Marina Tsvetaeva, Her Life in Poems - Rolf Gross

Venice - where I have spent much time without being alone - in Spain, in Tunis, in Algiers,
in Egypt... in that searching emphatic place, Provence ..., there was still participation,
being part of a web of relationships and tutelage). Muzot, on the other hand, more
challenging than anything else, allowed nothing but achievement, the vertical leap out into
open space, the whole earth's ascension to heaven within me....
Dear one, why do I have to tell you, since you have the Elegies in your hands, since
you have the Elegies in your hand and over your heart, which beats against them in
shared witness....
These poems had been begun (1912) in no less grand a solitude, on the Adriatic, in
the old (destroyed in the war) castle of Duino (near Trieste); in Spain and later in Paris
fragments of lines turned up, and all of this would probably have converged into
achievement in 1914 in Paris if that great interruption of the world had not cut in, making
me go rigid and static. ]
For years. Whatever I might have saved out of that long winter of my being, I myself
did not know when I was finally (1919) able to take refuge in Switzerland, as on a soil
where something natural and guileless still had full authority. I did not find out until 1921,
at Muzot, in the first lonely year I was in residence there, when the nature of my
temperament, which circumstances had repressed, drove, within a few weeks, the
unheard-of growth, first of Orpheus (each part in three days!), then of the Elegies into its
season of completion. Violently, almost destroying me with the passion of its outbreak,
and yet acting so gently and with such a sense of pattern that not one (think of it), not a
single pre-existing line failed to be fitted into the place, in which it was a natural stair and
a voice among the voices. How that healed together, the earlier with its already aging
fractured surface so intimately fitted onto the glowing one, taking on such new glow from
proximity and infinite kinship that never a visible seam remained! Triumph and jubilation,
Marina, without equal!
And this is what the overabundance of solitude, in all its deadliness, was needed for.
But, then, was it that I tried to maintain the impossible conditions of intensified isolation
over and beyond what had been achieved, mastered (This I did, not from stubbornness
or to wrest a bonus from grace, but because letting in the "other," living by him and for
him, instantly (just after the instant) entails conflicts and tasks I had to fear at a time
when I had accomplished everything much too extremely merely to change to a new kind
of achievement.)
Or is it (since the work itself, our great breathtaking labor, does not take revenge,
after all; even when it forces us outside and beyond ourselves, it leaves us, not fatigued
or exhausted, but staggering under the reward), is it that, mechanically, I endured too
long the same special conditions of seclusion, in a heroic valleyscape, under the almost
sun-raging sky of a wine country
– At any rate, for the first time in my life and in a treacherous fashion, my own
aloneness turned against me with a physical sting, rendering this being-with-myself
suspect and dangerous, and more and more threatening, because of the physical
disturbances that now drowned out what to me had been forever and ever the most
primeval silence.
– Hence my presence here in Val-Mont, for the third time now (after two shorter stays
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