Over lunch, I spoke with a writer about the process of writing. He mentioned that he had started using notebooks. We talked about the whether of the writing process. For whom is the writing written, and does it matter if it has no public. Which also reminded me of the commentary I recall reading somewhere, don’t know if it was by Barthes or Nietzsche, that everything a writer writes, down to their shopping lists, is part of their oeuvre.
Forgive a slightly high-falutin opening to reflection on Earthly Signs, Moscow Diaries 1917-22, as the book is titled. The above thoughts occur because one wonders, at the time of writing, whether Marina Tsvetaeva intended all the observations or notes that make up this book to be published. Or rather, one might wonder whether there were other observations or notes which, when the time came to put the book together, she decided to omit. The book is an account, as the title suggests, of the poet’s experiences in Moscow in the aftermath of the revolution, (as well as a brief aside about her time in Germany). It consists of eleven sections, which recount different moments and present different aspects of the harsh life she was leading. Sometimes there are repetitions, word for word, from one section to another. It’s a collage as much as a coherent narrative. What it does is open up the writer’s mind, presenting her political, emotional, maternal and psychological state of being.
Tsvetaeva is not a fan of the revolution. Her sympathies remain with the Whites. In one telling phrase she mentions the “new soulless communist soul forcibly imposed on Russ”. a phrase that sums up her attitude to a revolution which, more than anything else, she distrusts poetically. A long closing section brilliantly dissects her relationship with the poet Briusov, who briefly thrived in the new Soviet republic, because, as she explains, he had a machine-like addiction to power. (She damns Briusov with the following phrase: “Blok’s death was a thunderbolt to the heart; Briusov’s death was the silence that falls when a machine suddenly stops.”) Tsvetaeva seems to see the mechanisation of the soul and day-to-day life as the eventual outcome of the Bolshevik impulse, which in retrospect doesn’t seem to have been too wrong.
However, her tone remains ironic and distanced. Here’s a writer who knows she’s fallen out of step with the direction her nation is taking, but also knows that through the act of capturing her thoughts, distilling her voice, on the page, she retains her individuality, her capacity to be herself. Time after time she comes up with a striking, eminently human thought, or disarms the reader with a sly or witty remark. Writing transcends politics and history; a century later, Tsvetaeva lives on as she knew she would, merely through the act of having captured herself on the page, even had no-one ever got round to publishing or reading what she’d written.
The result is a brilliant, lucid account of what it was like to live through those days, with no particular axe to grind, with just children to protect and survival on your mind. Some sequences, such as the description of the women’s poetry reading night, are extended and wonderfully entertaining; at times other entries are little more than stray thoughts, captured against the will of time or memory. The net result is a wonderful, slim book which reveals more than could ever be hoped for about that remarkable moment in history and the remarkable poet who writes about it: “I can be bought, but only by all the heaven inside of you! By that heaven in which there may not even be room for me.”
No comments:
Post a Comment