I am grateful to David Bethea and to the anonymous reviewers of Slavic Review for their responses to an earlier version of this article. This project was assisted by a grant from the Eurasia Program of the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the State Department under the Program for Research and Training on Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union (Title VIII). All citations from Marina Tsvetaeva's works are from Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh (Moscow, 1994-95; hereafter SS). Translations from the Russian are my own unless otherwise noted. The epigraph is an excerpt from Tsvetaeva's poem “Zaochnost',” SS, 2:216.

1. See, for example, Tsvetaeva's 18 April 1911 letter to Maksimilian Voloshin: “There remains a feeling of complete aloneness which has no cure. The body of another human being is a wall; it stops me from seeing his soul. Oh, how I hate that wall!” (SS, 6:47).

2. Vera Zviagintseva, a friend of Tsvetaeva's, recalled an episode in which she accidentally came across Tsvetaeva apparently trying to seduce a man she herself was interested in: “She lay on top of him and was casting her spell with words. She often said that her main passion was to communicate with people; that sexual relationships were necessary because that was the only way to penetrate a person's soul.” Cited in Viktoria Schweitzer, “Stranitsy k biografii Mariny Tsvetaevoi,” Russian Literature 9 (1981): 342.

3. In this vein, Anya M. Kroth has perceptively noted that Tsvetaeva wishes not to transgress sexual barriers so much as to annul sexual difference altogether in the realm of poetry, where all beings are asexual “angels of a higher order.” Kroth, , “Androgyny as an Exemplary Feature of Marina Tsvetaeva's Dichotomous Poetic Vision,” Slavic Review 38, no. 4 (December 1979): 577 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Tsvetaeva's epistolary romance with Pasternak has already received ample critical attention, although the poetic works to emerge from the relationship have yet to be examined in much detail. See Schweitzer, Viktoria, Tsvetaeva, trans. Chandler, Robert and Willetts, H. T., poetry trans. Norman, Peter, ed. Livingstone, Angela (New York, 1992), 273-99Google Scholar; Efron, Ariadna, 0 Marine Tsvetaevoi: Vospominaniia docheri (Moscow, 1989), 140-65Google Scholar; Taubman, Jane A., A Life through Poetry: Marina Tsvetaeva's Lyric Diary (Columbus, 1988), 160–219 Google Scholar; and Saakiants, Anna, “Marina Tsvetaeva—Borisu Pastemaku,” Voprosy literatury, 1986, no. 12:264-68Google Scholar. Catherine Ciepiela's monograph-in-progress, The Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva, promises to be a rich contribution to the critical literature on this subject.

5. Olga Peters Hasty finds that, elsewhere in Tsvetaeva's oeuvre, these two conflicting attitudes toward feminine sexuality are embodied in the personae of Ophelia and Eurydice, respectively; Hasty writes of “Ophelia's insistence on sexuality and Eurydice's assertion of the asexual fraternity of poets.” Hasty, Tsvetaeva's Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word (Evanston, 1996), 160.

6. Tsvetaeva's predilection for mythopoesis is well known. For various viewpoints on the subject, see Zbigniew Maciejewski, “Priem mifizatsii personazhei i ego funktsiia v avtobiograficheskoi proze M. Tsvetaevoi,” in Robin Kemball, ed., Marina Tsvetaeva: Trudy 1-go mezhdunarodnogo simpoziuma (Bern, 1991), 131-41; Hasty, Tsvetaeva's Orphic Journeys, 6; and the whole of Makin, Michael, Marina Tsvetaeva: Poetics of Appropriation (Oxford, 1993)Google Scholar. Tsvetaeva herself remarks numerous times in her prose and correspondence that, for her, the overarching conception of a mythological worldview replaces the petty details of actual, daily existence “since everydiing is myth, since there is no non-myth, no extra-myth, no supra-myth, since myth anticipated and once and for all cast the shape of everything“ (55, 5:111; Marina Tsvetaeva, A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose, trans. J. Marin King [Ann Arbor, 1980], 234). In particular, Makin (Marina Tsvetaeva, 38-39, 68, 269) asserts that Tsvetaeva was familiar with Lucius Apuleius's account of the myth of Psyche and Eros from his Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass; she may also have known La Fontaine's expanded, semihumorous version of the myth presented in his Les Amours de Psyche et de Cupidon or I. F. Bogdanovich's Russian version in his mock-epic Dushen'ka: An Ancient Tale in Free Verse. In any case, Tsvetaeva's own treatment of the myth is closest to Apuleius's original.

