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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2017
Rainer Maria Rilke's widely celebrated fiftieth birthday in December 1925 and his sudden death on 29 December 1926 framed his correspondence with members of Boris Pasternak's family and Marina Tsvetaeva- Efron, for which Leonid Pasternak's initial greetings to his old Moscow friend and Rilke's prompt reply had set the stage. It was agreed that Rilke's letters from Switzerland would be sent to Boris Pasternak in Moscow via Marina Tsvetaeva in Paris. Against all historical and political odds, the three poets decided to form a union, the last one, perhaps, of an era which still believed that the making of poetry equaled the making of life. Rilke's participation in this association reassured uprooted Russian writers of their continuing link with European culture and history.
1. Between May and November 1926, Rilke and Pasternak exchanged one letter each; Tsvetaeva wrote nine letters and a postcard to Rilke; Rilke sent six to her (although she later claimed to have received seven and continued to call “letters” all of her subsequent writings dedicated to Rilke). Two critical publications edited by Kon stantin M. Azadovskii, Elena Pasternak and Evgenii Pasternak complement each other in documenting this exchange : the Germanvolume, Rainer Marie Rilke, Marina Zwetajewa, Boris Pasternak Briefwechsel (Frankfurt a. M. : Insel Verlag, 1983)Google Scholar (Briefwechsel below); the English translation of letters : Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Rainer Maria Rilke : Letters Summer 1926, trans. Margaret Wettlin and Walter Arndt (New York : Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1985); and the Russian edition : Rainer Mariia Ril'ke, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva : Pis'ma 1926 goda (Moscow : Kniga, 1990) (Pis'ma below). There are some textual discrepancies between the German and the Russian editions of the letters, not to mention different order in the names of the participants. To avoid misunderstanding, all quotations hereafter will follow the letters as published in the original language. Rilke's correspondence with Tsvetaeva will be cited from the Insel edition and Pasternak's and Tsvetaeva's letters will follow the Moscow edition. The English translation of letters is selective and occasionally departs from the original. Selections from these letters have also been published in French : Correspondance a trois : Ete 1926 (Paris : Gallimard, 1983); and in Italian, , settimo sogno : Lettre 1926 (Rome : Editore Riuniti, 1980)Google Scholar. For further information as to how these letters finally surfaced from the archives, see Patricia P., Brodsky, “On Daring to Be a Poet : Rilke and Marina Tsvetaeva,” Germano-Slavica III, no. 4 (Fall 1980) : 261-69.Google Scholar
2. In his review of the English translation, Clarence Brown criticizes the melodramatic tone which dominates most critical discussions of these letters : Rilke is often portrayed as poetic demiurge, Tsvetaeva becomes his pythoness and Pasternak assumes the role of a self-sacrificing mortal ( “Postmarked Parnassus, ” The New Republic 2 [September 1985] : 38-40).
3. Leonid Pasternak to Rilke, 8 December 1925, Pis'ma, 45-46. Rilke's friendship with Leonid Pasternak dated from his first visit to Russia in spring 1898. Leonid Pasternak left a memoir describing his meetings with Rilke in “Begegnungen mit R.M. Rilke” in Rilke und Rufiland : Briefe, Erinnerungen, Gedichte, ed. K. Azadovskii (Berlin and Weimar : Aufbau Verlag, 1986), 453-59. On Rilke's friendship with the Pasternaks, see Andre Gronicka, “Rilke and the Pasternaks : A Biographical Note, ” The Germanic Review XXVII (February 1952) : 260-71.
4. Azadovskii, “Einleitung, ” 52.
5. Olga Peters Hasty suggests in the opening of her doctoral thesis that “the contrast between the poetic styles of Marina Ivanovna Cvetaeva and Rainer Maria Rilke is so striking that the possibility of any affinity between them can be easily overlooked.” But after she locates several points of divergence in individual letters, she continues to focus primarily on similarities : “An artistic bond did however exist between these two poets, forged to a large extent by Cvetaeva herself…” (Olga Peters Hasty, “Introduction, ” Marina Cvetaeva's Encounters with Rainer Maria Rilke [Ph.D. Dissertation, Yale University, 1980], v).
