“– No, not you, – it’s me – a proletarian!”: Marina Tsvetaeva – Poetic Development of the Industrial Outskirts (Cycle “Factory”)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the specifics of Marina Tsvetaeva’s urban texts, the images of Berlin and Prague in connection with her creative personality, ideas about the nature of the poet and literary creativity. In the image of Tsvetaeva’s Berlin, the features of the Petersburg text of Russian culture are actualized (theatricality and decorativeness, ghostliness, stoneness become the features of the city), which will determine the poet’s indifference to this city. Tsvetaevskaya Prague is constructed differently; the poet himself defined the city through the categories of “kinship”. The corpus of texts devoted to Prague is extensive, many poems and two poems – “The Poem of the Mountain” and “The Poem of the End”. A feature of Tsvetaeva’s Prague texts is the cultural settlement of the Prague outskirts. In the outlying metaphor, Tsvetaeva experiences the Jewish Quarter and Mount Petrin, but the poetics of the outskirts is most clearly reflected in the Factory cycle (1922). Tsvetaevsky’s cycle is filled with apocalyptic metaphors, and the poet’s voice accumulates the voices of social outcasts and disenfranchised workers of Svobodarna. An appeal to Tsvetaeva’s creative notebook shows the poet’s movement towards the problems of this acute social cycle, the emergence of images, the connection with the universal categories of “truth” and “orphanhood” in Tsvetaeva’s poetic world. The poet’s immersion into the abyss of industrial-capitalist hell is poetically framed through the technique of gradation: among the suffering voices of a Prague seamstress and laundress, from the depths of the social moat comes the voice of the most lyrical heroine – the “proud without a shirt” and the poet. Tsvetaev’s creative notebook shows the metapoetic potential of the “little seamstresses” that appeared in Zavodskie, as on the following pages of the notebook the poet will deploy spectacular metaphors of writing in the context of factory sewing (“a syllable is a stitch”, “a hand is scribbling”). Thus, Tsvetaeva’s text generation acquires a new metaphor of montage of text fragments (rags) into text (dress). Tsvetaevsky’s “Factory” cycle is by no means the first example of industrial poetics in Russian culture. Tsvetaeva’s significant addition to the industrial poetics of Russian modernity will be a conscious immersion in the social ditch, the presence of her people there – over national and cultural borders, finding in the abyss of someone else’s social pain and human suffering the original metaphors of writing.