White guards: Gordian knot
Of Russian valour.
White Guards: white mushrooms
Ot the Russian folksong.
31. Sergei Efron and Marina Tsvetaeva, 1911
White Guards: white stars, Not to be crossed from the sky. White Guards: black nails In the ribs of the Antichrist.15
For the next five years, from 1918 to 1922, the young couple lived apart. Tsvetaeva pledged that, if both of them survived the civil war, she would follow Efron 'like a dog', living wherever he chose to live. While Efron was fighting for Denikin's armies in the south, Tsvetaeva stayed in Moscow. She grew prematurely old in the daily struggle for bread and fuel. Prince Sergei Volkonsky, who became a close friend during those years, recalled her life in the 'unheated house, sometimes without light, a bare apartment… little Alya sleeping behind a screen surrounded by her drawings… no fuel for the wretched stove, the electric light dim… The dark and cold came in from the street as though they owned the place.'16 The desperate hunt for food exposed Tsvetaeva to the brutalizing effect of the Revolution. It seemed to her
that the common people had lost all sense of human decency and tenderness. Despite her love of Russia, the revelation of this new reality made her think about emigrating. The death of her younger daughter, Irina, in 1920 was a catastrophic shock. 'Mama could never put it out of her mind that children can die of hunger here', her elder daughter, Alya, later wrote.17 Irina's death intensified Tsvetaeva's need to be with Efron. There was no news of him after the autumn of 1920, when the defeated White armies retreated south through the Crimea and crowded on to ships to flee the Bolsheviks. She said she would kill herself if he was not alive. At last, Efron was located in Constantinople. She left Moscow to join him in Berlin.
Tsvetaeva describes leaving Russia as a kind of death, a parting of the body from the soul, and she was afraid that, separated from the country of her native tongue, she would not be capable of writing poetry. 'Here a broken shoe is unfortunate or heroic', she wrote to Ehrenburg shortly before her departure from Moscow, 'there it's a disgrace. People will take me for a beggar and chase me back where I came from. If that happens I'll hang myself."8
The loss of Russia strengthened Tsvetaeva's concern with national themes. During the 1920s she wrote a number of nostalgic poems. The best were collected in After Russia (1928), her last book to be published during her lifetime:
My greetings to the Russian rye,
To fields of corn higher than a woman.19
Increasingly she also turned to prose ('emigration makes of me a prose writer'20) in a series of intensely moving recollections of the Russia she had lost. 'I want to resurrect that entire world', she explained to a fellow emigree, 'so that all of them should not have lived in vain, so that I should not have lived in vain.'21 What she longed for, in essays like 'My Pushkin' (1937), was the cultural tradition that made up the old Russia in her heart. This was what she meant when she wrote in 'Homesickness' that she felt
Stunned, like a log left
Behind from an avenue of trees.22
As an artist she felt she had been orphaned by her separation from the literary community founded by Pushkin.
Hence her intense, almost daughterly, attraction to Sergei Volkon-sky, the eurhythmic theorist and former director of the Imperial Theatre who was forced to flee from Soviet Russia in 1921. In Paris Volkonsky became a prominent theatre critic in the emigre press. He lectured on the history of Russian culture in universities throughout Europe and the USA. But it was his link to the cultural tradition of the nineteenth century that made him so attractive to Tsvetaeva. The prince was the grandson of the famous Decembrist; his father had been a close friend of Pushkin. And he himself had met the poet Tiutchev in his mother's drawing room. There was even a connection between the Volkonskys and the Tsvetaev family. As Ivan Tsvetaev mentioned in his speech at the opening of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1912., the idea of founding such a museum in Moscow had first been voiced by the prince's great-aunt, Zinaida Volkonsky.23 Tsvetaeva fell in love with Volkonsky - not in a sexual way (Volkonsky was almost certainly homosexual) but in the heady fashion of her amities litteraires. After several barren years, lyric poetry began to flow from Tsvetaeva again. In the cycle of poems The Disciple (1921-2) she cast herself at the feet of a prophet (the 'father') who linked her with the wisdom and the values of the past. The poem 'To the Fathers' was dedicated to 'the best friend of my life', as she described Volkonsky to Evgenia Chiri-kova, 'the most intelligent, fascinating, charming, old-fashioned, curious and - most brilliant person in the world. He is 63 years old. Yet when you see him you forget how old you are. You forget where you are living, the century, the date.'24
In the world which roars: 'Glory to those who are to come!' Something in me whispers: 'Glory to those who have been!'25
Volkonsky dedicated his own Memoirs (1923) to Tsvetaeva - recompense, perhaps, for the fact that she had typed out its two thick volumes for the publisher. She saw his recollections as a sacred testament to the nineteenth-century tradition that had been broken in 191 7.
To mark their publication she wrote an essay called 'Cedar: An Apology'. The title had been taken from the Prince's nickname, given to him because he had planted cedars on his favourite patch of land (today it is a forest of 12,000 hectares) at the family estate in Borisoglebsk, Tambov province.
The cedar is the tallest of trees, the straightest too, and it comes from the North (the Siberian cedar) and the South as well (the Lebanese). This is the dual nature of the Volkonsky clan: Siberia and Rome [where Zinaida settled as an emigree]!26
In the preface to his memoirs Volkonsky voiced the exile's agony:
Motherland! What a complex idea, and how difficult to catch. We love our motherland - who does not? But what is it we love? Something that existed? Or something that will be? We love our country. But where is our country? Is it any more than a patch of land? And if we are separated from that land, and yet in our imagination we can re-create it, can we really say that there is a motherland; and can we really say that there is exile?27
2
Russian emigre communities were compact colonies held together by their cultural heritage. The first generation of Russian exiles after 1917 was basically united by the hope and conviction that the Soviet Union would not last and that they would eventually return to Russia. They compared their situation to that of the nineteenth-century political exiles who had gone abroad to fight the Tsarist regime from the relative freedom of Europe and then returned to their native land. Living as they did in constant readiness for their own return, they never really unpacked their suitcases. They refused to admit that they were any-thing but temporary exiles. They saw it as their task to preserve the old traditions of the Russian way of life - to educate their children in Russian-language schools, to keep alive the liturgy of the Russian Church, and to uphold the values and achievements of Russian cul-ture in the nineteenth century - so that they could restore all these