Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry intrigued me by itself and learning about her lesbian relationships and other details of her life drew me even more. Though I was married in those years and came out as a lesbian in my mid-twenties, it was hard to imagine Marina married and with a family yet continuing her non-monogamous and, in today’s terms, queer way of life. During perestroika in the 1990s and the opening up of LGBT life for the first time after the fierce repression under Stalin and others, Marina Tsvetaeva quickly became the mother of lesbian love in Russia and the Pushkin of Russian sexual minorities.
Lesbians in Russia who loved Marina, and I, as a Slavic lesbian, shared a bond with Tsvetaeva and Parnok as if we were soul sisters. We would visit Tsvetaeva’s house in Moscow and other places associated with Marina and Sophia. I even went to Koktebel and Sudak and their haunts in the Crimea to connect with their spirits, and I hummed the rhythms and uttered the unusual sounds of their poems. Songs based on their poetry were sung and recorded by Elena Frolova and Vera Evushkina (as Verlen and as separate musicians) as well as other bard poets. These images and sounds reverberated in me. Although it is difficult to capture the rhythms of Tsvetaeva’s poetry for English speakers, I translated some of her poems as a way of understanding her more deeply and published them so that others could enjoy her words and thoughts. Healing, affirming, validating—her work made me feel I was not alone in my mad (bezumnye) Sapphic thoughts. Writing could anchor me as it did her. “What is writing but translating,” said Marina to her friend and correspondent German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in 1926.
It is difficult for me to convey the intensity of my desire to tell others about Sophia and Marina; my body actually shudders with excitement at their writings and their accomplishments. These women were in a sense advocating for women and for same-sex and alternative relationships a hundred years ago simply by living their lives. Sophia died in Sudak surrounded by her women friends. Marina’s interest in women was not hidden, nor was her eroticism or her play with gender. With her nontraditional queer sensibility, she wrote about Amazons, women’s breasts, gay actors in the Vakhtangov theater group who were friends with her beloved Sonechka Golidey in the 1920s in Moscow, and more. I wondered how she could be portrayed by most academics in the late twentieth century so exclusively as the wife of Sergey Efron and mother of a family!
While Ariadna Efron, who lived with Marina during all the moves and changes, rarely mentions her mother’s queer relationships, Ariadna herself spent about twenty-five years with a woman she met in the gulag, Ada Federolf. After witnessing her mother’s many passionate relationships, Ariadna was a victim of internalized homophobia and could not talk openly about her own relationship; the shame and criminalization were too strong in the Soviet Union during her lifetime. However, all of Ariadna’s youth was spent with Tsvetaeva. When sent to a Stalinist camp back in the USSR, Ariadna was given two terms of about eight years each in the camps. In her memoir about her mother, called No Love Without Poetry, Ariadna ends by saying, “Before you have the right to love poetry, you have to love the poet herself.” She loved her mother, with all her quirks and affairs but how did she reconcile this with her time in the gulag. Perhaps Ariadna found solace in her love for Ada Federolf.
As I read Marina’s passionate letter to Salomeya Halpern, a woman Marina loved in emigration, the distinct trembling I feel and my emotions move me to rise and walk around. Writing about Tsvetaeva has that effect on me. This morning, as I decided what to quote from her letter to Salomeya, the physical, erotic, even spiritual impact of Marina’s life and work course through me. I can feel her presence, her spirit. While I walk around the room, I get a lump in my throat. Her passion is palpable.
Dear Salomeya, I saw you in my dreams last night. I had such love and such longing, such mad love and longing, that my first thought upon awakening was: where have I been all these years; I’ve loved her [you] so much (at one time even more than now). And the first thing I wanted to do when I awoke was to tell you that: my last dream of the night (dreamed in the early morning), and my first thought in the morning.
Was the dream her reality? These lines of passion for Salomeya were not the first Marina wrote to her. Salomeya was a Georgian/Russian socialite and inspiration for several artists in the pre-revolutionary Silver Age in St. Petersburg. Later in Paris, she was a muse and benefactor to Marina. This letter was written by forty-year-old Marina with three children and an absent husband. Rumors about a possible love affair between the two women had already been flying about the émigré community, but there were other rumors about Tsvetaeva’s many affairs. More from the letter:
…Loving so, so, so much, like I loved you in my dream last night (is so impossible)—I could never—you mean a him!—never, not a single him, not in any waking state. Only a woman (my own kind). Only in dreams (in freedom). And the face of my longing is a woman’s face.
Marina believed her dreams. as I do. Why are dreams not considered valid or real aspects of our daily lives?
The letter captures her love for women, her obsession with that love, and her absolute acceptance of that love as real and significant, whether or not there was a physical relationship with Salomeya. Marina expressed similar infatuations with various women all her life. It is estimated that she wrote 125 letters just to Salomeya. In 1932 she also wrote the revealing “Letter to an Amazon,” a long letter in French addressed to Natalie Barney, an expatriate American writer and lesbian socialite in Paris, in which she explores an imaginary long-term lesbian relationship. She is wistful throughout. Women eventually want to have children, she writes, so the younger woman inevitably leaves the older one for a man who can help her with that. And what about love? She implies that marriage is not about love but about having a family and that love cannot be the basis for a marriage. These are some of Tsvetaeva’s rationalizations and musings that were not known to the public until after perestroika.
I translated “Letter to an Amazon” with the help of my dear friend in Moscow, Elena Grigorievna Gusyatinskaya, a French translator and organizer of the highly regarded Moscow LGBT Archives. We worked in her apartment near the Rechnoy Vokzal metro station, using the original French and a Russian translation published in Paris in the 1960s. I enjoyed this process immensely—discussing with Lena Marina’s words and concepts in French and Russian and then finding the right words in English. For me as a writer, it truly was an exciting adventure and a new creation. Translating a poet’s works is like writing poetry. Tsvetaeva’s comment to Rilke rang true, that all writing is translation, in the sense that we are translating something going on in the mind and heart into words. And the same is true from one language to another.
At the end of “Letter to an Amazon” Marina writes:
Then again, one day, the one who was once young will learn that somewhere at the other end of this very earth the older one has died. At first she will want to write in order to know. But time hurries on—the letter is frozen in time. Desire remains desire. The “I want to know” becomes “I would like to,” then “I don’t want to anymore”—and so what? Since she has died. Since I, too, will die someday. And courageously, with the great honesty of indifference—For she has been dead within me, for me—already twenty years now?”
It’s not necessary to die in order to be dead.
Island. Summit. Solitary.
Weeping willow! Inconsolable willow! Willow—the body and soul of woman! Inconsolable neck of willow. Gray hair falling over her face, so she cannot see anything. Gray hair sweeping the face of the earth.