7. For instance, in A Life through Poetry, Jane Taubman titles one of her chapters “Retreat from Eros“; leva Vitins makes use of the Psyche myth at some length in her enlightening reading of the Wires cycle and also suggests in passing the myth's relevance to several other poems Tsvetaeva addresses to Pasternak. Vitins, , “The Structure of Marina Cvetaeva's ‘Provoda': From Eros to Psyche,” Russian Language Journal 41, no. 140 (1987): 143-56.Google Scholar

8. The centrality of the Psyche myth to Tsvetaeva's understanding of herself is camouflaged by the sparsity of its specific mention in her writings. Thus, despite the title of her collection Psyche (Berlin, 1923), the Psyche motif in that book appears obliquely in only two places; other direct references to the myth in Tsvetaeva's work are few and scattered. Occasional references to Psyche in Tsvetaeva's correspondence are often poignant, as when she cries out to Aleksandr Bakhrakh in a letter of 1923: “Everything falls away like an old skin, and under the skin is live meat or fire: I: Psyche. I don't fit into any mold— not even into the most spacious of my poems! I don't know how to live. I'm not like other people [Vse ne kak u liudei]” (55, 6:607). The fervor of this confession indicates that Tsvetaeva's testimony to the unique significance of her collection Psyche applies equally to the myth itself: “Psyche is a selection, therefore not a phase [etap]: not a segment of my path [ne chast’ putt] but, if you like, a constant companion [vechnoe sopulstvie]” (SS, 7:400).

9. Neumann, Erich, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine, trans. Manheim, Ralph (New York, 1956)Google Scholar. Neumann's commentary is extremely helpful in making sense of the tale in its mythological context and glimpsing some of the psychological and symbolic themes embedded in it, although Neumann's primarily psychoanalytic agenda at times leads to overinterpretations verging on the absurd.

10. Neumann, Amor and Psyche, 61.

11. Ibid., 90. For Tsvetaeva, sight and vision are attributes of the nonpoetic, the antipoetic, the world of phenomena rather than noumena; see Hasty's discussion of this topic (Tsvetaeva's Orphic Journeys, 2-4). Psyche's attempt to look upon her husband's physical aspect speaks of a loss of faith, an urge toward the earthly and away from the poetic. Tsvetaeva's continuing erotic desire for real lovers is evidence of a similar vacillation in her poetic commitment. Yet the situation is more complicated; Tsvetaeva craves real lovers not only in spite of her poetry but for the sake of it.

12. Neumann, Amor and Psyche, 89.

13. Ibid., 105.

14. Ibid., 108.

15. Compare Tsvetaeva's poem “Eurydice to Orpheus” (SS, 2:183) written a week after Pasternak's departure: “Uplocheno zhe—vspomiani moi kriki!—/ Za etot poslednii prostor. / Ne nado Orfeiu skhodit’ k Evridike / I brat'iam trevozhit’ sester” (I've paid already— recall my cries!—/ For this final space. / There's no need for Orpheus to go down to Eurydice / Or for brothers to upset sisters). See Hasty's excellent analysis of this poem in Tsvetaeva's Orphic Journeys, 43-51.

16. Psyche must appease the forces of darkness and reap the benefits they offer, without allowing herself to succumb to their allure—depriving herself of bodily pleasures (symbolized by Persephone's luxurious feast; the permission to consume coarse bread, on the contrary, is an acknowledgment of the bare necessity of physical sustenance) and observing rigorous spiritual restraint. This distinction between good bread and seductive feast is distinctly Tsvetaevan in character. For example, Tsvetaeva often sings the praises of poets’ physical bodies, physical needs, physical aches and pains, while at the same time vehemently insisting on the poetic necessity for complete separation of body and soul and concomitant abnegation of bodily desire.

17. Elisabeth Bronfen in Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (New York, 1992) has made a persuasive argument for understanding the female artist's suicide as the logical result of her pursuit of the aesthetic, since the “male” tradition has always objectified feminine beauty, implicitly equating it with the mask of death.

18. Catherine Ciepiela, The Same Solitude, 8-11, 54nl7, points out that the English translation of muzhestvennost', the final word of the Russian title, as “courage” (standardized in Angela Livingston's translation of this essay in her Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva [Cambridge, Eng., 1992]) is inadequate in the context of Tsvetaeva's concern with the essential role gender plays in the determination of poetic identity; this noun should also be understood as meaning “masculinity.“

19. 55,5:233.

20. SS, 6:233. The ability to cause pain is an essential feature of Tsvetaeva's muse, and all candidates for the position, including Pasternak, are identified by this characteristic.

21. Efron, O Marine Tsvetaevoi, 144.

22. SS, 6:226.

23. This arc also appears in the 1920 poem “Psikheia” (Psyche), when Tsvetaeva describes the appearance of Aleksandr Pushkin's wife, fresh from a ball, in his bedroom: “And—ghostlike—/ In the half-circle of the arch—birdlike—/ Mothlike—Psyche!” A concise statement of the relationship of the arrow of love to the fated trajectory of parting can be found in the brilliant paranomastic play of Poema kontsa (Poem of the end): “Liubov'—eto znachit luk / Natianutyi: luk: razluka” (Love means a bow / Pulled taut: a bow: parting, 55, 3:35).