6. Gary Saul Morson examines letters as a “boundary genre” in The Boundaries of Genre (Austin : University of Texas Press, 1981), 48.
7. Rudolf Kassner, who knew Rilke well, predicted after his death that the “public would receive an overabundance of beautiful letters which he shared with his friends.” Quoted in Rilke and Benvenuta : An Intimate Correspondence, ed. Magda von Hattingberg, trans. Joel Agee (New York : Fromm International, 1987), 133.
8. Tsvetaeva liked to quote this coinage by Marc Slonim. Reference in Nashe nasledie, no. 4 (1991) : 46.
9. Azadovskii advises in his introduction to the correspondence that Tsvetaeva's letters did not belong in the category of traditional epistolary prose (Pis'ma, 32). G. Gorchakov presents a most comprehensive analysis of Tsvetaeva's letter-writing style in his “Marina Tsvetaeva—korrespondent, adresat” (Novyi Zhurnal, no. 167 [June 1987]) and Svetlana Boym offers a provocative reading of Tsvetaeva's “erotic intersexuality” as a rebellion of a talented femme terrible ( “The Death of the Poetess, ” Death in Quotation Marks : Cultural Myth of the Modern Poet [Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1991], 200-40).
10. For a study of different ways in which men and women communicate with each other, see Carol, Gilligan, In a Different Voice : Psychological Theory of Women's Development (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1982.Google Scholar
11. Rilke was well aware of the narcissistic nature of creative processes. He himself became an object of Lou Andreas-Salome's psychoanalytic observations which she developed in her essay, “NarziBmus als Doppelrichtung, ” Imago VII, no. 4 (1921) : 361-86.
12. For a comprehensive discussion of this three-way correspondence from different historical and literary points of view, see introductions and commentaries provided by Konstantin M. Azadovskii to individual collections of letters : K. M. Azadovskii : Bibliografiia (K 50-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia) (St. Petersburg, 1991).
13. Olga Hasty suggests that due to “the brevity of the acquaintance and, perhaps, even more because Cvetaeva's verse—not easy even for a native speaker—proved too difficult for Rilke, he was less affected by the relationship than Cvetaeva” (Marina Cvetaeva's Encounters with Rainer Maria Rilke, iv).
14. Barbara Heldt argues that Tsvetaeva's “vigorous female voice” has a special appeal to a feminist reader but a common reader might find her lack of heed “too strident, abrasive, hysterical, or immodest” (Terrible Perfection : Women and Russian Literature [Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1987], 130).
15. Simon, Karlinsky, Marina Tsvetaeva : The Woman, Her World and Her Poetry (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1985), 163.Google Scholar
16. Irma, Kudrova, Versty, dali : Marina Tsvetaeva, 1922-1939 (Moscow : Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1991), 171.Google Scholar
17. Christopher, Barnes, Boris Pasternak : A Literary Biography (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1989), I : 373-74.Google Scholar
18. Pasternak to Tsvetaeva, 23 May 1926, Pis'ma, 110.
19. Donald, Prater, A Ringing Glass : The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York : Oxford University Press, 1986), 393–94.Google Scholar
20. Rilke to Tsvetaeva, 19 August 1926, Briefwechsel, 237.
21. Pasternak's poems “Nuit accablante” and “Depart, ” translated by Helene Iswolsky, were published in Commerce, no. 6 (1925).
