Marina Tsvetaeva, Her Life in Poems - Rolf Gross

Boulevard de Crancy, 3 (not far from Ouchy, I think), that's where you can find me. I
have short hair (like now, I've never in my life worn it long), and I look like a boy, with a
rosary around his neck.
Tonight I did some reading in your Duino Elegies. In the daytime I never get to reading
or writing. The day's work goes on deep into the night, for I have only my two hands. My
husband - a volunteer soldier all his young life, barely thirty-one years old (I am turning
thirty-one in September) - is very sickly, and a man, after all, cannot do woman's work, it
looks ugly (to the wife, that is). At this moment he's still in Paris, but is coming here soon.
He is handsome: the handsomeness of suffering. My daughter looks like him, although
more on the happy side, our son is more like me, but both are bright, bright-eyed, моя
раскиаска [my rascals].
What to tell you about the book The ultimate stair. My bed turned into a cloud.
Darling, I know everything already - from me to you - but it is still too early for a lot of
things. Something in you must still get used to me.
Marina
Rilke to Tsvetaeva
[PTR p.123-128]
Val-Mont par Glion (Vaud) Suisse
17 May 1926
"Марина! Спасибо за мир ... " - Marina! Thank you for the world... [from Tsvetaeva:
“Psyche: A Romance”]
That your daughter should have been able to say this to you, Marina, and in the face
of hard times! (Who in the days of my childhood, what child - in Austria at least, in
Bohemia - would have found the inner urge of assent to speak like this... My daughter
perhaps might have wanted to say this to me if the word and its mode of address had
been more urgent in her; but almost the only time I really was with her was before any
verbalness at all, from her birth to sometime after her first birthday: for as early as that,
what had arisen, a little against my will, in terms of house, family, and settling down, was
dissolving; the marriage, too, although never terminated legally, returned me to my
natural singleness (after arely two years) and Paris began: this was 1902. Now my
daughter has long since married and settled somewhere on an estate in Saxony, which I'm
not familiar with; and my granddaughter, Christine, whom I also only guess at, from a lot
of small snapshots, passed her second year in November and is growing well into her
third....
But all of this is on a different plane from the one on which Muzot stands, which ever
since 1921 (when the most wondrous circumstances, no, outright miracle itself, allowed
me to find it and hold on to it) I have inhabited alone (not counting visits from friends
from time to time - which are rare, though), as much alone as I've always lived, more so
if anything: in an often uncanny intensification of what being alone means, in a solitude
rushed to an ultimate and uttermost state (for formerly, being alone in Paris, and Rome, in
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