24. 55, 6:226. Emphasis in the original.

25. 55,6:225.

26. The poems in question are “Ne nado ee oklikat'” (You needn't call her back; SS, 2:161), “Net, pravdy ne osparivai” (No, don't challenge the truth; SS, 2:162), “Emigrant“ (SS, 2:163), “Dusha” (Soul; 55, 22:163-64), “Liutnia” (Lute; 55, 2:167), and the cycle Skifskie (Scythians; 55, 2:164-67). In fact, many of the poems of Posh Rossii (After Russia), even those that ostensibly have an addressee other than Pasternak, can be seen as connected with him on some level.

27. 55,6:232,229.

28. SS, 1:481-82.

29. 55, 6:230. Emphasis in the original.

30. 55, 6:232.

31. Tsvetaeva's oklikaiu here reverses Eurydice's refusal to recall Orpheus and thus guarantees, paradoxically, that she lose her lover. See Tsvetaeva's poem “You needn't call her back” (55, 2:161), addressed to Pasternak, as well as the first poem of Wires (discussed below).

32. For the cycle Phaedra, see SS, 2:172-74; for The Two, see SS, 2:235-38. See, for instance, Tsvetaeva's letter to Pasternak of 11 November 1923: “I am beginning to guess at some secret of yours. Secrets … “ (SS, 6:233). References to secrecy in Phaedra include the following: “hidden” (skryt), “hide” (spriach!), “as in a crypt” (kah v sklepe), “great secret“ (velikaia taina), “silence,” (molchanie), “Hippolytus’ secret” (Ippolitova taina).

33. SS, 2:173.

34. SS, 1:567.

35. SS, 2:174. Emphasis in the original. The image of the horseman here recalls Tsvetaeva's mounted battle with her horseman-muse in On a Red Steed, where sexuality is transformed—through violent sexual metaphor—into a rigorously asexual confrontation of souls.

36. SS, 6:237, 238, 240. Emphasis in the original.

37. SS, 6:240, 239.

38. SS, 6:229.

39. SS, 6:241.

40. Tsvetaeva's imagery resonates with both the Old Testament, in which the Hebrew God marks His covenant with a rainbow arched across the heavens, and the ancient Sumerian epic of Cilgamesh, in which the goddess Ishtar vows her remembrance of human suffering by raising her necklace of “azure blue” jewels in a celestial half-circle. See Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1949), 259. As Neumann notes, Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of sexuality and fertility, is but another manifestation of the Greek Aphrodite (Amor and Psyche, 87); Ishtar plays a central role in Tsvetaeva's cycle Scythians, which is also addressed to Pasternak.

41. For the cycle Wires, see SS, 2:174-82. Two previous articles on Wires also merit attention; the first, by leva Vitins, has already been cited. Vitins writes convincingly on narrative and thematic parallels to the Psyche myth in Wires. I will therefore refrain from an explicit enumeration of these similarities here. Bruce Holl's analysis in “'The Wildest of Disharmonies': A Lacanian Reading of Marina Tsvetaeva's ‘Provoda’ Cycle in the Context of Its Other Meanings,” Slavic and East European Journal 40, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 27-44, is interesting in that his Lacanian approach allows him to focus on Tsvetaeva's problematic relationship to alterity which is also at the center of the present study; on the other hand, he overlooks the alternative exit from self afforded Tsvetaeva by myth.

42. Lawrence Lipking has shown in his book Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago, 1988) that the passive, abandoned woman is a trope that recurs throughout the history of poetry. Lipking notes the ambivalence of this figure: “Those who are banished are also let loose; utter surrender resembles utter freedom… . Women who live in ‘abandon' are capable of sudden dangerous turns… . Victim or outlaw, powerless or powerful, [the abandoned woman] can change in an instant from the acted-upon to the actor“ (xvii).

43. This threat is present more explicitly in Tsvetaeva's poem to Pasternak “You needn't call her back” (SS, 2:161). Elsewhere,Tsvetaeva writes to him: “I cannot bear physical presence, nor can you. Our songs would merge [My by spelis’]” (SS, 6:265). Tsvetaeva's Psychean distancing of herself from Pasternak was apparently an effective strategy in resisting his threat and redefining her own poetic mydi, as Ariadna Efron testifies: “The influence of Tsvetaeva's correspondence with Pasternak on her creative work was as significant as it was unusual, for this influence was expressed not in the extent of appropriation, absorption of one personality by the other, nor in ‘assimilation’ of one degree or another; rather, it was expressed in Marina's newly defined orientation toward the goal of creative self-sacrifice—self-sacrifice that had now gained a concrete addressee“ (O Marine Tsvetaevoi, 146).