22. Pasternak to Rilke, 12 April 1926, Briefwechsel, 76.
23. “Sie kennen meine Meinung daB der Revolutionar dem Russen direkt entgegengesetzt ist … . Nehmen sie dazu, daB ich auch den Kiinstler als den Gehorchenden, Geduldigen, auf langsame Entwicklung Eingestellten, nicht und in keinem Punkt unter den Umstiirzlern mir vorstellen kann … ” Rilke to Karl von der Heydt, 3 May 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke : Briefe aus denjahren 1906 bis 1907, eds. Ruth Sieber-Rilke und Carl Sieber (Leipzig : Insel Verlag, 1930), 253-54.
24. Rilke to L. Pasternak, 14 March 1926, Briefwechsel, 60.
25. Kathrine Tiernan O'Connor, “Reflections on the Genesis of the Pasternak-Tsvetaeva-Rilke Correspondence” in Festschrift in Honor of Vladimir Markov, eds. John Malmstad and Ronald Vroon (Moscow : Akademiia nauk, 1993.Google Scholar
26. Pasternak to Rilke, 12 April 1926, Briefwechsel, 76.
27. Pasternak, B., Vozdushnyeputi : Proza raznykh let (Moscow : Sovetskii pisatel', 1982), 479–80.Google Scholar
28. B. Pasternak to Rilke, 12 April 1926, Briefwechsel, 75.
29. B. Pasternak to L. Pasternak, Pis'ma, 142.
30. B. Pasternak, Vozdushnye puti, 479-83. Pasternak always imagined, he wrote, that in his original efforts and in his artistic work he was only translating or diversifying Rilke's own motifs, that he was adding nothing to Rilke's originality and was always swimming in his waters (Pasternak to Michel Aucouturier, 4 February 1959, in M. Aucouturier, Pasternak par lui-meme [Paris : Editions du seuil, 1963], 34); see also B. Pasternak to L. Pasternak, June 1926, Briefwechsel, 177.
31. “la uspokaivalsia vspominaia, chto v perepiske s Vami Tsvetaeva, potomu chto khotia ia ne mogu zamenit’ Tsvetaevoi, Tsvetaeva zameniaet menia” (B. Pasternak, Vozdushnye puti, 479-80).
32. To describe this suspension between his need for solitude and his desire for a communion with an “understanding human soul, ” Rilke coined the term “craving to get out” (Hinaussiichtigkeit). Quoted by Storck in Rilke and Benvenuta, 135.
33. For example, Rilke's letters to Franz Xavier Kappus, “To the Young Woman, ” to NN, to Elisabeth Schenk zu Schweinberg and others. See also Carl Sieber's “Rainer Maria Rilkes Briefwerk, ” lnselschiff (1933) : 236-41.
34. Rilke to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, 29 July 1920. Quoted in J.R. von Salis, Rainer Maria Rilke : The Years in Switzerland, trans. N.K. Cruickshank (Berkley and Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1966), 242.
35. Rilke reported to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart from Paris : “Little by little I have been able to find most of the Russians I knew earlier … ” (Rilke to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, 3 March 1925. R.M. Rilke-Nanny Wunderly-Volkart : Briefwechsel, [Frankfurt am M. : Insel, 1977] 2 : 1047-48).
36. “Lettres a une amie, ” 197.
37. Julie, Sazonova, “Pis'ma Rainera Mariia Ril'ke,” Novyi zhurnal 5 (1943) : 281.Google Scholar
38. Klaus, Jonas, “Rilke und die Sakharoffs,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (28 January 1966) : 28.Google Scholar
39. Tsvetaeva to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, 17 October 1930, in Rainer Maria Rilke-Marina Zwetajewa : Ein Gesprdch in Briefen, ed. Konstantin Azadovsky (Frankfurt am M. : Insel, 1992), 169.
40. J.R. von Salis, “The Man Rilke, ” Rainer Maria Rilke : The Years in Switzerland, 226-43.
41. “Die Menschen um ihn und die fernen Briefempfanger begliickte er trotz eigener Bedriickungen und Sorgen mit den wunderbaren Uberschiissen seines Aufnahme-und Mitteilungsvermogens; er bereicherte sie mit seiner Gegenwart, mit der sanften Kraft seiner menschlichen Zuwendung und mit den Kostbarkeiten seines Wortes!” (J.R. von Salis, Rainer Maria Rilkes Schweizer Jahre [Frauenfeld : Verlag Huber, 1936], 58).
