Marina Tsvetaeva, Her Life in Poems - Rolf Gross

In June 1935 Pasternak was obliged by Stalin to attend the “International Congress
of Writers in Defence of Culture” - ten days in Paris! Marina seems to have avoided him,
and he ran scared of the political watchdog who headed the Soviet delegation. Rumors
have it that he “saw” her in a corridor of his hotel. He is supposed to have whispered:
“Marina, don't return to Russia, it's cold there, there's a constant draught.” - Marina
wrote Anna, “It was a non-meeting...” - and left for the sea-shore with a sick Mur (he had
had his appendix removed).
Her Тоска, nostalgia, homesickness for the Motherland was different from Alya's
and Sergey's. She had few illusions. The Russia she loved and longed for was gone, the
house on Tryokhprudny Lane had been razed and replaced by a shoddy apartment
building. The people she loved had left, were alienated, or dead. She carried her Russia in
her soul. For her there was nothing to be found in the new “Rodina”. In 1934 she wrote a
poem that expressed her loss:
Homesick for the Motherland.
Homesickness! Long
Unmasked confusion !
I do not care -
Where I am completely lonely
Or over what stones I wander home
With a shopping bag
To a house, that is no longer mine
Like to a hospital or barracks .
I do not care that I am among
Bristling people - captive
Lion, or what human society
Will cast me out – as it must -
Into myself, my individual feelings.
A Kamchatka bear without ice
Where I do no fit ( and no goodbye!)
Where they grovel - I am one.
I will not be seduced by the language,
The mother tongue's milky call.
I do not care - in what language
I am humiliated!
(Or by what readers , newspaper
Swallowers, searching for gossip ...)
They belong to the twentieth century -
I am - before all time!
Stunned, like a log,
Left over from an alley of trees.
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