44. See Vitins, “Structure of Marina Cvetaeva's ‘Provoda,'” 145: “the persona, like Psyche who clung to Eros as he flew from her, seeks to detain the parting Pasternak.“

45. SS, 2:174.

46. Compare Tsvetaeva's letter to poet Maksimilian Voloshin of 18 April 1911 in which she writes: “Life is a butterfly without dust [bez pyli] on its wings” (SS, 6:47).

47. SS, 1:507.

48. SS, 2:162.

49. SS, 2:175.

50. Ibid. Compare the poem “Emche organa i zvonche bubna” (More capacious than an organ and more resonant than a tambourine; SS, 2:250), which reduces (thus focuses, intensifies) all poetic speech to an acoustically and semantically evocative series of three prelinguistic cries: “Okh!—ekh!—akh!” Tsvetaeva does not mean to diminish poetry by this insistence on its fragmentariness, but rather to elevate poetry by evoking the comparative infinity of its source. Incidentally, this is the critical point upon which my reading differs from Holl's in his “'The Wildest of Disharmonies'“; in my view, he reads the quintessentially romantic, Tiutchevian paradox of “silentium” that underlies Tsvetaeva's poem too reductively. It seems to me that Tsvetaeva's poetics of the inexpressible is a more “vectored“ idea than the deconstructionist tangle by means of which poetry expresses nothing so much as its own inexpressibility. For Tsvetaeva, it is not that the ineffable cannot be uttered, but that it can be uttered only in agonizing stages or fragments. Poetry for Tsvetaeva always points outside itself; it is the instrument of a higher truth than the human.

51. SS, 2:175-76.

52. Hence the poet's indifference to her bodily suffering—for it is erased as a reality in itself and exists for her only as a metaphor for the abstraction of her poetic desire. This idea is also the basis for the poignant poem “Primety” (Omens; SS, 2:245), in which the poet observes the torments of her desirous body, whose claims she has renounced, as if from a great distance, with a wry, scientific curiosity. Here, too, her physical pain translates ultimately into lyricism, as her broken throat metamorphoses into a Pasternakian broken voice, and the rift (shekel1) between body and soul is sublimated in a poetic trill.

53. 55,2:190.

54. SS, 2:176-77.

55. 55, 2:178. Tsvetaeva may also be recollecting Gavriil Derzhavin's ode “Bog“(God), in which he derives God's existence from his own through a sequence of verbal permutations: “Ty byl, Ty est', Ty budesh’ wek! … la esm'—konechno, est’ i Ty!” (You were, you are, you will always be! … I am—of course, you are also!).

56. In Tsvetaeva's essay Poety s istoriei i poety bet istorii (Poets with histories and poets without histories), she characterizes the trajectory of “lyrical geniuses” like Pasternak as a circle, and that of “pure geniuses” like Pushkin as an arrow: “Mysl'—strela. Chuvstvo— krug” (Thought is an arrow. Feeling is a circle; SS, 5:403). Tsvetaeva herself, predictably, fits exclusively into neither of these two categories.

57. 5S, 6:241.

58. SS, 2:179.

59. SS, 2:180.

60. 55,2:181-82.

61. SS, 2:182. Tsvetaeva, however, continues to dream of such a child, and when her actual, human son is born two years later, it is all her husband can do to convince her not to name him Boris in Pasternak's honor. She relents, ultimately, only in light of her continued hopes of bearing Pasternak a real son some day: “Clearly and simply: if I were to name him Boris, I would forever bid farewell to the Future: you, Boris, and a son from you“ (6:242). These obviously hopeless hopes are a remarkable admission of emotional vulnerability, bodily yearning, and maternal craving by the bodiless soul who is the supposedly omnipotent, genderless author of Wires.

62. SS, 2:180.

63. Incidentally, the word vel'mozha is prominent in the titles of well-known poems by both Derzhavin (“Vel'mozha,” 1774-1794) and Pushkin (“K vel'mozhe,” 1830); the word is thus associated with the masculine poetic legacy with which Tsvetaeva affiliates herself.

64. 55,2:181.

65. 55,2:180.

66. SS, 2:176, 2:181. The poet, in contrast, finds spiritual sustenance in the company of living forests in Tsvetaeva's cycle Derev'ia (Trees): “Derev'ia! K vam idu! Spastis’ / Ot reva rynochnogo! / Vashimi vymakhami wys’ / Kak serdtse vydyshano!” (Trees! I come to you! To be saved / From the roar of the marketplace! / In your upward wavings / How the heart is breathed clean! SS, 2:143).

67. I have adopted this phrase from the concluding line, “Obychnoe—zhenskoe— schast'e moe,” of Tsvetaeva's early poem “V Liuksemburgskom sadu” (In the Luxembourg Garden; SS, 1:53-54).

68. SS, 2:181.