It is somewhat paradoxical that, once they all disappeared, and in the atrocious way in which they met their end, Marina Tsvetaeva’s literary legacy continues to endure thanks to the daughter who was distant to her in the last fifteen years of her life, and that she put so much of the energy she had left after having suffered fifteen years in prison, to organize her file and collect and classify the unpublished texts and correspondence. Hers was not a vicarious life, but rather one of triumph. In her last twenty years, Ariadna was Marina’s mother, her guide, the master of her destiny. Without her, we would not be able to read her.
5 Translated by Walter Arndt.
6 Translated by J. Marin King.
7 Translated by Simon Karlinksy.
8 Also translated by Karlinsky.
23 MAY
Here I am again in Leningrad. Contrary to all expectations the weather is gorgeous, perfectly bright and almost warm. They booked me into the Evropeiskaya, the imperial hotel where I stayed seven or eight years ago, to attend the opening of the Orozco exhibition at the Hermitage. Mid-morning, I paid a courtesy visit to the city’s Writers’ Union, a beautiful palace with Rococo interiors that clash with the Soviet office furniture and especially with the functions of that graveyard. At no time was I able to broach any of the current topics. I’m wondering if Moscow reported how badly I behaved there and has given instructions to keep me quiet during my meeting with the writers. The writers who welcomed me talked only about literature (so to speak) and only on the importance of landscape in Russian narrative. They spoke and gesticulated with exuberance; as soon as one was about to finish his monologue, another would take his place — a game of questions and answers. Someone asked a rhetorical and contrived question like: Is Soviet Russian literature not, perhaps, that which has most exalted nature, from the revolution to the present day? — while the one facing me answered: But, certainly, of course, the forest, the river, and the sea are themes that we cultivate most, also the desert, the steppe, the tundra, lakes so big they look like oceans, we have it all and of it all we sing. The only thing missing were the balalaikas so they could sing in honor of each of these formations of the earth’s crust and also, in passing, the wildlife and minerals; in the meantime we drank coffee, ate cookies, desserts; and when the dishes were empty, they stood up, thanked me for the visit, accompanied me to the entrance, and before I realized it, I was already on the street. In the afternoon, a work of contemporary Russian theater about family problems, the lack of communication between generations; it bored me so much that I took advantage of the intermission to sneak out. I ran out into the street and walked. I walked for hours and hours. What splendor! Truly! There is nothing as splendid, intense, and tragic as this city! What melancholy! I spent part of the walk chatting with an Uzbek journalist, whom I met in a second-hand bookshop on Gorky Street. We spoke, as far as my Russian allowed, about literature and cities. He was amazed that I knew his country: Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara. He didn’t want to talk about his country’s current political or social affairs either, and he avoided the few questions I ventured, as if he had no interest in what was happening at the time, which means he wasn’t pleased with the current moves, or that he was overly cautious and, because he did not know me from Adam, it was better to remain silent to avoid problems at work, for example. I got to my room half an hour ago. I read a few pages of The White Ship, by Chingiz Aitmatov, and I underlined these lines: “It is said, and not in vain, that people do not forgive the man who is unable to demand respect. He did not know how…He was softhearted, and that thankless human quality was apparent at first glance.”9 Later I pulled out another quote from one of Canetti’s diaries from an Italian magazine, which he wrote the day he turned fifty-five: “Learn to speak again at fifty-five, not a new language but speech itself. Discard all my prejudices, even if nothing else is left. Reread the great books whether I’ve actually read them before or not. Listen to people without lecturing them, especially those who have nothing to teach me. Stop validating fear as a means of fulfillment. Struggle against death without constantly pronouncing its name. In short, courage and justice.”10 I, who transcribes those thoughts, will in three years turn fifty-five, Canetti’s age when he wrote those words…Learn language, learn to speak, and learn that one does not have to want to be respected…that life is something much more mysterious and simpler…that should be the journey. I will make every effort, with courage and justice, as much as I can. ¡Ojalá! I hope!
