Marina Tsvetaeva, Her Life in Poems - Rolf Gross

horseman.
Your penciled notation (is this right no, annotation in the margin, I suppose!) - those
dear, airy three words: “to a dog”. Dear one, this takes me right back to the middle of my
childhood, age eleven; that is to say, into the Black Forest (into the very middle of it!).
And the headmistress (Fräulein Brinck was her name, and she was gruesome) is saying,
"This-little Satan's brat, Marina, makes one forgive her anything; all she has to do is say
'a dog'!" ("A dog" - yowling with ecstasy and emotion and wanting - ein Hund with three
u-u-u's. They weren't pedigreed dogs, just street mongrels!)
Rainer, the purest happiness, a gift of happiness, pressing your forehead on the dog's
forehead, eye to eye, and the dog, astonished, taken aback, and flattered (this doesn't
happen every day!), growls. And then one holds his muzzle shut with both hands (since
he might bite from sheer emotion) and kisses, just smothers him.
Where you are, do you have a dog And where are you Val-Mont (Valmont), that was
the hero's name in that hard and cold and clever book, Laclos's Liaisons dangerieuses,
which - I can't think why, is the most moral of books! - was on our index in Russia, along
with the memoirs of Casanova (whom I love with a passion!). I have written to Prague to
have them send me my two dramatic poems (I don't think you can call them dramas),
"Adventure" (Henrietta, do you remember his loveliest, which wasn't an adventure at all,
the only one that was no adventure) and "Phoenix" - Casanova's end. Dux, seventy-five
years old, alone, poor, out of style, laughed at. His last love. Seventy-five years - thirteen
years. You have to read that; it is easy to understand (the language, I mean). And - don't
be amazed - it was my Germanic soul that wrote it, not my French one.
“We touch each other. - How With wings that beat,” Rainer, Rainer, you told me that
without knowing me, like a blind man (a seeing one!), at random.
Tomorrow is the Feast of the Ascension. How lovely! The sky in these words looks just
like my ocean - with waves. And Christ - is riding.
Your letter has just arrived. Time for mine to go.
Marina
Tsvetaeva to Rilke
[PTR p.120-123]
St.-Gilles-sur-Vie
Ascension Day, May 13, 1926
“...to him you cannot boast of matters grandly sensed...” [Ninth Duino Elegy]
Therefore, in a purely human and very modest way, Rilke the man. - As I wrote this, I
hesitated. I love the poet, not the person. (As you read this, you came to a halt.) - This
sounds like aestheticism, i.e., soulless, inanimate (aesthetes are those who have no soul,
just five acute senses, often fewer). May I even choose As soon as I love, I cannot and
will not choose (that stale and narrow privilege!), you already are an absolute. And until I
love (know), you, I may not choose because I have no relation to you (don't know your
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