychoanalytic theory asserts that separation and assumption of the subject's position in die “symbolic defile” of language and human society must take place for both individuation and communication to occur. “Khromatika” tries to elude that inevitable order. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York, 1984); Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York, 1982); and Anne Marie Smith, Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable (London, 1998), 21, 60, 69.

70. Bergson, Laughter, 165.

71. Tsvetaeva, Mat’ i muzyka, 2:190.

72. Anastasiia describes her mother occasionally rising from her sickbed to perform for groups of transported listeners; Marina condenses these into one “conquered” boy.

73. Tsvetaeva, Mat’ i muzyka, 2:190.

74. And for herself. Sacks marvels at the unique neurological efficacy of musical performance in reanimating his amnesiac subject's full personality: “[It] comes not with recalling the past, as for Proust, but with performance—and it holds only as long as the performance lasts.” Sacks, “The Abyss,” 111.

75. Bergson, Laughter, 16.