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3 Losing Rilke The Dark Lure of Mra Мимо свадебных карет, Похоронных дрог. . . [Past the wedding carriages, past the funeral hearses . . .] —‘‘Chtob doiti do ust i lozha . . .’’ (1916) Ибо правильно толкуя слово Рифма—что—как не—целый ряд новых Рифм—Смерть? [Since understanding the word rhyme correctly, what else is death —except—a whole sequence of new rhymes?] —‘‘Novogodnee’’ (1927) The artist Leonid Osipovich Pasternak, father of poet Boris, enjoyed a friendship with the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke that dated back to Rilke’s days in Russia at the beginning of the century.1 Through a bizarre sequence of events, Rilke renewed his contact with the elder Pasternak in the spring of 1926, after having seen two of the son’s poems published in French translation; a grateful letter from Boris Pasternak to Rilke followed this exchange. In his letter, for somewhat inscrutable reasons, Pasternak brought Tsvetaeva to Rilke’s attention and requested that the German poet write to her and send her his collection Duino Elegies. Rilke was amenable, and on 3 May 1926, he wrote his first letter to her. This was the beginning of Tsvetaeva’s short-lived but intense correspondence with Rilke, whom she had loved and revered since her youth on a par with Blok and even with Orpheus himself.2 Rilke was one generation Tsvetaeva’s senior, yet Tsvetaeva, who in any case never consented to the tyrannical limitations of time, interpreted Rilke’s age more as a sign of his spiritual superiority than as any barrier to an equal friend129 130 Losing Rilke ship. Indeed, the letters exchanged by these two great poets read, from the very beginning, as an intimate conversation between equals who, moreover, share not only an intuitive rapport with one another, but also a gratifying awareness of their poetic kinship.3 Even in Rilke’s first, gracious letter to the unsuspecting Tsvetaeva, he takes her talent on faith, writing nostalgically of his recent trip to Paris: But why, I must now ask myself, why was it not vouchsafed me to meet you, Marina IvanovnaTsvetaeva? After Boris Pasternak’s letter I must believe that for both of us, such a meeting would have led to the deepest, innermost joy.Will it sometime be possible to make up for this?!4 In this passage, Rilke unwittingly adopts Tsvetaeva’s central thematic concern: namely, the missed or impossible meeting between two great poets. Furthermore , he inscribes his Duino Elegies, which he sends to her at Pasternak’s request , as if with her own most cherished words and images: Wir rühren uns.Womit? Mit Flügelschlägen, mit Fernen selber rühren wir uns an. Ein Dichter einzig lebt, und dann und wann kommt, der ihn trägt, dem, der ihn trug, entgegen. [We touch each other.With what? With beating wings, with distance we touch each other. One poet only lives, and nowand then it happens, he who bears him comes toward the one who bore him.]5 Here are Tsvetaeva’s wings, symbolic throughout her oeuvre of the poetic gift; here is her motif of the poet’s spiritual elevation and consequent isolation; here is her theme of poetic kinship across space and time. In her response to Rilke, she staggers under the force of his miraculous recognition: ‘‘Rainer, Rainer, you said this to me, without knowing me, like a blind man (a seer!) by chance. (The best shots are blind!).’’6 Tsvetaeva confidently casts Rilke as the blind man who, as far back as her ‘‘Poems to Akhmatova,’’ has been her soul mate, her double, and her muse. Rilke, whom she would never have dared approach on her own initiative, has suddenly, magically come into her most intimate life of the soul like an apparition of her innermost self. In the process, he shatters Blok’s wounding indifference and unresponsiveness to Tsvetaeva years before. Not yet having heard her poetic voice, Rilke believes in her gift—and by this single, generous gesture, he confirms the metaphysical basis for her poetic genius. Indeed, for all her humility before Rilke, Tsvetaeva is now no longer a poetic adolescent, but a fully formed poet confident of her own voice and destiny. Since her renunciation of Pasternak on the spiritual plane (in the spring of 1923), and the ruinous rupture of her passionate, though short-lived liaison with Konstantin Rodzevich on the physical plane (in the fall of 1924), she has cultivated a careful tranquility— The Dark Lure of Mra 131 akin, at times, to barrenness—in her affections and emotions.7 It is no...

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