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1 Battling Blok and Akhmatova In Pursuit of a Muse Ох, огонь мой конь—нecытый едок! Ох, огонь на нем—несытый ездок! [Ah, my horse is fire—an insatiable eater! Ah, the fire upon him —an insatiable rider!] —‘‘Pozhiraiushchii ogon'—moi kon'! . . .’’ (1918) With a poet I always would forget that I myself—am a poet. —Letter to Boris Pasternak, 10 February 1923 At age sixteen I already understood that inspiring poems is greater than writing poems . . . If you don’t want to feel jealousy, offense, diminution, loss—don’t vie—surrender, dissolve everything soluble within yourself, and out of what remains create a vision, something immortal. This is my behest to some distant inheritress of mine, a poet who will arise in female form. —‘‘Plennyi dukh’’ (1934) Tsvetaeva never met the great Symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok in person, although she was present at two of his readings in Moscow during May 1920. Her seven-year-old daughter Alia (Ariadna Efron) described in her diary her mother’s appearance during Blok’s reading: ‘‘She had . . . a stern [groznoe] expression on her face, compressed lips, like when she was angry . . . And in general in her face there was no joy, but there was ecstasy.’’1 After each of these evenings of poetry, Tsvetaeva sent Alia backstage to convey to Blok an envelope of poems she had dedicated to him—five poems on the first occasion, one on the second—but she pointedly refrained from meeting Blok herself. One scholar records, without acknowledging her source, that Blok’s reaction to Tsvetaeva’s poems was to ‘‘read them—silently, read them—for a long time—and then such a lo-ong smile.’’2 However, Blok neverattempted to contact Tsvetaeva after this 35 36 Battling Blok and Akhmatova event and made no answer to her, either in person or in his poetry; he was to pass away the following summer. Tsvetaeva’s nonmeeting with Blok continued to torment her several years later; here, she reminisces about it in a letter of 1923: In life—by the will of poetry—I missed a great meeting with Blok (if we had met— he wouldn’t have died), myself a twenty-year-old, I carelessly conjured: ‘‘I rukami ne potianus'’’ [And I will not stretch my arms out to you]. And there was a second . . . when I stood near him, in the crowd, shoulder to shoulder (seven years ago!), I gazed at his hollow temples, at his slightly reddish, unattractive (he was sick; he had been sheared) thin hair, at the dusty collar of his shabby jacket.—My poems were in my pocket—all I had to do was reach out my hand—I didn’t budge. (I sent them to him by Alia, without an address, on the eve of his departure.) . . . [This is] my experience of dangerous—almost fatal—games.3 (6:236) This passage subtly diverges from the facts: although Tsvetaeva’s cycle to Blok was, indeed, written seven years before, the evening she is recollecting occurred only three years earlier; Tsvetaeva at the time was not twenty years old, but twenty-eight; and Alia did not seek Blok out ‘‘without an address’’ on the ‘‘eve of his departure,’’ but rather, as already stated, went backstage to him after his reading. This manipulation of the facts joins with Tsvetaeva’s own assessment here of her avoidance of Blok (in hopes that he will magically come in pursuit of her) as a ‘‘dangerous—almost fatal—game’’ to indicate her theatrical bent in operation. Indeed, Tsvetaeva’s decision not to seek Blok out is a risky gamble. She painfully decides against thrusting forward that stranger—her physical body, her nonself, her embarrassingly round-faced, rosy-cheeked female hypostasis—before Blok, whom she describes as almost disembodied (she writes elsewhere that on this evening, he was ‘‘no longer among the living’’ [6:228]). Instead, she chooses to come to Blok as disembodied poet and pure voice, much as she would advise Orpheus, the quintessential poet, to go in search of Eurydice in a later poem: ‘‘If Orpheus had not gone down to Hades himself, but had sent his own voice, had sent just the voice into the darkness, himself standing, superfluous , at the threshold—Eurydice would have walked out along it as along a tightrope ...’’ [Esli b Orfei ne soshel v Aid / Sam, a poslal by golos / Svoi, tol'ko golos poslal vo t'mu, / Sam u poroga lishnim / Vstav,—Evridika by po nemu / Kak po kanatu vyshla...] (2:323–24). In real life, however, Blok...

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