Rainer Maria Rilke!
Is it permissible to address you like this? After all, you - poetry itself in the flesh - cannot help but know that your very name is a poem. Rainer Maria - it sounds churchly - but also childish - but also chivalrous. Your name does not rhyme with time - it comes from before or from after - from time immemorial. Your name wanted it and you chose it. (We choose our names ourselves; everything that happens is just a consequence.) Your christening was a prologue to you as a whole, and the priest who baptized you truly did not know what he was doing.

No, you are not what they call “my favorite poet” (“most beloved” is a degree). You are a phenomenon of nature, and it cannot be mine and they do not love it, but they endure it, or, more precisely (but still too insufficient!), You are the fifth element incarnate: poetry itself, or (and this is also still too insufficient) You - that from which poetry grows, and this is something more than it (you).

The point here is not in the man-Rilke (man is what we are forced to do!), but in Rilke-spirit, who is even greater than the poet, and it is he who, in fact, is called for me Rilke - Rilke from the day after tomorrow.

You must see yourself through my eyes (from my eyes), embrace your greatness with their scope when I look at you: your greatness with all their breadth and breadth.

What else can a poet do after you? A master (for example, Goethe) can be overcome, but to overcome you means (would mean) to overcome poetry. A poet is one who overcomes life (must overcome).

You are an impossible task for future poets. The poet who comes after you must be you, that is, you will have to be born again.

You return words to their original meaning (meaning), and things to their original names-signs (significance). For example, if you say “magnificently,” then you are talking about great lepa (modeling, molding) - the way it was intended when it [the word] arose. (Nowadays, “great” is just a bare exclamation point.)

In Russian I would express all this more clearly, but I don’t want to force you to read it, I’d rather force myself to write it down (hineinzulesen - hineinzuschreiben).

The first thing in your letter that threw me (not - ascended, not - delivered) to the highest tower of joy was the word “may”, to which you added a bit of old aristocracy with the letter y. May (mai) with i - it’s as if about the first of May, not a workers’ holiday, which someday can become beautiful - but about the gentle bourgeois May of engaged and (not too) lovers.

A few brief biographical (only the most necessary) notes: from the Russian revolution (not from revolutionary Russia, a revolution is a country with its own - and eternal - laws!) I arrived - through Berlin - in Prague, along with your books. In Prague I read “Early Poems” for the first time. So I fell in love with Prague - from the very first day - thanks to your student life.

I stayed in Prague from 1922 to 1925, three years, and in November 1925 I left for Paris. Were you still there at that time?

In case you were there:

Why didn't I come to you? Because you are my most beloved - in the whole world. Very simple. And also because you didn’t know me. Out of suffering pride, out of reverence for chance (or fate). Out of cowardice, probably, so as not to have to endure your aloof gaze on the threshold of your room. (You couldn’t, of course, look at me strangely! But even if you did, your gaze would be for everyone, because you didn’t know me, and that means: still alien!)

One more thing: you will always perceive me as a Russian, and I will perceive you as a purely human (divine) phenomenon. This is the complexity of our overly peculiar nationality - everything that is our “I” in us is called Russian by Europeans.

We have something similar - with the Chinese, Japanese, blacks - very distant or very wild.

Rainer Maria, all is not lost, next year (1927) Boris will come and we will visit you - wherever you are. I know Boris very little and I love him the way one loves only the Never-Seen (already past or not yet to come: following-coming), Never-Seen or Never-Being. He is not that young - 33 years old, it seems to me, but he is childish. He doesn't look like his father in even a single eyelash (the best a son can do). I believe only in mother's sons. You are also your mother's son. A man in the female line is why he is so rich (duality).

The first poet of Russia is him. This is known to me - and to several others, the rest are waiting for him to die.

I await your books like a thunderstorm that - whether I want it or not - will come. Almost like heart surgery (no, this is not a metaphor! each poem //Yours// cuts into the heart and cuts it at will - whether I want it or not). Don't want anything!

You know why I tell you you and love you and - and - and - because you are strength. The rarest.

You don’t have to answer me, I know what time is, I know what poetry is. I also know what writing is. Like this.

I was a ten-year-old girl in Vaud (canton) (1903), in Lausanne, and I remember a lot from that time. There was an adult black woman in the boarding house who was supposed to learn French. She learned nothing, but she ate violets. This is the most poignant thing I remember. Blue lips - Negro lips are not red - and blue violets. Blue Lake Geneva appears later.

What do I want from you, Reiner? Nothing. Total. So that you allow me, every moment of my life, to direct my gaze to you - as to the peak that protects (a certain stone guardian angel!). While I didn’t know you, it was possible and so, but now that I know you, permission is required.

For my soul is well educated.

But I want to write to you - whether you like it or not. About your Russia (cycle “Tsars”, etc.). About many things.

Your Russian letters. Touched. I, who as an Indian (or Hindu?) never cry, I almost...

I read your letter near the ocean, the ocean read with me, we both read. Does such a co-reader bother you? There won’t be another - I’m too jealous (too jealous of you).

Do you know how I received your books today (10th)? The children were still sleeping (seven o’clock in the morning), I suddenly got up and ran to the door. At that very moment - I already had my hand on the doorknob - the postman knocked - right on my hand. All I had to do was complete my door gesture and accept the books with the same hand that still kept the knock.

I haven’t opened them yet, otherwise the letter won’t leave today - and it should fly away.

When my daughter (Ariadne) was still very young - about two or three years old - she often asked me before going to bed: “Are you going to read Reinecke?”

Reinecke - that's how it sounded to her - in her rapid childish sense of sound - Rainer Maria Rilke. Children have no sense of pauses.

I want to write to you about Vendée, my heroic French homeland. (Every country and century has at least one, right?) I'm here for her name. If, like me, they have neither money nor time, they choose the most necessary: ​​the essentials.

Switzerland does not allow Russians in. But the mountains must move apart (or split!) so that Boris and I can come to you!

I believe in mountains. (A line I modified - but essentially not - because mountains and nights (Berge - Nachte) rhyme - do you recognize?)*

Marina Tsvetaeva

Your letter to Boris will go out today - registered and to all the gods. Russia for me is still a kind of otherworldly.

* Tsvetaeva is referring to the line of Rilke’s poem: “I believe in the night.” - Transl.

Pasternak – Tsvetaeva – Rilke

anatomy of love myths

Ekaterina Zotova

© Ekaterina Zotova, 2016

Created in the intellectual publishing system Ridero

Instead of a preface

It is interesting to follow the feelings of a talented poet. It is doubly interesting if we are talking about two poets, and three times more interesting if it is a relationship between a man and a woman. And although some consider such curiosity reprehensible, the desire to find out how people with particularly acute feelings love and suffer from, outweighs modesty. After all, by plunging into the world of another, we clarify something in ourselves.

Trying to express on paper her feelings for Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva rightly complained: “In conversation this is done through silence”(CP, 51)1. In fact, most human relationships, one way or another, remain out of sight of outsiders. Touches, glances, gestures - you cannot record them... Therefore, when reading stories about the lives of famous people, it is necessary to remember that before us is a more or less successful reconstruction of events. Even the authors of memoirs, often unwittingly, and sometimes consciously, wishful thinking, forcing researchers to puzzle over the discrepancies in the “testimonies” of various witnesses.

However, in the literature of the twentieth century there is a unique case when a deep feeling arose and was lived only in letters. This epistolary novel was perhaps the longest in the history of Russian literature. Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak corresponded for fourteen years - from 1922 to 1936. Moreover: for several months in 1926, the relationship turned into a kind of love triangle - the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke joined the dialogue shortly before his death.