9 Translated by Mirra Ginsburg.
10 Translated by John Hargraves.
24 MAY
I woke up in a mood from hell. I still don’t know if I’ll go to Georgia, and if so, when and for how many days. I took a long walk through parts of old Leningrad. I realize that I know nothing about the city, or very little. The same happens when I return to Rome, where I lived a few months in my youth, to Venice, where I have been several times, and Prague, where I have resided for three years. I get excited when I arrive, and I am stunned at the splendor of those dazzling cities; I realize that I continue to be in love with them, but I find that I am still a long way away from knowing them, that I have not managed to cross the threshold, that I’m just beginning to scratch their surface, and sometimes not even that. I have an urgent need to reread Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, perhaps the most important Russian novel of the century. Mann read it in his youth and that reading marked him forever. At that time he detested that the novel had not remained in Stendhal, Tolstoy, or Fontane. They were extraordinary, no one could doubt it, but he found in Bely an almost secret parodic form. The culminating scenes, the violent climaxes that abound in the story are bathed in a gentle sarcasm that almost nobody noticed at the time. He did, and he began to study the construction of situations that could combine pathos with caricature. An example can be seen in the tuberculosis spots on the lungs of Mme Chauchat seen in an X-ray by Hans Castorp and the verbal spasm, the exquisite rhetoric with which this young man makes us aware of his romantic passion by way of these spots. I would like to read Bely’s other novels: The Silver Dove, his most experimental, an intrauterine monologue that struggles, through babbling, to reach some meaning, and moreover, to soak in the amazing literature of early twentieth century at the end of teens and twenties: Akhmatova, Rozanov, Kuzmin, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Tynyanov, Pasternak, Platonov, and Khlebnikov — for some the latter is the most radical poet of form at the time. Both Ripellino and Shklovsky, who have studied him thoroughly, agree that he is the true transformer of Russian lyrical poetry, who frees it from symbolism and directs it toward the avant-garde, toward futurism in particular. In the afternoon, a pleasant outing to the house-museum of Repin, a painter from the end of the nineteenth century; we are indebted to him for the faces known to us of the great figures of the nineteenth century: Tolstoy, Turgenev, the whole lot. The house is on the Karelian peninsula, not far from the border with Finland. I grew bored during the outing; I continued to rehash my regret for having alienated the Russians. Only one of my books does not cause me to blush, Vals de Mefisto [Mephisto’s Waltz], perhaps because when I wrote it, during the long period I lived in Moscow, I had immersed myself full-time in those waters. And in the evening a perfect Eugene Onegin at the Maly Theater. The only works of Tchaikovsky that really interest me are his operas. Orchestra, voices, musical and stage direction, set design, everything was remarkable in that masterful opera. I left the theater thoroughly refreshed. Happy to discover that my love of opera has not become extinct, as I sometimes feared. What bombs I’ve had to endure in Mexico in recent years! I remember an I puritani by Bellini11 that Luz del Amo took me to see some time ago at Bellas Artes to calm my nerves the night before my standardization exam in the Foreign Service, and I still get shudders remembering that performance. But one can also experience these disappointments in Prague: whether out of apathy, desolation, or laziness, opera has become tedious, except when a major international figure arrives, then the singers and the orchestra give it everything they can, and the improvement is obvious. During intermission, I heard both Russian and Finnish. I have a nagging desire to go out onto the street. But I restrain myself. I think about cities: Prague, Moscow, and Leningrad. Prague is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, as everyone knows, and also the most hermetic. But the hopelessness of its inhabitants creates a gloom that permeates everything and penetrates to the marrow. Moscow has wonders: the churches of the Kremlin, St. Basil’s, old neighborhoods — but also large areas of horrendous architecture. The monumental towers constructed during Stalinism are truly frightening, the megalomania of cement and reinforced concrete. An architecture that evinces a complete disregard for dreams, for any sense of play. But the city is alive, its breath can be felt everywhere. At the very moment I write this, there are probably thousands of Muscovites in open conflict, arguing,