42. Rilke to Tsvetaeva, 10 May 1926, Briefwechsel, 112.
43. Rilke to Tsvetaeva, 17 May 1926, ibid., 125.
44. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that women's anxiety of authorship is different from men's “anxiety of influence ” ; that it is pre-Oedipal in nature and does not seek to enter into the hierarchical power relationship with the male precursor. I believe that Tsvetaeva's correspondence with Rilke reverses this gendered dichotomy (The Madwoman in the Attic : The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. [New Haven : Yale University Press, 1979], 45–92 Google Scholar). See also Elaine, Showalter, A Literature of Their Own : British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1977 Google Scholar).
45. Rachel M. Brownstein writes persuasively about pleasures and dangers awaiting women who want to become somebody else's heroines (Becoming a Heroine : Reading about Women in Novels [New York : Viking Press, 1982]).
46. The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, trans. Matilde Blind (London : Virago, 1985).
47. Tsvetaeva believed that Rilke and Pasternak were her poetic equals but while they had been already known she still had the difficult task of establishing herself in the west (Tsvetaeva to Ivask, 8 April 1934 [Russian Literary Archives, eds. Dmitry Cizevsky and Michael Karpovich [New York, 1956], 214-15).
48. Marina Tsvetaeva, “Svetovoi liven;” Ob iskusstve (Moscow : Iskusstvo, 1991), 260-61.
49. Marina, Tsvetaeva, “Epic and Lyric of Contemporary Russia,” Art in the Light of Conscience, trans. Angela Livingstone (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1992), 127.Google Scholar
50. Tsvetaeva to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, 9 March 1931 (Rainer Maria Rilke— Tsvetaeva : Ein Gesprach in Briefen, 175).
51. Tsvetaeva, “Neskol'ko pisem Rainera Marii Ril'ke, ” Ob iskusstve, 283.
52. Tsvetaeva to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, 29 December 1931, Ein Gesprach, 182.
53. Angela Livingstone believes that Tsvetaeva had Rilke in mind when she wrote her essays on art in the period between 1926-1930 (Art in the Light of Conscience, 3).
54. Azadovskii, “The ‘Letter’ in the Writings of Marina Tsvetaeva, ” Culture and History (1990) : 61-67.
55. Those were Valerii Briusov's remarks made in his review of Tsvetaeva's Vech-«, rnii al'bom. Quoted in Gorchakov, “Marina Tsvetaeva—korrespondent, adresat, ” 157.
56. Tsvetaeva to Rilke, 2 August 1926, Breifivechsel, 233-34.
57. Ibid., 233.
58. Rilke to Tsvetaeva, 28 July 1926, ibid., 229 (emphasis mine).
59. Rilke, , Of Love and Other Difficulties, trans. John Mood (New York : Norton 1975) 36.Google Scholar
60. Ibid., 37.
61. Helene Sword argues that even the most sensitive male allies of the modernist generation failed in adequately representing the female worldview. She persuasively reveals a hidden “male” agenda in Rilke's treatment of the Leda myth ( “Leda and the Modernists, ” PMLA 107, no. 2 [1992] : 305-17).
62. Rilke's correspondence with Regina Ullmann, which lasted from 1908 until Rilke's death, reminds one of his exchange with Tsvetaeva. Ullmann was a German poet and story-writer who had to support her two children on the occasional income from her publications. Destitute and despairing, she turned to Rilke who helped her by placing her work in journals and wrote an introduction to her volume of poetry (Rilkes Brieftvechsel mit Regina Ullmann und Ellen Delp [Frankfurt a. M. : Insel, 1987]).