Their correspondence is striking in the intensity of the spiritual struggle. A struggle not only for attention to oneself (it’s hard to surprise anyone with this), but also with one’s own imperfections, a struggle whose goal is to become worthy of an interlocutor, to raise oneself to a new spiritual and creative height.

In the relationship between these people there was a lot of strange, difficult to explain, sometimes almost incredible. The parents of Pasternak and Tsvetaeva belonged to a very small circle of the Moscow creative elite. However, they themselves met as adults, around 1918, and “discovered” each other in absentia, in the summer of 1922, shortly after Marina Ivanovna and her daughter Ariadna left for the Czech Republic to join her husband, a participant in the white movement. Then for more than ten years they will live the dream of meeting, but, having seen each other, again they will not recognize each other...

And the almost mystical story of their acquaintance with Rilke! In 1925, Rainer came across Pasternak's poems, first in Russian, and a little later in French. In December of the same year, Boris's father, Leonid Osipovich Pasternak, living with his family in Berlin, decided to congratulate his longtime friend on his 50th birthday. In a reply letter to the artist, Rilke favorably mentions the work of his son. Shocked Boris Leonidovich, who has long dreamed of meeting his idol, writes him an enthusiastic letter in which he asks to send an answer through Tsvetaeva, who was living in France at that time. Marina Ivanovna’s acquaintance with Rilke instantly grew into a whirlwind romance in letters that lasted about four months...

Until recently, only a small fragment of this correspondence was published - letters from three poets in 1926. In August 1941, Marina Ivanovna gave the letters of Rilke and Pasternak, as the most valuable, for safekeeping to Goslitizdat employee A.P. Ryabinina. The choice turned out to be accurate... (Letters from Tsvetaeva herself, addressed to Rilke, were kept in the Sieber-Rilke family archive.) However, the main part of her archive, brought to the USSR, also survived to this day thanks to the devotion of her son George. After the death of his mother, he, a 16-year-old teenager, in the confusion of the first months of the war, managed to take a chest of papers from remote Yelabuga to Moscow to his paternal aunt E. Ya. Efron. There they waited for Tsvetaeva’s daughter, Ariadna Sergeevna Efron, to be released from the camps. After looking through the letters and draft notebooks, she transferred them for storage to the State Archives of Literature and Art, but at the same time, in obedience to her mother’s wishes, she closed them for study and publication until 2000.

The fate of Tsvetaeva’s letters to Pasternak was much more dramatic. In the fall of 1941, Boris Leonidovich also entrusted them to his friend, a great lover of poetry. Afraid of parting with them, she took them with her everywhere - and one day, exhausted, she forgot them on the train... However, even before that, some of Tsvetaeva’s letters were copied by the famous autograph collector, former futurist Alexei Kruchenykh and his assistants. In addition, Marina Ivanovna had a happy habit of jotting down answers in a workbook. After Tsvetaeva’s fund was opened, using these drafts it was possible to restore the approximate text of most of the missing letters.

Collected together, the letters of Pasternak and Tsvetaeva were published in 2004 in the collection “Souls Begin to See: Letters from 1922 to 1936.” It was they who made it possible, having penetrated into the mystery of the relationships between great poets, to trace how the love illusion was created and destroyed, which gave the world a whole scattering of poetic masterpieces.

Background. Senior

Petty Prague official Joseph Rilke had no idea that his son was destined to soar to the heights of poetry. He wanted the only surviving child to make his unfulfilled dream come true and become a brilliant officer, or, at worst, reach high society (his wife dreamed about this). The boy studied for several years at a military school, which became for him a “primer of horrors.” However, at the age of 15, due to poor health, he was expelled from there.

By this time, Rene (this is his real name - he will call himself Rainer later) had already firmly decided to become a poet. The young man was eager for success and at the same time acutely felt his lack of education (the tasks of the military school did not include the diversified development of students). Thanks to the help of his uncle, who saw him as his successor in the legal profession, he managed to independently complete the gymnasium course and enter the University of Prague. But, after studying for only six months, he quits it to devote himself entirely to literature. The first collection of poems was published in 1894, when the author was 18 years old. He tried his hand at poetry, drama and prose, and actively participated in the creative life of Prague.

By the end of the 90s, Rilke had established himself as a writer. However, at the same time, the first spiritual crisis in his life was brewing, associated with the need for higher values ​​than love and fidelity typical of the lyrics of all times. An amazing woman, a native of St. Petersburg, a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Andreas-Salome, helped the young poet overcome it. Educated, smart, independent, 36-year-old Lou became for Rainer not only a lover, but also a guide to the world of higher spirituality. She reveals to him the riches of world culture, including Russian literature.

In April 1899, Rilke and the Andreasov couple came to Russia. The Easter night in the Moscow Kremlin made a huge impression on him - crowds of people of all classes, inspired by one divine joy. Five years later the poet wrote:

“I only had Easter once. It happened on that long, unusual, extraordinary, exciting night, when crowds of people were crowding around, and Ivan the Great struck me in the darkness, blow after blow. That was my Easter, and I believe that it will last me a lifetime; The news on that Moscow night was given to me in a strangely big way, it was given straight to my blood and heart.” 2.

Among other recommendations, the poet also had a letter to the artist Leonid Pasternak, with the help of which the travelers hoped to get to Leo Tolstoy. Connected with the writer by a close creative relationship, Leonid Osipovich readily responded to the request - and the meeting took place. In gratitude, Rilke gave him his collections.

L. O. Pasternak. R. M. Rilke in Moscow (1926)

Immediately after this trip, Reiner and Lou begin to intensively prepare for the next one. With the help of a friend, the poet studies the Russian language, reads in the original not only the works of Russian writers of the 19th century, but even “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” which he later tries to translate into German. In May 1900, they again arrived in Russia and in three months visited Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, Poltava, Voronezh, sailed on a ship from Saratov to Yaroslavl, stopped in the village to visit the peasant poet Spiridon Drozhzhin... On the train carried by Rilke and Lou to Yasnaya Polyana to see Tolstoy, they suddenly encountered the Pasternak family, who were going on vacation to Odessa. For the rest of his life, 10-year-old Borya will remember the stranger in the fluttering lionfish, who spoke some very special German language that was unique to him. But only years later this image will be combined in his mind with the name of his beloved poet.

On December 4, 1875, the Austrian poet René Karl Wilhelm Johann Joseph Maria Rilke was born.

Rilke was once considered an alien bourgeois poet among us. Known opinion Fadeeva 1950: " Who is Rilke? Extreme mystic and reactionary in poetry" Through one or two poems, Rainer Rilke gradually leaked to the Russian reader. Now the number of his translators has exceeded one hundred. We are best known for such textbook poems by Rilke as “ Autumn", "Autumn Day", "About Fountains".

Foliage falls to the ground, flies,
just like the time of leaf fall in the sky,
so he falls, murmuring amidst the disintegration;
and falls from the star cascade
heavy earth, like a monastery.
We are falling. And lines on sheets.
I don’t recognize you among the displacement.
And yet there is someone who keeps falling
For centuries it has been kept carefully in a handful.

(Translation by V. Letuchy)

I suddenly understood the essence of fountains for the first time,
glass crowns riddle and phantom.
They are like tears to me, it’s too early -
in the rise of dreams, on the eve of deceptions -
I got lost and forgot later...

(Translated by A. Karelsky)

Oh my holy loneliness - you!
And the days are spacious, bright and clean,
Like an awakened morning garden.
Loneliness! Don't trust distant calls
And hold the golden door tightly,
There, behind her, there is hell of desires.

(translated by A. Akhmatova)

Or here's a great poem: For a book" in translation B. Pasternak. Listen to him perform David Avrutov:

Travel to Russia

Rilke had a lot in common with Russia.

