Article

Name: Content and meaning of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem «Perekop»

Authors: G. V. Durinova

National Research University Higher School of Economics, Saint Petersburg

Abstract: The article focuses on Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem Perekop (1929), which somehow has not received sufficient attention from scholars. As Tsvetaeva herself pointed out, the Perekop “derives” from her husband’s Notes of a volunteer (where S. Efron described his experience as a White Guard). Therefore, the Perekop tends to be interpreted in way, which is apologetic towards the White Guard movement in the revolutionary Russia. From this vantage, the Perekop features the thinking apparent also in Tsvetaeva’s early poems (1917–1920) from the Swan camp cycle. Such reductionist interpretation should be replaced by a close, line-by-line reading of the poem. My analysis places the Perekop into an intertextual field and approaches it through the prose vs poetry, dialogue vs monologue, narrative vs lyrics oppositions. The concept of a particular “poetic narratology” is elaborated in order to understand the purpose of the poem on a historical topic. Perekop is an account of events (the battle on the Isthmus of Perekop) and therefor can be viewed as a narration. In the classic narration theory (Schmid) the event is a change of the initial situation: it can be the “external situation” in the fictional world being the object of narration. Or it can be an “internal event”, or a “mental one”, which deals with the internal world of personage. The main characteristics of the narrative texts are: relevancy, unpredictability, consequence- commitment and irreversibility. In the poetic form of narration, though, it seems that the irreversibility and the unpredictability are replaced by their converse. The poetic form predicts the future events (by alliteration and neologisms). As for the irreversibility, it manifests in the linear prosaic text, while poetry possesses a cyclic time, thus, reversible. It is the connections in absentia (the paradigmatic ones) that offer the understanding of such a text. Hence, the syntactic and grammatical structures are “influenced” by etymological and phonetic connotations, and the significant-signifié relation tends to be not arbitrary. The polyphonic (Bakhtin) structure of the Perekop is a realization of the metaphor of “the voice of conscience”: a philosophical category, which is apparently at the center of Tsvetaeva’s later oeuvre. While being in the very center of the historical events the participants cannot easily achieve its profound meaning. The guiltiness and the “pain of conscience” are common for the intellectuals in exile. Tsvetaeva herself paid a lot of attention to these questions, yet she has understand very early that the guiltiness must not be “satisfied” by a new political engagement (Union for repatriation of Russians abroad) as only an individual (not the group) can bring justice, otherwise unachievable.

Keywords: Marina Tsvetaeva, linguistic poetics, narratology

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