63. Rilke, , The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York : Norton, 1964), 176.Google Scholar
64. Rilke to a “Young Woman, ” 20 November 1904, in Gesammelte Briefe, I : 103-4.
65. Rilke, Of Love and Other Difficulties, 35.
66. Princess Marie Thurn und Taxis, Erinnerungen an Rainer Maria Rilke (Frankfurt a. M. : Insel, 1966), 43.
67. A few years before the episode with Tsvetaeva, Rilke acknowledged this pattern in his relationships with women. In a letter to Andreas-Salome, he wrote : “I am terrified when I think how I live from within myself, as if standing at a telescope I always look for happiness with everyone who comes along; happiness which certainly has not been found with anyone yet. My happiness, the happiness of my loneliest hours” (Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salome, 21 October 1913, Rilke—Lou Andreas-Salome, Briefwechsel, 305).
68. Claire, Goll, “Rainer Maria Rilke,” Twice a Year : A Book of Literature, the Arts and Civil Liberties, no. 5-6 (1940/41) : 370.Google Scholar
69. Marie von Turn und Taxis, Erinnerungen, 107.
70. Rilke to Mimi Romanelli, 11 May 1910 (Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Rilke-Archiv im Weimar, with Ruth Sieber-Rilke [Frankfurt a. M : Insel, 1987] I : 266).
71. A comparison between Rilke's and Nietzsche's views of women is one way of demonstrating how “progressive” Rilke's position on gender issues was for his time (Nietzsche uber die Frauen, ed. Klaus Goch [Frankfurt a. M. : Insel, 1992]).
72. “Wir ruhren uns, Womit? Mit Fliigelschlagen, mit Fernen selber riihren wir uns an. Ein Dichter einzig lebt, und dann und wann kommt, der ihn tragt, dem, der ihn trug, entgegen.” (Rilke to Tsvetaeva, Briefwechsel, 105).
73. Rilke, Duino Elegies, trans. C.F. Maclntyre (Berkley and Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1965), 7 (all subsequent translations of the elegies are from this edition).
74. Ibid., 63.
75. Ibid., 67.
76. Rilke, “Sonnet 13, ” Part II, Between Roots, trans. Rika Lesser in Rilke between Roots (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1986), 56.
77. In a letter accompanying the “Marina Elegy, ” Rilke abandoned all allegory and explained to her that writing letters had become impossible for him because of his physical condition (Rilke to Tsvetaeva, 8 June 1926, Briefwechsel, 158).
78. “Marina Elegy” was neither Rilke's last poem nor did it belong to the Duino cycle, as Tsvetaeva claimed. Rilke's last major work was a poem dedicated to Erika Mitterer, “Taube die drauBen blieb, auBer dem Taubenschlag.” The poem was written in Ragaz at the time of Rilke's correspondence with Tsvetaeva (20 July through 30 August 1926) and its theme echoed the main message of the elegy to Tsvetaeva (Samtliche Werke, II : 318-19).
79. Even though Tsvetaeva informed Anna Teskova that no one, except for Pasternak, knew of the existence of Rilke's elegy, the poem became known to readers from Rilke's drafts.
80. Rilke, “Marina Elegy, ” 52-53.
81. Rilke always distinguished between the elevated singular and the belittling plural uses of the word “god. ”
82. Rilke, “Marina Elegy, ” 53.
83. Before Tsvetaeva's letters became available, Dieter Bassermann, one of Rilke's most insightful readers, had concluded on the evidence of Rilke's entire oeuvre that in “Marina Elegy” Rilke answered Tsvetaeva's complaints about her life. Bassermann mastered well the art of guessing the originals to which Rilke was responding in his images (Der andere Rilke [Bad Hamburg : Hermann Gentner, 1961], 228-29).