In 1897 (at age 22) he met in Munich with a woman who went down in history as the Russian Muse of the poet. She was a native of St. Petersburg, a Russified German Louise Andreas Salome or, as her name was, Lou. The daughter of a Russian general, who left early for Western Europe, a close friend Nietzsche, wife of a member of the German parliament, later a favorite student Freud, writer, essayist, literary critic - she was one of the most prominent figures of her time.

Rilke became so captivated by this brilliant woman that he became her shadow for several years. He idolized Lou (she was 15 years older than him), hung on every word, not to mention the poems - all of Rilke’s work from 1897 to 1902 was addressed to her in one way or another. Here is one of his most powerful sonnets of those years:

There is no life for me on earth without you.
If I lose my hearing, I will still hear,
If I lose my eyes, I will see even more clearly.
Without legs I will catch up with you in the darkness.
Cut out your tongue - I swear on my lips
Cut off my hands and I’ll hug you with my heart.
Break my heart - my brain will beat
towards your mercy.
And if suddenly I am engulfed in flames
And I will burn in the fire of your love -
I will dissolve you in the blood stream.

On Lou's advice, Rilke changes his real name Rene to more masculine Rainer. Under the influence of Louise Salome, he fell in love with Russia, where she first brought him in 1899. On that trip they visited only Moscow and St. Petersburg, but the next year, in 1900, they traveled almost all of Russia: they visited Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana, visited the grave Taras Shevchenko, visited Kharkov, Voronezh, Yaroslavl, Saratov. From a letter to Lou: “ Arriving in Saratov, we were supposed to immediately transfer to the ship, but we were late and had to spend the whole day in this city.”
This is how Rainer describes their journey through Volga: « A journey along the Volga, this calmly rolling sea. Wide current. There is a tall, tall forest on one bank, and on the other side there is a deep plain on which large cities stand like huts or tents. You see everything in a new dimension. I feel as if I saw the work of the Creator».
In Russia they met with Chekhov, A. Benois, Repin, Leonid Pasternak, who was then painted by Rilke in front of two-year-old Boris.

Then their long-term friendly correspondence began, in which much later he would also take part. Boris Pasternak. Many years after Rilke’s death, L. Pasternak would paint his portrait, the best of all the variety that exists. No one has yet been able to convey the essence of this poet’s personality so psychologically subtly and deeply.

Rilke fell in love with Russia, as they say, to the point of unconsciousness. Then he will even arrange his home in Germany in the manner of a Russian hut. Rainer writes poems about Russia, including in Russian, and translates Russian poets: Lermontova, Z. Gippius, Fofanova, even translated “The Seagull” by Chekhov, but the translation was lost. In 1901, he was going to Russia for the third time, but there was a break with Lou, and soon Rilke married a sculptor Clara Westhoff.

Rilke's wife Clara

Bust of Rilke by his wife K. Westhoff

They had a daughter Ruth. They are moving to Paris. But the family soon broke up. Since then, Rilke has lived in Europe. Russia would resurrect for him in 1926, when a stormy epistolary friendship with Marina illuminated the last year of his life.

Requiems by Rilke

Some biographers believe that Rilke was in love with this woman. This requiem is permeated with a sense of great personal loss.

I honor the dead and whenever I could,
gave them free rein and marveled at them
livability in the dead, despite
bad rumors. Only you, you are rushing back.
You cling to me, you spin around
and you try to hurt something,
to give away your arrival.
Get closer to the candle. I'm not afraid of the sight
dead people When they come
then you have the right to claim a corner
in our eyes, like other objects.
I, like a blind man, hold my fate
in my hands and burning I don’t know the name.
Let's pay that someone took you
from the mirror. Can you cry?
Can not. I know...
But if you are still here, and somewhere
in the darkness this place is where the spirit is
yours ripples on the flat waves of sound,
which my voice rolls into the night
from the room, then listen: help me.
Be among the dead. The dead are not idle.
And give help, without being distracted, so,
like the farthest thing at times
gives me help. In myself...

Portrait of Rilke by Paula Modersohn-Becker

Duino elegies

At the beginning of 1912, Rilke began to write something unprecedented in European poetry - a cycle of 10 elegies, which he called "Duino Elegies""- perhaps the pinnacle of Rilke's creativity and, of course, his most daring experiment. The elegies were named after the castle Duino on the Adriatic, where they were started.

This is the princess's estate Maria Thurn and Taxis, friendly towards the poet. Rilke, who was poor all his life, needed the help of philanthropists. The mistress of the castle, with whom Rainer corresponded for 17 years after living in Duino, recalled that the opening lines of the Duino Elegies appeared on a day when the bora blew - a strong, almost hurricane-force wind. In its noise, the poet heard a voice shouting the first words.

In these elegies, Rilke sought to develop a new picture of the universe - an integral cosmos without division into past and future, visible and invisible. The past and the future appear in this new cosmos on an equal footing with the present. Angels appear as messengers of the cosmos - “messengers, messengers”, angels - as a kind of poetic symbol, not connected - he emphasized this - with the ideas of the Christian religion.

Wilmann Michael Lucas Leopold. Landscape with Jacob's Dream. Staircase of Angels.

Angels (I heard) wander without knowing
where they are - among the living or the dead.

Gustave Moreau. Angel

The poet sings here the key moments of human existence: childhood, familiarization with the elements of nature and death, as the last frontier, when all the values ​​of life are tested:

True, it’s strange for us to leave the familiar land,
to forget everything that we managed to get used to,
do not guess by petals and signs,
what should happen in human life:
not remembering that we were touched
timid hands, and even the name with which
We were called, break and forget, like a toy.
It’s strange not to love what you love anymore. Strange
see how the usual density disappears,
how everything is dispersed. And it's not easy to be
dead, and wait until it's barely noticeable
the eternal will visit us. But they themselves are alive
They don’t understand how fragile these boundaries are.

In 2003, Duino Castle was opened to tourists, hosting concerts and other events.

« Rilke Trail" It stretches for 2 kilometers, and there are benches for rest on its observation platforms. It was along this road that the famous Austrian poet loved to walk, drawing inspiration from the surrounding nature.

Sonnets to Orpheus

From 1919 until his death, Rilke lived almost continuously in Switzerland, where friends buy him a modest old house - a castle Muso.

Here, in the 20s, Rilke experienced a new creative takeoff: he created a wonderful cycle “ Sonnets to Orpheus" Orpheus is the image of God the singer, to whom all 55 poems are addressed. To some extent, they can be considered an autobiographical confession of the poet.

Is reading David Avrutov: http://rutube.ru/video/174298156f48074cfa1abe616b5f142b/

The faces of the world are like clouds,
quietly sailed away.
Everything that happens takes centuries away
in the ancients there were.
But above the flow and change began
louder and wider
Your original melody sounded to us,
God playing the lyre.
The mystery of love is great
pain is beyond our control
and death is like a distant temple,
reserved for everyone.
But the song is light and flies through the centuries
bright and victorious.

(G. Ratgauz)

Stefan Zweig, who knew Rilke well, left in his book of memories “ Yesterday's world"Wonderful portrait of the poet: " None of the poets of the beginning of the century lived more quietly, more mysteriously, more inconspicuously than Rilke. Silence seemed to expand around him... he was alienated even from his own glory. His blue eyes illuminated his otherwise inconspicuous face from within. The most mysterious thing about him was precisely this inconspicuousness. Thousands of people must have passed by this young man with a slightly Slavic face, without a single sharp feature, without suspecting that he was a poet, and, moreover, one of the greatest of our century...”

