My Pushkin
Marina Tsvetaeva
A little later, when I was six and in my first year of music in the Zograf-Plaksina School of Music in Merzlyakovsky Lane, there was a Christmas play, a public evening, as it used to be called in those days. They put on a scene from Rusalka, followed by Rogneda, and,
“Now we’ll flit over the garden
Where Tatyana encountered him…”[1]
A bench. On the bench, Tatyana. Then Onegin comes but does not sit down: she rises. Both are standing. And he alone speaks all the time, a long time, while she does not say a word. And here I realize that the red cat, Avgusta Ivanovna, and the dolls are not love, that this is love: when there is a bench, she is seated on the bench, then he comes, and speaks all the time, while she does not say a word. Mother, after the performance: “Well, Musya, what did you like best?”
“Tatyana and Onegin.”
“What? Not Rusalka, with the mill, and the prince, and the wood goblin? Not Rogneda?”
“Tatyana and Onegin.”
“But how could it be? You did not understand anything in it. What could you understand?”
I am silent.
Mother, triumphantly: “You see, you did not understand a single word, just as I thought. A girl of six! What could you like in it?”
“Tatyana and Onegin.”
“You are an absolute fool and more stubborn than ten asses!” Turning to the approaching director, A.L. Zograf:
“I know her: whatever I ask her, she will now repeat in the cab all the way home: ‘Tatyana and Onegin.’ I really regret bringing her. Not a single child in the world would have liked Tatyana and Onegin out of all the performance—everybody else would have preferred Rusalka, because it’s a fairy tale, it’s easy to understand. I really don’t know what to do with her!”
The director, with great kindness: “But, Musenka, why Tatyana and Onegin?”
My unspoken reply in full:
“Because it is love.”
“She must be seeing the seventh dream by now,” says Nadezhda Yakovlevna Bryusova,[2] our best and oldest student, as she approaches us—and here I find out for the first time that there is a “seventh dream” that measures the depth of somnolence and night.
“And what is this, Musya,” says the director, drawing out of my muff a mandarin orange he has placed there, replacing it inconspicuously (conspicuously!), and taking it out, again, and again, and again…
But I am already completely dumb, petrified, and none of his and Bryusova’s mandarin smiles and no terrifying glares from my mother can elicit a smile of gratitude from me. On our way home (quiet streets, a late hour, a horse-drawn sleigh) mother scolds me: “You put me to shame. You did not say thank you for the mandarin orange. A girl of six, you fell in love with Onegin, like a fool!”
Mother was wrong. I fell in love, not with Onegin, but with Onegin and Tatyana (the more perhaps with Tatyana), with both of them, with love. And later I never wrote anything without first falling in love with the two simultaneously (the more with her than with him): not with the two of them, but rather with their love. With love.
The bench on which they did not sit proved to be a predestination. Neither then nor later did I ever love when the two were kissing, but always when they were parting. I never loved when they were sitting down together, but always when they were taking leave of each other. My first love scene was a non-love scene: he did not love (I realized that), and that’s why he did not sit down; she loved, and that’s why she stood up. They had not been together for a single minute: they did nothing together; they did something quite opposite: he spoke, she was silent; he left, she stayed; so that if the curtain were raised, she would still be standing there, or perhaps sitting again, since she stood up only because he was standing, and afterward collapsed and would now be sitting like this forever.
This first love scene of mine predetermined all the rest, all the passion in me for the unfortunate, the unreciprocated, the impossible love. From that very minute I no longer wanted to be happy, but condemned myself to nonlove.
The whole point was that he did not love her, and she had made such a choice, to the exclusion of any other, only because she secretly knew that he would be unable to love her. (I am telling this now, but I knew it even then; then I knew, and now I have learned how to tell it.) People with this fatal gift of unfortunate love, all of which they shoulder alone, without ever sharing, have a real genius for choosing unsuitable objects.
There was also another thing (not one thing but many) that Eugene Onegin had predetermined in me. If all my life to this very day I have always been the first to write, the first to stretch out my hand and my arms, braving judgment, it was only because at the dawn of my days Tatyana in the book, reclining by candlelight, the loose braid falling across her breast, had done so before my eyes. And if later, whenever I was being abandoned (as I always was), I never stretched out my arms to stop and never even so much as turned my head, it was only because then, in the garden, Tatyana stayed as motionless as a statue.
A lesson in courage. A lesson in pride. A lesson in faithfulness. A lesson in destiny. A lesson in loneliness.
What other nation has such an amorous heroine: brave yet dignified, enamored yet inexorable, clear-sighted yet loving?
There was not a shadow of vindictiveness in Tatyana’s rebuff. This is why her vindication is complete; this is why Onegin stands “as if struck by thunder.”
She had all the trumps in her hand so as to take vengeance, to drive him mad; all the trumps to humiliate him, trample him under foot, abase him to the parquet of that reception room. She did away with all that in a single slip of the tongue: “I love you (why dissimulate?).”
Why dissimulate? Surely, to be triumphant! But why be triumphant? To this question Tatyana can truly find no answer, at least no intelligible answer; and again she remains standing in the enchanted circle of the reception room, as once she stood in the enchanted circle of the garden—in the enchanted circle of her amorous loneliness: not needed then; coveted now; loving and unable to be loved, both then and now.
She had all the trumps, but she did not play them.
Yes, girls, yes! Be the first to declare love, then listen to rebuffs, then marry a distinguished wounded veteran, and then listen to his declaration of love yet concede nothing—and you will be a thousand times happier than that other heroine of ours, the one whose fulfilled desires left her no other choice but to lay down on the railroad track.[3]
My choice between the fullness of desire and the fulfillment of desires, between the fullness of suffering and the emptiness of happiness, was made the day I was born and even before then.
Because, before me, my mother had been influenced by Tatyana. When my grandfather, A. D. Mein, made her choose between himself and her beloved, she had chosen her father and not her beloved, and then she married in an even better fashion than Tatyana did, because “for poor Tanya all lots were equal” whereas my mother drew the heaviest lot: a widower[4] twice her age, with two children, and still in love with the departed. She married to face someone else’s children and the grief for someone else, while still loving, still continuing to love that other one, whom she never sought to meet later and whom, having met him for the first time and by chance at her husband’s lecture, she answered, when asked how she was and whether she was happy: “My daughter is one year old; she is very big and clever; I am completely happy…” (God, how she must have hated me—the big and clever one—at that moment because I was not his daughter.)
Thus, Tatyana had influenced not only my life but the very fact of my existence; had there been no Pushkin’s Tatyana, I would not have come into being.
For this, and this alone, is the way women read poets.
It is significant, however, that mother did not name me Tatyana: she must have taken pity on that girl, for all that.
As far as I am concerned, the entire Eugene Onegin still consists today, as it did in my infancy, of three scenes: that candle, that bench, that parquet. Some of my contemporaries perceive in Eugene Onegin a brilliant joke, almost a satire. Perhaps they are right; perhaps, had I not read it before I was seven—but I read it at an age when there are neither jokes nor satires: there are dark gardens (as we had in Tarusa), there are crumpled bedclothes (as we had in our bedroom), and there is love (as I have in the hollow of my breast).
[1] The quotations from Eugene Onegin are taken from Vladimir Nabokov’s translation in the Bollinger Series LXXII. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964).
[2] Sister of Valery Bryusov.
[3] Anna Karenina.
[4] Marina Tsvetaeva’s father, Ivan Vladimirovitch Tsvetaev (1846-1913), philologist and art historian, professor at the University of Moscow, director of the Rumyantsev Museum and founder of the Alexander III Museum of fine arts in Moscow, now the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.
