The Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva (review)

The Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva is devoted to a creative relationship that lasted just over ten years and exerted a formative influence on the creative selves and the writings of two leading poets of the twentieth century. Given the stature of Tsvetaeva and Pasternak and the intensity of their engagement, their correspondence and artistic exchanges have naturally attracted critical and scholarly attention of high caliber. Catherine Ciepiela's study is an important addition to this corpus.

Enlarging on existing scholarship and drawing on primary materials that have recently become available, The Same Solitude attends to Tsvetaeva's and Pasternak's erotically charged epistolary and poetic exchanges in the context of the shifting biographical, cultural, historical, and sociopolitical circumstances in which the relationship unfolded. Exercising impressive command over a vast range of materials, Ciepiela demonstrates the extent to which the two poets participated in one another's creative worlds and the complexity and subtlety of this participation.

In reading Tsvetaeva and Pasternak, Ciepiela is attuned to how they read one another and their surrounding world. The overarching concern is with the development of their poetic philosophies, which are both shaped by their exchanges and documented in them. It is specifically in how Tsvetaeva and Pasternak related to femininity "as it was constructed in the Victorian culture of Tsveteva's and Pasternak's childhood" (7) that Ciepiela discerns a moving force in their creative lives. Concentrating on how "the poets shared voices and genders in ways that profoundly shaped their writing" (245), she traces Pasternak's poetic development from the "feminine lyricism" (230) of his early poetry to his later efforts to embrace history and socialism in verse. Tsvetaeva's poetic evolution is shown as a steady expansion of that lyric principle to which she steadfastly adheres and in which she seeks to situate her fellow-poet even as he moves away from it.

Ciepiela's thoughtful and thought-provoking discussions of how gender figures in Tsvetaeva's and Pasternak's writings and self-presentations add a new dimension to how we understand the two poets, the tradition from which they emerged, and the cultural climate in which they wrote. This productive focus on gender is augmented by Ciepiela's perceptive recognition in Tsvetaeva's and Pasternak's life and writings in general and in their relationship in particular of a psychopoetics closely related to hysterical discourse. Drawing on the work of Clare Kahane, who discerns "the historical relation between modernism and the cultural phenomenon of hysteria" (7), Ciepiela connects the constructs of gender on which Tsvetaeva and Pasternak drew with hysterical discourse that resonated for modernists. If the initial stages of the project show some signs of thralldom to this interpretive strategy, Ciepiela's study swiftly grows in complexity to deliver rich insight and understanding that benefits from this viewpoint on the two poets and their exchange.

Ciepiela opens The Same Solitude with pertinent background on Tsvetaeva and Pasternak and then moves on to present in sequence the absorbing dialogue that lasted from the early 1920s to 1936. An account of Tsvetaeva's "fascination with Pasternak" (9) is followed by a discussion of the crisis Pasternak suffered in the 1920s. Ciepiela's examination of how Pasternak and Tsvetaeva related to Rainer Maria Rilke, who figured prominently in their discourse on poet and poetry, highlights the essential similarities in creative outlook that drew the two Russian poets together, but also foregrounds incontrovertible signs of growing differences. The conclusion documents the lasting effects of this exchange, effects that remained distinctly palpable until the ends of the poets' lives.

The success of The Same Solitude is secured by Ciepiela's scholarly acumen, sensitivity, and stamina and by the elegant balance she strikes between attending to the creative realm the two poets shape over the course of their exchange and the actual world from which their creative gestures spring. As befits a study of Tsvetaeva and Pasternak, it is their quest for...