Words that have lived their entire lives without affection,
simple words are the closest to me, -

Wrote Rilke. And this unfussy modesty, unostentatiousness, discreetness, and chastity of words were also characteristic of him in his work. Rilke, writes Zweig, belonged to a special tribe of poets. These were " poets who did not demand the recognition of the crowd, nor honors, nor titles, nor benefits and thirsted for only one thing: to painstakingly and passionately string together stanza after stanza, so that each line would breathe music, sparkle with colors, glow with images.”« Song is existence“, we read in his sonnets.

Rilke in his office

"I accepted you, Marina..."

It was impossible to imagine him being unrestrained. There was delicacy in every movement, in every word, he even laughed barely audibly. He had a need to live in a low voice, and therefore what irritated him most was noise, and in the area of ​​feelings - any manifestation of incontinence. " I'm tired of people who cough up their feelings with blood, - he said once , - that’s why I can only take Russians in small doses, like liqueur" This distinguished him from the spontaneous, squally nature Marina Tsvetaeva. But they also had something in common: both were poets of melancholy; they had in common an attitude towards religion that was far from orthodox, canonical Christianity. Rilke was in love with Russia, and Marina was very close to German culture from childhood (“ I have many souls, but my main soul is German", she wrote).
Rilke sent Marina his books " Duino elegies" And " Sonnets to Orpheus" They shocked Tsvetaeva. She writes in her first letter that Rilke is for her “ embodied poetry", "natural phenomenon", which " you feel with your whole being" In her kneeling (as she once did before Blok), she imperceptibly switched to a personal relationship with the poet, not as an equal, but as a deity:
« I am waiting for your books, like a thunderstorm that - whether I want it or not - will break out. Just like heart surgery (not a metaphor! each poem (yours) cuts into the heart and cuts it in its own way - whether I want it or not). Do you know why I tell you You and I love you and - and - and - because you are strength. The rarest».

Tsvetaeva quickly closes the distance in conversation, not embarrassed that she is writing to a stranger. She is convinced: the strong look with a smile at those who cross boundaries - they are unknown to defensive anxieties. And Rilke is not only not embarrassed by the tone of Tsvetaev’s letter - he is fascinated by it. He readily accepts and adopts her “you” and takes a huge step forward on his part.

« Today I accepted you, Marina, I accepted you with all my soul, with all my consciousness, shocked by you, your appearance... What can I tell you? You extended your palms to me one by one and put them together again, you plunged them into my heart, Marina, as if into the bed of a stream, and now, while you hold them there, its alarmed streams rush towards you... Don’t move away from them! I opened the atlas (geography for me is not a science, but a relationship that I hasten to take advantage of), and now you are already marked, Marina, on my internal map: somewhere between Moscow and Toledo I created space for the onslaught of your ocean».

Elegy for Marina

Rilke dedicates an elegy to Tsvetaeva, in which he reflects on the inviolability of the balance of the cosmic whole.

Listen to an excerpt from it performed by David Avrutov(translation Z. Mirkina) : http://rutube.ru/video/0aa0cc8c64b13b1e78a959f033c0ebcc/

Oh, these losses of the universe, Marina! How the stars fall!
We cannot save them, we cannot make up for them, no matter how the impulse lifts us up
up. Everything is measured, everything is constant in the cosmic whole.
And our sudden death
the holy number will not decrease. We fall into the original source
and in it, having been healed, we rise.

So what is all this?.. So what then is our life? Our torment, our death? Is this just a game of indifferent forces that makes no sense? " An innocently simple game, without risk, without a name, without gains?“Rilke answers this rhetorical question not directly, but as if crossing it with a suddenly invading new dimension:

Waves, Marina, we are the sea! Depth, Marina, we are the sky!

We are thousands of springs, Marina! We are larks over the fields!
We are the song that caught up with the wind!

Oh, it all started with jubilation, but, overflowing with delight,
We felt the weight of the earth and we bow down with a complaint.
Well, after all, a complaint is the forerunner of a new invisible joy,
hidden until the end in darkness...

That is, we are what fills us. And if we are filled to the brim with life, it will not disappear with our death. She is. It accumulated and ripened in us, like a flower in a bud, like a fruit in a flower. The bud burst, but there is something else - the whole meaning of the bud's life is a flower that spreads its fragrance far beyond its limits. This fragrant spirit of life also matures in us if we are filled with sky and sea, spring and song. And we need to love exactly this in us, and not the shell of it.

Those who love are beyond death.
Only the graves decay there, under the weeping willow, burdened with knowledge,
remembering those who have passed away. Those who left themselves are alive,
like young shoots of an old tree.
The spring wind, bending, twists them into a marvelous wreath, without breaking anyone.

There, in the world core, where you love,
there are no passing moments.
(As I understand you, a feminine light flower on an immortal bush!

How I dissolve in this evening air, which will soon touch you!)
The gods first deceptively draw us to the other sex, like two halves into unity.

But everyone must replenish themselves, growing, like a flawed month, until the full moon.

And only a lonely path will lead to the fullness of being.
through the sleepless space.

This is difficult to understand and difficult to accept. " Everyone must replenish themselves..." Myself? And not together? So, he doesn’t need her next to her, fused with him? But what is needed then?!.
But this is the very fire of love in which your small “I” burns completely. To love without appropriating anything. Tell your loved one not to be mine!"- A " be!" - but only. I don't need anything from you. I just need you to be there. In your being is mine.
Imbued with a powerful philosophical charge, this elegy was close to Tsvetaeva in all its spirit. For many years it would become her consolation, her secret joy and pride, which she jealously guarded from prying eyes.

“Your Elegy, Reiner. All my life I have given myself gifts in poetry - to everyone. Poets too. But I always gave too much, I always drowned out a possible answer. I pre-empted the response. That’s why poets didn’t write poems to me - and I always laughed: they leave it to someone who comes in a hundred years. And here are your poems, Rainer, poems by Rilke, Poet, poems - poetry. And my Rainer, dumbness. It's the other way around. Everything is correct. Oh, I love you, I can’t call it anything else, the first to appear and yet the first and best word.”

Rendezvous of Souls

Rainer no longer lived in Muso, and in a resort town Ragaz. Here he was treated in a sanatorium for leukemia to no avail. Neither Rainer himself, nor the doctors and friends even suspected that the poet had only six months to live. His last letters to Marina were written from there: “ The last of your letters has been with me since July 9th. How often I wanted to write! But life has become strangely heavy in me, and I often cannot budge it...»

"Rainer, I want to come to you, - Tsvetaeva responded two days later, - for the sake of a new one, one that can only arise with you, in you" She is absolutely sure that their meeting will bring joy to Rilke. She clearly does not understand the severity of the poet’s condition. She is completely in the grip of love for him, so ideal and so earthly, so unselfish and so demanding, her feelings poured out on paper are like poetry in prose: she creates literature from her life, from her experiences.
« Rainer - don’t be angry, it’s me, I want to sleep with you - fall asleep and sleep. A wonderful folk word, how deep, how true, how unambiguous, how exactly what it says. Just sleep. And nothing else. No, one more thing: bury my head in your left shoulder, and my hand on your right, and nothing more. Not yet: even in the deepest sleep to know that it is you. And one more thing: listen to how your heart sounds. And - kiss him."
This dream of an ideal union of souls, when she wants to see him sleeping next to him, this poetic vision, an image - he did not scare away Rilke, but met with his grateful understanding. For there was nothing “carnal” in these lines. Something like transcendental love, heavenly passion, it can only be expressed by poets, and they perfectly understand each other perfectly.
« I have always translated the body into the soul,- Tsvetaeva wrote to Rilke. - Why am I telling you all this? Probably out of fear that you will see in me an ordinary sensual passion (passion is slavery to the flesh). “I love you and want to sleep with you” - friendship cannot be said so briefly. But I say this in a different voice, almost in a dream, deep in a dream. I am a sound other than passion. If you took me to your place, you would take les plus deserts lieux. Everything that never sleeps would like to sleep in your arms. There would be that kiss to the very soul (depth). (Not a fire: an abyss.)"
She indisputably knew that she would never meet Rilke in her life, that there was no place on earth for “ shower dates" - she wrote a poem about this " Room attempt“- and still waited for this impossible meeting, and demanded from the poet the place and time for it.
« Rainer, we should meet this winter. Somewhere in French Savoy, very close to Switzerland, somewhere you have never been before. In a small town, Rainer».

