Marina Tsvetaeva, Her Life in Poems - Rolf Gross

them anyway!), I was led to overestimate myself...: your books, even though you guide
me through the more alien passages, are difficult for me - it has been too long since I
have read consistently, save for scattered things like (in Paris) some of Boris's verses in
an anthology. If only I could read you, Marina, as you read me! Nonetheless, the two little
books accompany me from table to bed and in many ways outdo the ones easily read.
– What keeps me from sending you my passport picture is not vanity, but actually
awareness of its lightning-flash fortuity. But I have put it next to your picture: get used to
this first in pictures, will you
– Rainer
– I shall have to go to Muzot for a day shortly, and there I'll pick up for you a few
small, fairly valid pictures from two years ago. I completely avoid sitting for photographs
or pictures: Shumov has made no picture of me.Send me that other one of yours soon!
After this letter there was suddenly silence. Marina stopped writing. Proud and
vulnerable as she was in her self-exposure, she read all her egocentric misgivings into
Rilke's tactful reference to his illness. She wrote about her hunches to Boris. After
suffering for two weeks in silence, Marina took up the pen again, going back to the visit
planned in the beginning, trying in the process to fend off Boris' intervention.
Tsvetaeva to Rilke
[PTR p.161-163]
St.-Gilles-sur-Vie
June 3, 1926
Much - everything even - remains in my notebook. For you let me quote only the
words from my letter to Boris Pasternak: "When I used to ask you what we would do if we
were together, you once answered, 'We would go to see Rilke.' I tell you Rilke is
overburdened; he doesn't need anything or anyone. He breathes upon me the bitter cold
of the possessor, of whose possessions I am knowingly and by predestination a part. I
have nothing to give him, all has been taken in advance. He does not need me, or you.
Strength, always attracting, distracts. Something in him (what it's called is your guess)
does not want to be diverted. Must not be.
This encounter is a great wound, a blow to my heart (the heart not only beats, it also
takes beatings - whenever it rises to a joyous higher beat!), the more so since he is right:
in thinking that I (you) in our best hours are the same! - One sentence in your letter: -
"... If all of a sudden I should turn uncommunicative - which ought not to keep you from
writing to me. As often as ..." The moment I read that - that sentence asks for rest. Rest
took place. (You are a little rested, aren't you) Do you know what all this means: rest,
unrest, request, fulfillment, etc. Listen, I suddenly seem to feel quite sure about this.
Before life one is always and everything; as one lives, one is something and now (is,
has – all the same!). My love for you was parceled out in days and letters, hours and
lines. Hence the unrest. (That's why you asked for rest!) Letter today, letter tomorrow.
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