"Represented on a graph, Tsvetaeva's work would exhibit a curve--or rather, a straight line--rising at almost a right angle because of her constant effort to raise the pitch a note higher, an idea higher (or, more precisely, an octave and a faith higher.) She always carried everything she has to say to its conceivable and expressible end. In both her poetry and her prose, nothing remains hanging or leaves a feeling of ambivalence. Tsvetaeva is the unique case in which the paramount spiritual experience of an epoch (for us, the sense of ambivalence, of contradictoriness in the nature of human existence) served not as the object of expression but as its means, by which it was transformed into the material of art."
--Joseph Brodsky
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My poems, written early, when I doubted that I could ever play the poet’s part, erupting, as though water from a fountain or sparks from a petard, and rushing as though little demons, senseless, into a sanctuary, where incense spreads, my poems about death and adolescence, --that still remain unread! -- collecting dust in bookstores all this time, where no one comes to carry them away, my poems, like exquisite, precious wines, will have their day! |
Marina Tsvetaeva, 1913
Translated by Andrey Kneller