...I would like to live with you
In a small town,
Where is the eternal twilight
And eternal bells.
And in a small village hotel -
Subtle ringing
Antique watches are like drops of time.
And sometimes, in the evenings, from some attic -
Flute,
And the flutist himself is in the window.
And big tulips on the windows.

And maybe you wouldn’t even love me...

« Say yes,- she writes to him - so that from this day on I too could have joy - I could look somewhere...»
« Yes, yes, and yes again, Marina,- Rilke answers her, - everything you want and what you are - and together they add up to a big YES, said to life itself... But it also contains all 10 thousand unpredictable “nos”».
« Room attempt” turned out to be an anticipation of the non-meeting with Rilke, the impossibility of the meeting. Refusing it. Anticipating Rilke's death. But Tsvetaeva realized this only when this death broke out over her.
Their correspondence ended unexpectedly in August 1926. Rilke stopped answering her letters. Summer is over. Marina and her family moved from Vendée to Bellevue near Paris. At the beginning of November, she sent Rilke a postcard with her new address: “ Dear Rainer! I live here. Do you still love me? There was no answer.
Subsequently, in her letter to the next world, to her eternal and, perhaps, truest lover - Rilke - she will write - and this will be another “ the cry of women of all times»:

Surely you see better, for from above:
Nothing worked out for you and me,
So pure and so simple -
It's okay, it suits my shoulder and height
We don’t even need to list them.

On earth, in this world, nothing worked out. But...

Or were you too knowledgeable about the means?
Of all this, only that light
Ours was like ourselves - just a reflection
We - in return for all this - all that light.

The Great Nothing. All or nothing. You can't do everything in life. That means nothing. In this world, in the world of bodies, in the world of passions, desires - everything is torn into pieces and you have to choose. And in one case, she herself chose - nothing - with Rodzevich (« Poem of the End"), in another - fate chose. Death chose.

Letter to the next world

Rilke died December 29, 1926. The last poem allows us to understand how painful his illness was.

Let the torment of body tissues end
the last destructive pain.

Dying Rilke

He was buried in a small cemetery near the Museau castle.

Tsvetaeva learned of Rilke's death on New Year's Eve. Her first words were: “ I've never seen him. Now I will never see him again."
That New Year's Eve she writes him a letter. The written word is her lifeline in the most difficult moments of life - even when the person to whom it is addressed is no longer on earth.

« Darling, I know that you read me before this is written,” that's how it started . The letter is almost incoherent, tender, strange . “The year ends with your death? End? Start! Tomorrow is the New Year, Rainer, 1927.7 is your favorite number... Darling, make me see you often in my dreams - no, that’s not true: live in my dream. You and I never believed in a meeting here - just like in life here, didn’t we? You got ahead of me and, in order to receive me well, you ordered - not a room, not a house - but a whole landscape. I kiss you - on the lips? In whiskey? head-on? Darling, of course, on the lips, truly, as if alive... No, you are not high and not far yet, you are very close, your forehead is on my shoulder... You are my dear, grown-up boy. Rainer, write to me! (Pretty stupid request?) Happy New Year and beautiful skies!”.

Mourning. Spells. The forerunner of future requiems - in poetry and prose. Tsvetaeva celebrated the New Year together with Rilke. She spoke not to the dead and buried Rilke, but to his soul in eternity. She felt his abyss with her abyss. This cannot be explained. One can only partake of this.

Tsvetaeva's best works always grew from the deepest wounds of the heart. In February 1927, she completed the poem “ New Year's", about which Brodsky will say that this is " tête-à-tête with eternity" The subtitle was: “ Instead of a letter" This is a kind of requiem, something between love lyrics and a funeral lament. Letter-monologue, communication " on top of the obvious and continuous separation", on top of the universe. Congratulations on a stellar housewarming, love and sorrow, everyday details that A. Sahakyants calls " everyday life" It is impossible for her to believe in Rilke’s non-existence. This would mean believing in the non-existence of your own soul. The non-existence of being.

What should I do in the New Year's noise?
with this internal rhyme: Rainer - dead?
If you, such an eye has darkened,
This means that life is not life, death is not death.
So, he’s stuck, I’ll figure it out when we meet!
There is no life, there is no death, - third,
new...

Following “New Year’s”, unable to part with Rilke, Tsvetaeva writes a short work in prose “ Your death». « That's it, Rainer. What about your death? To this I will tell you (myself) that she was not in my life at all. I’ll also tell you that not for a single second did I feel you dead, myself alive, and who cares what it’s called!”- lines that almost verbatim repeat the lines of the poem “ Peter Efron»: « And if you're dead to the whole world, I'm dead too».
« Since then I have had nothing in my life, - she later admits in a letter to Boris Pasternak . - Simpler: I haven’t loved anyone for years - years - years. On the surface of myself I simply petrified».
Impressed by this whole story, I wrote a poem:

Rainer Maria Rilke

Old castle. Quiet garden.
A lost area in the mountains.
Glowed in blue eyes
Mysterious inconspicuousness.

The sadness of half-closed eyelids.
The sound of the lines is like a flute.
Who is the angel? God-man?
Orpheus of the twentieth century?

Their souls are deeply related
The poet was immediately captivated.
On the map of its inner
Marina was noted.

Above barriers and interference
Oh, how she wanted to touch his chest!
He was the only one of all
In which everything is intertwined and sung.

He was her living There,
Her transcendental miracle.
And again to impossible dreams
A loan is given to blind hopes...

The essence of love is insatiable.
You always pay her a penalty.
Tell your loved one: don't be
With me”, and “Be!” - but only.

Eyes in tears, soul in bloom.
Prolonging distance and pain is her calling.
Meeting of souls “in the next world”
No sign of existence.

Palms never again
They will not fall on earthly shoulders.
Trying a shower room -
Anticipation of a non-meeting.

Alone in despair in the darkness
He looks with sleepless eyes.
Where? For what? For what?! Wall.
The power of rock. Next - silence.

The melancholy grows and spreads,
Emerging from the body, as if from a crypt.
But from the earthly dead end
There is a way out: into the infinity of the sky.

May they not be given the happiness of two,
But distance always meets distance,
Space - with space, with spirit - spirit,
Universal sadness - with sadness.

His star is burning in heaven.
The eyes were fixed on the pupils of the light.
But not for a moment did she then
I didn’t feel him dead.

Where is your sting, death? Love
Transcendentalism is akin to absenteeism.
Her heavenly counterpart
Now I read it without mail.

And for a month we are tormented by secrets,
Frozen in the space outside the window,
Like an eternal monument to two,
One not seen in the world.

We touch each other. How? Wings

Rainer Maria Rilke Boris Pasternak Marina Tsvetaeva

Correspondence of R.M. Rilke,
M. Tsvetaeva, B. Pasternak
It takes considerable courage and skill to transfer your soul, your whole self onto paper, to do it in such a way that your invisible interlocutor feels the same great, invisible impulse of soul and spirit, making them tremble, and fly along with the letter, in the hope of merging with the interlocutor ... These three Masters - Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak knew how to do this to the highest degree, and their letters are the thinnest threads between kindred souls who soared high above everyday life, the world and death...