84. Rilke, “Epitaph, ” Between Roots, 29.
85. Tsvetaeva to Rilke, 14 July 1926, Briefwechsel, 173.
86. Tsvetaeva to Wunderly-Volkart, 29 December 1931, Ein Gesprdch, 182.
87. Tsvetaeva to Rilke, 14 June 1926, Briefwechsel, 173-74.
88. “Ril'ke ne pishu. Slishkom bol'shoe terzanie, besplodnoe. Menia sbivaet s tolku. Vybivaet iz stikhov … ” (Tsvetaeva to Pasternak, 25 May 1926, Pis'ma, 117).
89. Ibid.
90. The difference between Rilke's and Tsvetaeva's ideals for a poet's life and death still remains to be examined. Even though Tsvetaeva insisted that for her no boundary existed between those two existential conditions, she clearly privileged death. Hence her ultimately narcissistic fascination with poets’ suicides as highest artistic creations (see Hasty, Olga Peters, “Reading Suicide : Tsvetaeva on Esenin and Maiakovskii,” Slavic Review 50, no. 4 [1991] : 838-46Google Scholar). Rilke, on the other hand, insisted that the poet's ideal death continues life's natural cycle. In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke created contrasting images of death : old Christoph Detlev's three-day agony spoke to everyone in the village while the young Make's disappearence into the city remained unnoticed. In Duino Elegies, the image of “pregnant death” serves to affirm life. Even though there are descriptions of violent death in Rilke's work, he does not care for suicides.
91. Tsvetaeva to Anna Teskova, 21 February 1927, Pis'ma k Anne Teskovoi (Jerusalem : Versty, 1982), 49.
92. See Viktoriia, Shveitser, Byt i bytie Mariny Tsvetaevoi (Paris : Sintaksis, 1988 Google Scholar; and El'nitskaia, Svetlana, Poeticheskii mir Mariny Tsvetaevoi (Vienna : Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 1990 Google Scholar.
93. Tsvetaeva to Pasternak, 1 January 1927, Pis'ma, 203.
94. Tsvetaeva to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, 2 April 1930, Ein Gesprach, 226.
95. Elena Korkina divides Tsvetaeva's major lyrical poems of 1920-1927 into three cycles and analyzes their gradual progression from the rejection of earthly existence towards glorification of non-being ( “Kommentarii, ” in Marina Tsvetaeva, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy [Leningrad : Sovetskii pisatel', 1990]).
96. Elena, Korkina, “Liricheskaia trilogiia Tsvetaevoi,” A Centennial Symposium Dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva, eds. Efim Etkind and Svetlana El'nitskaja (Norwich : Russian School of Norwich University, 1992), 117.Google Scholar
97. I believe that Joseph Brodsky's reading of Tsvetaeva's “New Year's” is the most convincing in its fine tuning to Tsvetaeva's artistic world. And yet it falls short of introducing Rilke's voice ( Brodsky, , “Footnote to a Poem,” Less than One [New York : Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1986], 195–267 Google Scholar).
98. “ … It could not have been a son, ” Tsvetaeva wrote to Rilke's daughter, Ruth Sieber-Rilke, 24 January 1932 (Ein Gesprach, 189).
99. See Brodsky's observations concerning the possible meanings of this phrase ( “Footnote to a Poem, ” 211).
100. Marina, Tsvetaeva, Stikhotvoreniia i poemy (New York : Russica, 1983), IV : 382.Google Scholar
101. Anthropologists differ in their definitions of the origins and nature of gift giving. Marcel Mauss describes potlatch as a rite which implies negative reciprocity : in potlatch rich gifts are extended with the intention of obliging, challenging, or humiliating rivals by making them accept the treasure which they are unable to repay (The Gift : Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison [New York : Norton, 1965], 32-33). Lewis Hyde takes a more benign view of the gift giving ceremony by showing its possible ambivalence (The Gift : Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property [New York : Random House, 1983], 29-39). It is appropriate to argue in this connection about the self-indulgence of poets’ epistolary relationships and the sincerity of their “gifts” of poetry.
102. Tsvetaeva to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, 12 January 1932, Ein Gesprdch, 185