UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 7th Annual International Postgraduate Conference
Inclusion Exclusion
Friday 17 February 10:00 – 11:30: Panel D4: Identity in Literature
Anja Burghardt (University of Hamburg): ‘Inclusion – exclusion: Marina Tsvetaeva’s Stikhi k Chekhii’
I would like to discuss Marina Tsvetaeva’s double cycle "Stikhi k Chekhi" ("Poems for the Czech Republic") as an example of inclusion and exclusion with respect to Czech culture, the poet’s biography and gender issues. Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) wrote this cycle on the occasion of the division of the Czech Republic by the Munich Agreement in September 1938 and its occupation by Nazi-Germany in March 1939.
Tsvetaeva was living at the outskirts of Prague for several years (1922-25). As she points out in her diaries and letters, her years in Prague were among the happiest and most productive of her life; some of her finest verses were written here. This is part of the explanation of the highly emotional and affectionate tone of the "Poems for the Czech Republic". In terms of content, these poems are a dense mixture of descriptions of Czech landscape and cities, history (ancient as well as recent); they contain autobiographical traces and are full of intertextual allusions.
Dedicated to the Czech Republic, a country whose integrity – at the time of writing – has just been destroyed, the poems give rise to questions about the unity and continuity of a country’s culture, about the role of national minorities and ethnic homogeneity. This is one theme I would like to develop in my analysis of these poems.
Being a foreigner was one of the continuities of Tsvetaeva’s life, a migrant’s life, the story of which may be told as a chain of inclusions to and exclusions from various communities: born in Russia, she was living in Italy, Switzerland and Germany, she went to Paris, came back to Russia, went into exile (via Berlin) to Prague, later to Paris, returned to the Soviet Union; in 1941 she committed suicide in Jelabuga. These autobiographical elements, or so I would like to show, are reflected also in the poems of the cycle. As a female poet Tsvetaeva has always been judged also (and perhaps mainly) as a woman and mother. Thus, working on her poetry and its reception necessarily includes issues about gender, about the position a female author holds in a society, in particular in the Russian society at the beginning of the twentieth century. As I shall argue, the "Stikhi k Chekhii" reveal a picture of a woman who is well informed about current political issues and thus their analysis may contribute to a revision of the image of an "unworldly poetess" as it is still widely held. Besides they are one more example of the complexity, skillfulness and brilliance of her poetry. I hope to show how autobiographical, cultural and gender issues, all of which show fragility and borderline experience in various respects, are mutually interwoven in Tsvetaeva’s "chants" for the Czech Republic.
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