Amazing and largely tragic circumstances brought together three great European poets at the beginning of 1926. The eldest of them, Rainer Maria Rilke, was 50 years old by that time. The greatest German-language poet of the 20th century, Rilke then lived in Switzerland in the secluded small castle of Musot; a painful illness forced him to undergo long-term treatment at resorts and sanatoriums. It was there, in the town of Val-Mont, that his communication with young Russian poets - Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva, who had previously been connected by friendship and long-term correspondence, began in May 1926. Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak were Muscovites, peers, from professorial families. Their fathers came to Moscow from the provinces and achieved success and social position on their own. Both mothers were gifted pianists from the galaxy of students of Anton Rubinstein. One can also find a certain similarity in the adolescent impressions of Pasternak and Tsvetaeva. Thus, the frequent trips to Germany of the Tsvetaev family (1904-1906) are quite comparable to the Pasternaks’ trip to Berlin (1906) and especially the summer semester at the University of Marburg (1912) of the young Boris Pasternak - an indelible memory of his restless youth.
By the end of peacetime, Tsvetaeva’s talent was noted by such authorities as Bryusov, Voloshin, Gumilev; Her fame grew in the artistic circles of Moscow. Already at that time, Tsvetaeva regarded her poetic calling as a destiny and mission. Pasternak, who devoted almost a decade to his later abandonment of musical composition and the serious study of philosophy, only in the summer of 1913 began to write poetry for his first youth collection, the immaturity and premature publication of which he long blamed himself for.
In May 1922, Tsvetaeva went to live with her husband, who had been found again after many years of separation, in Berlin. Soon Pasternak read Versts, published in 1921, and wrote Tsvetaeva a long, enthusiastic letter. Thirty-five years later, Pasternak talked about this in his autobiography:
“I had to read into it. When I did this, I gasped at the abyss of purity and power that had opened up to me. Nothing like it existed anywhere around me. I’ll shorten my reasoning. I won’t take it upon myself to say: minus Annensky and Blok and with some restrictions Andrei Bely, the early Tsvetaeva was what all the other symbolists combined wanted to be and could not be. Where their literature floundered powerlessly in the world of far-fetched schemes and lifeless archaisms, Tsvetaeva easily rushed over the difficulties of real creativity, coping with its tasks playfully. , with incomparable technical brilliance."
In the spring of 1922, when she was already abroad, I bought her small book “Verst” in Moscow. I was immediately captivated by the lyrical power of Tsvetaeva’s form, deeply experienced, not weak-chested, sharply compressed and condensed, not out of breath on individual lines, covering entire sequences of stanzas with the development of their periods without breaking the rhythm.
Some kind of closeness was hidden behind these features, perhaps the commonality of experienced influences or the sameness of incentives in the formation of character, the similar role of family and music, the homogeneity of starting points, goals and preferences.
I wrote a letter to Tsvetaeva in Prague, full of delight and surprise that I had missed her for so long and found out so late……….
She answered me. A correspondence began between us, which became especially frequent in the mid-twenties, when her “Craft” appeared and in Moscow her large-scale and thought-provoking, bright, unusual in novelty “Poem of the End”, “Poem of the Mountain” and “Pied Piper” became known in the lists. . We became friends"
Tsvetaeva’s daughter Ariadna Sergeevna Efron beautifully wrote about this friendship, community and true love contained in their poems, prose, critical notes and, most importantly, amazing letters addressed to each other. According to her, the correspondence between Tsvetaeva and Pasternak lasted from 1922 to 1935, reaching its climax in the mid-twenties and then gradually fading away.
“There is a lot about you in my mother’s notebooks and rough notebooks,” A. S. Efron wrote to Boris Pasternak on August 20, 1955. - I’ll write it out for you, there’s a lot you probably don’t know. How she loved you and for how long - all her life! She loved only dad and you, without falling out of love.”
The first half of the 1920s was also a crisis for Pasternak creatively. At the beginning of January 1923, Pasternak wrote from Berlin to V.P. Polonsky about the “mental heaviness” that prevented him from working. Pasternak is overcome by the idea that lyric poetry is not justified by time. Pasternak shares his doubts with Tsvetaeva, and she responds with all her heart to his frankness.
“Boris, the first human letter from you (the rest of the Geisterbriefe *, and I am flattered, gifted, exalted. You simply honored me with your draft,” she writes to Pasternak on July 19, 1925. Pasternak’s self-doubt and hesitation are met with indignation from Tsvetaeva rebuff: “I don’t understand you: throw poems. And then what? From the bridge into the Moscow River? Yes, with poems, dear friend, as with love: until she leaves you... You are Lyra’s serf.”
From that time on, Tsvetaeva’s participation and support became a paramount necessity for Pasternak.
As for Rilke’s poetry, Tsvetaeva became acquainted with it already in adulthood. One of the first mentions of the German poet is found in excerpts from Tsvetaev’s diary “On Germany” (dating from 1919, but published only in 1925, and possibly revised in connection with the publication. Getting to know these books by Rilke, in which By the way, there were still not too many admirers in German-speaking countries, Tsvetaeva was struck. From now on until the end of her days, she will perceive Rilke as the personification of the highest spirituality, as a symbol of poetry itself, “You are poetry incarnate,” she begins with these words. she is her conversation with him. Rilke for Tsvetaeva is a Poet with a capital P, an artist who creates the Eternal.
Tsvetaeva handled reality freely. “...She did not take reality into account when creating her own,” recalls A.I. Tsvetaeva, reproaching Marina for her self-will, for distorting the appearance of their mutual acquaintances. In a letter to V. Sosinsky, Tsvetaeva herself admitted that her memory is “identical to imagination.”
Inspired by the image created in her imagination, Tsvetaeva sometimes seemed to forget about the living person with whom she corresponded or about whom she wrote, losing sight of his everyday, “earthly” signs. They seemed to serve her only as an excuse to move the conversation to a more important “lyrical” level for her. The highest ups and tragic downs of Tsvetaeva’s “life-creativity” are connected with this. Her letters to Rilke are a prime example of this. Plunging headlong into the atmosphere of spiritual communication she created, Tsvetaeva “overlooked” the real person, who was already terminally ill at that time. Rilke's attempts to draw her attention to what was happening to him offended Tsvetaeva and was perceived by her as the poet's desire to isolate himself from her high impulses for the sake of spiritual comfort.
Rilke initially, as can be seen from his letters, treated Tsvetaeva with the deepest trust and sympathy. The feeling of spiritual closeness, set, like a tuning fork, by Boris Pasternak’s letter, is immediately established between the poets, determining the intonation, character and style of the dialogue. This is a conversation between people who understand each other perfectly and seem to be privy to the same secret. An outside reader has to carefully read their letters, as well as the lines of poetry. The best example of this esoteric style is Rilke’s wonderful “Elegy,” addressed to the Russian poetess and forming an integral part of the correspondence. But not just “Elegy” - Tsvetaeva’s entire conversation with Rilke gives the impression that its participants are conspirators, accomplices who know something that no one around them is aware of. Each of the interlocutors sees in the other a poet, extremely close to him in spirit and equal in strength. There is a dialogue and competition between equals (which Tsvetaeva always dreamed of). “Of my equals in strength, I met only Rilke and Pasternak,” Tsvetaeva declared nine years later.
However, over three and a half months - from early May to mid-August - Rilke's attitude towards Tsvetaeva changed somewhat. The turning point in their correspondence was Tsvetaeva’s letter dated August 2. Tsvetaeva's unrestrainedness and categoricalness, unwillingness to take into account any circumstances and conventions, her desire to be for Rilke “the only Russia,” pushing aside Boris Pasternak - all this seemed to Rilke unjustifiably exaggerated and even cruel. He apparently did not respond to Tsvetaeva’s long letter dated August 22, just as he did not respond to her postcard from Bellevue near Paris, although in Sieurs, where he lived until the end of November, and in the Val-Mont sanatorium, where he ended up again in December , he was still writing letters.
Rilke's death struck Tsvetaeva terribly. This was a blow for her from which she could never recover. All that Tsvetaeva passionately loved (poetry, Germany, the German language) - all this, embodied for her in the image of Rilke, suddenly ceased to exist. “...Rilke is my last Germanness. My favorite language, my favorite country (even during the war!), like Russia (the Volga world) for him. Since he passed away, I have neither a friend nor joy,” she admitted in 1930 to N. Wunderli-Volkart, a close friend of Rilke in the last years of his life. We can say that this tragic event partly determined the future fate of Tsvetaeva and her creative biography. In many ways it also changed the relationship between Pasternak and Tsvetaeva. The correspondence, interrupted in July and gradually resumed in February 1927, inexorably froze and grew cold. “...You are my last hope for all of me, the me that exists and which cannot exist without you,” Tsvetaeva writes to him on December 31, 1929
B. L. PASTERNAK - TSVETAEVOY
<Москва>, 25.III.<19>26
Finally I'm with you. Since everything is clear to me and I believe in it, I could remain silent, leaving everything to fate, so dizzyingly undeserved, so devoted. But precisely in this thought there is so much feeling for you, if not all of it, that it is impossible to cope with it. I love you so much, so completely, that I become a thing in this feeling, like one swimming in a storm, and I need it to wash me away, lay me on my side, hang me upside down by my feet * - I am swaddled with it, I become a child, the first and the only world revealed by you and me... And now about you. The strongest love I am capable of is only part of my feeling for you. I'm sure no one has ever done this before, but that's only part of it. After all, this is not new, because it was already said somewhere in my letters to you, in the summer of 24, or maybe in the spring, and maybe already in 22-23. Why did you tell me that I'm like everyone else?
Rilke - Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva
1923
We touch each other.
How? Wings.
We trace our kinship from afar.
TSVETAEVA - B. L. PASTERNAK
Boris, I'm writing the wrong letters. Real and don't touch paper. Today, for example, walking for two hours behind Murka’s stroller along an unfamiliar road - roads - turning at random, learning everything, blissful that we are finally on land (sand-sea), stroking and walking - some thorny flowering bushes - like stroking someone else’s dog, without stopping - Boris, I talked to you continuously, I spoke into you - I rejoiced - I breathed. Minutes when you were thinking too long, I took your head with both hands and turned it: here! Don’t think that beauty: poor Vendée, beyond any external heroic “and, bushes, sands, crosses. Tarataikas with donkeys. Stunted vineyards. And the day was gray (the color of a dream), and there was no wind. But - the feeling of someone else’s Trinity Day, tenderness over children in donkey caps: girls in long dresses, important, in hats (exactly to ah!) from the time of my childhood - ridiculous - square bottom and side bows - girls so similar to grandmothers, and grandmothers so similar to girls... But not about this - about something else - and about this - about everything - about us today, from Moscow or St. Gill - I don’t know, looking at the poor festive Vendee. (Like in childhood, with our heads together, temple to temple, in the rain, at passers-by.)
Boris, I don’t live back, I don’t impose my six or my sixteen years on anyone - why am I drawn to your childhood, why am I drawn to pull you into mine? (Childhood: a place where everything remained the same and there). I’m with you now, in the Vendée on May 26, constantly playing some kind of game, like a game - games! - I’m sorting out shells with you, I’m picking green (like my eyes, the comparison is not mine) gooseberries from the bushes, I’m running out to look (p<отому>h<то>when Alya runs, it’s me who runs!) whether Vie fell and rose (high tide or low tide).
Boris, but one thing: I DON ' T LOVE THE SEA. I can not. There is so much space, but you can’t walk. Once. It moves and I look. Two. Boris, this is the same scene, that is, my forced, deliberate immobility. My inertia. Mine - whether I want it or not - is tolerance. And at night! Cold, shy, invisible, unloving, full of itself - like Rilke! (Yourself or the deity is the same). I feel sorry for the earth: it is cold. The sea is not cold, this is it, everything that is terrifying in it is it. The essence of it. Huge refrigerator (Night). Or a huge cauldron (Day). And completely round. Monstrous saucer. Flat, Boris. A huge flat-bottomed cradle that dumps a child every minute (ships). It cannot be ironed (wet). You can’t pray to him (terrible. So, Jehovah, for example<имер>I would hate it. Like any power). The sea is a dictatorship, Boris. The mountain is a deity. The mountain is different. The mountain is reduced to Moore (affected by him!). The mountain grows up to Goethe’s forehead and, so as not to confuse him, exceeds it. A mountain with streams, with holes, with games. The mountain is, first of all, my feet, Boris. My exact cost. Mountain - and a big dash, Boris, which you fill with a deep sigh.
And yet, I don’t repent. “Everything becomes boring - only it’s not given to you...”
I don't write to Rilke. Too much torment. Barren. It confuses me - knocks me out of poetry - the risen Nibelungenhort * - is it easy to cope with?! He doesn't need it. It hurts me. I am no less than him (in the future), but I am younger than him. For many lives.

