The Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva

by Catherine Ciepiela

"Still, we have the same solitude, the same journeys and searching, and the same favorite turns in the labyrinth of literature and history."―Boris Pasternak to Marina Tsvetaeva One of the most compelling episodes of twentieth-century Russian literature involves the epistolary romance that blossomed between the modernist poets Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak in the 1920s. Only weeks after Tsvetaeva emigrated from Russia in 1922, Pasternak discovered her poetry and sent her a letter of praise and admiration. Tsvetaeva's enthusiastic response began a decade-long affair, conducted entirely through letters. This correspondence-written across the widening divide separating Soviet Russia from Russian émigrés in continental Europe-offers a view into the overlapping worlds of literary creativity, sexual identity, and political affiliation. Following both sides of their conversation, Catherine Ciepiela charts the poets' changing relations to each other, to the extraordinary political events of the period, and to literature itself. The Same Solitude presents the first full account of this affair of letters and poems from its beginning in the summer of 1922 to its denouement in the 1930s. Drawing on many previously untranslated letters and poems, Ciepiela describes the poets' mutual influence, both in the course of their lives and the development of their art. Neither poet saw any separation between a poet's life and work, and Ciepiela treats each poet's letters and poems as a single text. She discusses the poets' famous triangular correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke in 1926, and she addresses the profound significance of Tsvetaeva for Pasternak, who is often perceived (mistakenly, Ciepiela asserts) as the more detached partner. Further, this book expands our understanding of poetic modernism by showing how the poets worked through ideas about gender and writing in the context of what they themselves called a literary "marriage."

Genres: Literature, Russia, Poetry, Biography

320 pages, Hardcover

First published October 5, 2006

About the author

Catherine Ciepiela is a scholar and translator of Russian poetry who teaches at Amherst College. She is the author of The Same Solitude (Cornell 2006), a study of Marina Tsvetaeva’s epistolary romance with Boris Pasternak; co-editor, with Honor Moore, of The Stray Dog Cabaret (NYRB 2007), an anthology of poems by the Russian modernists in Paul Schmidt’s translations; and editor of the anthology Relocations (Zephyr 2013), featuring translations of Polina Barskova, Anna Glazova and Maria Stepanova. She recently finished translating a book of Polina Barskova’s poetic prose and is at work on a book about Tsvetaeva’s émigré career.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 1 out of 5]

'It was more first than first love and the simplest thing in the world'
'fall asleep and sleep'

I dont know. anything, and feel all the more with reading this.

look at what the LC cataloger gives as its genre:
'Criticism and interpretation'

I should have stopped there. but admit to thirsting so very much for BP and Marina T's words that I read the damn thing. (every other word from the author is 'agency' and i died a thousand times very time i read it.)

I would simply like THEIR words pls.

BP explaining his wife-type and a certain idea that the ideal condition of human is poet:
"at bottom she is a good sort. Sometime in the n'th generation this soul, too, like all the rest, will become a poet, armed with the whole sky"

YES! hello! and who among us is not a poet?!
If you say not me, let me tell you, 'you have been!'

BP splitting the skies! about marina t's appearance in his dream:
'Who were you? A sketch of everything that in a decisive moment of feeling raises the woman you are holding to proportions physically incompatible with human size, as though she weren't a person but a sky with the beauty of all the clouds that ever floated above you...Your beauty, conveyed in the photograph--beauty in your special case--i.e., the manifestations of a great spirit in a woman, beat into the air around you before i fell into these waves of benevolent light and sound. This was the world's condition called into being by you. ....It was more first than first love and the simplest thing in the world'

yes! pls.
(and people please read flaubert's legend of st. julian hospitator for the most moving description of what it feels like to grow, and grow and grown larger than the room from an pure embrace, and like czech poet v. holan writes..."there is such a love, that the world is to small for even your tiniest step"
yes!!!!!!!!!!

and wonderful marina t:
'I want to sleep with you, fall asleep and sleep. That magnificent folk word, how deep, how true, how unequivocal, how exactly just what it says. Just---sleep. And nothing more....Sometimes I think: I must exploit this chance that I still am (after all!) a body. Soon I wont have any arms.'


Stop interpretations pls! give me more letters pls. and people everywhere...



hello!!!!!!

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

OMG OMG tortured epistolary romance is teh hotz0rz

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thorough, riveting, and devastating.