This epistolary novel was perhaps the longest in the history of Russian literature. It lasted fourteen years, and during all this time the lovers never saw each other. Their correspondence is striking in the intensity of the spiritual struggle, the goal of which is to become worthy of the interlocutor, to raise oneself to a new spiritual and creative height. It allows us to trace how the love illusion was created and destroyed, which captured three great poets and gave the world a whole scattering of poetic masterpieces.

* * *

The given introductory fragment of the book Pasternak – Tsvetaeva – Rilke (Ekaterina Zotova) provided by our book partner - the company liters.

There are many similarities in the destinies of Pasternak and Tsvetaeva - and no less differences. Both were born in Moscow, Boris - January 29 (February 10), 1890, Marina - September 26 (October 8), 1892. Both felt Moscow as their not only actual, but also spiritual homeland.

They grew up in families where the very air seemed to be permeated with the spirit of creativity. Their fathers, thanks to exceptional hard work and natural talent, achieved prominent positions in society by mid-life. The son of a village priest, Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, became an art critic, professor at Moscow University, founder and builder of the Museum of Fine Arts on Volkhonka, and Odessa resident Leonid Osipovich Pasternak became a famous artist, famous for his illustrations of the works of Leo Tolstoy, and a teacher at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. However, that's where the similarities end...

Boris Pasternak was the first-born in a friendly, close-knit family, where the cult of creative freedom was paradoxically combined with a general desire to subordinate personal interests to the well-being of relatives. In his youth, he persistently defended the right to independence, early began to earn money by tutoring - and at the same time, all his life he felt guilty before his loved ones for not becoming what they would like him to be. It can be assumed that it was in adolescence, under the influence of his parents, that his understanding of life as a gift from above was formed, for which it is necessary to thank with selfless creative service.

In the Tsvetaevs' house everything was different. Ivan Vladimirovich married M.A. Main shortly after the death of his first, beloved wife. Maria Alexandrovna in her youth experienced a strong feeling for a married man and got married rather out of obedience to her father, whom she loved very much. A warm, trusting relationship was immediately established between the spouses, but this closeness was complicated by the difficult attitude of Ivan Vladimirovich’s daughter from her first marriage to her stepmother (she was already 8 years old at the time of the wedding). And when Marina was only 9, her mother fell ill with a severe form of consumption. After that, until her death in 1906, the girl, together with her younger sister Asya, spent most of her time in foreign boarding houses not far from the sanatoriums in which Maria Alexandrovna was treated. Separation from her beloved mother and the harsh demands of her teachers made Marina withdrawn, stubborn, and independent.

German and French romantics became her favorite authors for a long time. She early learned their view of life as an unequal duel between good and evil, middle-class vulgarity with knightly splendor. The wayward Marina rejects any authority, listening only to her own convictions. Even in her adolescence or early youth, she felt the line separating dreams from everyday life, and then she accepted the world of her own dreams as the highest reality, the native element of the human spirit - in a word, for what in most religions is called “that light.” There one could communicate on equal terms with the geniuses of past centuries and fall in love with the young Duke of Reichstadt, the unfortunate son of Napoleon, who died in captivity because of his origin. There were no humiliating misunderstandings, defeats and own powerlessness, which hurt painfully in reality. Finally, it is from there, from this mysterious, inexhaustible well of possibilities, that inspiration descends... Since then, Tsvetaeva has subordinated life to the uncontrollable flight of her imagination. She studies at the gymnasium somehow, but at the age of 16 she goes alone to Paris to bow to the ashes of Napoleon and see the legendary Sarah Bernhardt, who played the Duke of Reichstadt in E. Rostand’s play “The Little Eaglet”.

Marina (right) and Anastasia Tsvetaeva (1905)

Tsvetaeva’s path into poetry was direct and natural. Even in adolescence, poetry became for her a lyrical diary, illuminating a repulsively gray world with the light of imagination. However, it is worth making a reservation here. What appears to us as “fantasies,” Marina considered to be the truth sent down by a higher, divine power, and she obeyed it with all passion.

Pasternak's path turned out to be much more intricate. From the age of 13, after meeting Scriabin, he, of his own free will, took up music seriously (his teachers were conservatory teachers). However, at nineteen, having doubted that music was his calling, Boris abandoned it, completely devoting himself to the study of philosophy. The young romantic was not brought to his senses either by Scriabin’s approval of his first sonata, or by the persuasion of his parents, who saw their son as a composer. After another three years, he, caught up in a powerful lyrical wave, left philosophy. He remains at the peak of success - just in July 1912, his studies attracted the attention of the head of neo-Kantianism, professor at the University of Marburg, Hermann Cohen. During these days, Pasternak wrote to his friend A. Shtikh:

“I know that I would excel in philosophy - everything that I sometimes outlined in the living room or in a snowstorm hat sein gutes Recht 5 .But this year in Moscow I will break myself for the last time.<…>On the day of the essay - almost unconsciously - 3 hours before the confrontation before the luminary of pure rationalism - before the genius of other inspirations - 5 poems.<…>God, what a success this trip to Marburg was. But I give up everything; - art, and nothing more" 6 .

(However, this did not prevent Boris from successfully graduating from Moscow University next spring.)

The names of Tsvetaeva and Pasternak appeared in print during that short period when the era of Russian symbolism was ending, and the new “masters of thought” had not yet gained strength. In October 1910, as an 18-year-old high school student, Marina, using her own funds, published her first book of poems, “Evening Album,” which would cause reserved approval from critics and give her friendship with the poet Maximilian Voloshin. At the beginning of 1912, the second book, “The Magic Lantern,” will be published, and a year later, the collection “Of Two Books.” Pasternak’s debut took place at the very beginning of 1913: several poems were published in a small collective collection “Lyrics”. That same fall, his first book, “Twin in the Clouds,” was published, and three years later, his second collection, “Over the Barriers,” was published. The poems of young authors clearly stood out against the general background. However, it was not they who managed to get “in the flow” of reader expectations then, but Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Yesenin, who spoke at the same time and successfully “divided” their spheres of influence.

B. L. Pasternak. 1910s.

In principle, this is understandable. Neither Pasternak nor Tsvetaeva were able to immediately find their own voice. For years, Marina had to free herself from romantic cliches inherited from her favorite authors and her own fixation on “girlish” themes. The process proceeded gradually, as the young woman groped for her real, not fictitious, essence. And Boris, who was much more experienced in creativity, at this time was intensely looking for a means to embody his very difficult worldview in words. It is curious that in this search they walked, as it were, towards each other: Tsvetaeva moved away from “average”, impersonal images to finding her own uniqueness, Pasternak - from the extremes of futuristic experiment to increasingly clear expression. Their creative paths would cross in the mid-20s, and then diverge again. He will go towards classical clarity of style and will persistently master the art of speaking “about time and about himself.” Having never found “her” reader, in her last poems she breaks through into the airless space of high abstruseness, and only then masters the ascetic style of maturity. Even many devoted fans preferred and prefer the “early” Tsvetaeva to the “late”. In Marina Ivanovna’s letter to her Prague friend A. A. Teskova dated September 24, 1926, there is an expressive example of such an attitude:

"...With Modern Time<нными>Notes(magazine published in Paris in the 1920s - 1930s - E.Z.) completely sold out,” they ask for poetry from the former Marina Tsvetaeva, i.e. 16 years old. Recently a letter from one of the editors: “You, a poet by God’s grace, are either deliberately disfiguring yourself or fooling the public.” 7 …

But all this will happen later. In the meantime, both are moving on to their first mature books. After the revolution, they get acquainted, occasionally meet in common companies - and do not show the slightest interest in each other. Moreover, at one of the poetry evenings, Tsvetaeva hears Pasternak’s performance, and she actively dislikes it, just as he does not like Marina Ivanovna’s early poems.

The revolutionary whirlpool of the spring-summer of 1917 with endless disputes, rallies and meetings generated by the explosion of mass interest in public life, the radical breakdown of the old system, far from ideal for him personally, captured Pasternak and, coupled with love, resulted in a book of poems with the remarkable title “Sister my life". Its basis turned out to be a bizarre mixture of the most intimate, timeless lyrics, reporters accurately captured signs of current events and philosophical insights on a universal scale. A typical example of the resulting fusion is a quatrain from the poem “Steppe”:

Shadowy midnight stands by the way,

The roads are covered with stars,

And cross the road beyond the tyn

It is impossible without trampling the universe.

In the collections “Versts” (published in 1921 and 1922), Tsvetaeva will include poems written in 1916–1920. In the time since the previous books were published, she has experienced a lot and learned a lot. The revolutionary spirit of liberation from any conventions (primarily from the conventions of marriage) turned out to be close to her, although Marina Ivanovna categorically did not accept either the ideology or the methods of the revolution. She peers more and more keenly into the life around her. Therefore, remaining within the circle of “his” themes (love – separation – creativity – Moscow – fate), the poet saturates his figurative structure with many everyday details, and his language with words from a variety of linguistic layers.

“My Sister My Life” and “Versts” brought the authors fame in the circles of poetry lovers and connoisseurs, although they were far from the popularity of the “leading three” Akhmatov - Yesenin - Mayakovsky. The same years brought fundamental changes to their personal lives. In the summer of 1921, after three years of uncertainty, Marina Tsvetaeva learns that her husband Sergei Efron is alive, who joined the white movement in mid-1918 and left Russia together with Wrangel’s troops. In May 1922, despite the many love affairs she had experienced over the years of separation, she and her daughter went to Prague with him. In September 1921, due to poor health and domestic instability, Pasternak’s parents and daughters also left Russia. And at the beginning of the next year, 1922, Boris’s next love ended in marriage. His wife was VKHUTEMAS student, artist Evgenia Lurie.