1926 ...
Pasternak, Tsvetayeva, Rilke

Susan Sontag 

What is happening in 1926, when the three poets are writing to one another?
On May 12 Shostakovich's Symphony No.1 in F Minor is heard for the first time, performed by the Leningrad Philharmonic; the composer is nineteen years old.
On June 10 the elderly Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi, on the walk he takes every day from the construction site of the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia to a church in the same neighborhood in Barcelona for vespers, is hit by a trolley, lies unattended on the street (because, it's said, nobody recognizes him), and dies.
On August 6 Gertrude Ederle, nineteen years old, American, swims from Cap Gris-Nez, France, to Kingstown, England, in fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes, becoming the first woman to swim the English Channel and the first woman competing in a major sport to best the male record-holder.
On August 23 the movie idol Rudolph Valentino dies of endocarditic and septicemia in a hospital in New York.
On September 3 a steel broadcasting tower (Funkturm), 138 meters high, with restaurant and panorama platform, is inaugurated in Berlin.
Some books: volume two of Hitler's Mein Kampf, Hart Crane's White Buildings, A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, Viktor Shklovsky's Third Factory, Louis Aragon's Le Paysan de Paris, D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
A few films: Fritz Lang's Metropolis,* Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mother, Jean Renoir's Nana, Herbert Brenon's Beau Geste.
Two plays: Bertolt Brecht's Mann ist Mann and Jean Cocteau's Orphée.
On December 6, Walter Benjamin arrives for a two month stay in Moscow. He does not meet the thirty-six-year old Boris Pasternak.
Pasternak has not seen Marina Tsvetayeva for four years. Since she left Russia in 1922, they have become each other's most cherished interlocutor, and Pasternak, tacitly acknowledging Tsvetayeva as the greater poet, has made her his first reader.
Tsvetayeva, who is thirty-four, is living in penury with her husband and two children in Paris.
Rilke, who is fifty-one, is dying of leukemia in a sanatorium in Switzerland.

* Metropolis was filmed in 1926, and it premiered in January 1927. (Editors' note.) 

Letters: Summer I926 is a portrait of the sacred delirium of art. There are three participants: a god and two worshippers, who are also worshippers of each other (and who we, the readers of their letters, know to be future gods).
A pair of young Russian poets, who have exchanged years of fervent letters about work and life, enter into correspondence with a great German poet who, for both, is poetry incarnate. These three-way love letters - and they are that - are an incomparable dramatization of ardor about poetry and about the life of the spirit.
They portray a domain of reckless feeling and purity of aspiration that it would be our loss to dismiss as "romantic."
The literatures written in German and in Russian have been particularly devoted to spiritual exaltation. Tsvetayeva and Pasternak know German, and Rilke has studied and attained a passable mastery of Russian-all three suffused by the dreams of literary divinity promulgated in these languages. The Russians, lovers of German poetry and music since childhood (the mothers of both were pianists), expect the greatest poet of the age to be someone writing in the language of Goethe and Holderlin. And the German-language poet has had as a formative early love and mentor a writer, born in St. Petersburg, with whom he traveled twice to Russia, ever since which he has considered that country his true, spiritual homeland.
On the second of these trips, in 1900, Pasternak actually saw and probably was presented to the young Rilke.
Pasternak's father, the celebrated painter, was an esteemed acquaintance; Boris, the future poet, was ten years old. It is with the sacred memory of Rilke boarding a train with his lover Lou Andreas-Salome-they remain, reverently, unnamed-that Pasternak begins Safe Conduct (1931), his supreme achievement in prose.
Tsvetayeva, of course, has never set eyes on Rilke.
All three poets are agitated by seemingly incompatible needs: for the most absolute solitude and for the most intense communion with another like-minded spirit. "My voice can ring out pure and clear only when absolutely solitary," Pasternak tells his father in a letter. Ardor inflected by intransigence drives all of Tsvetayeva's writings. In "Art in the Light of Conscience" (1932), she writes:
The poet can have only one prayer: not to understand the unacceptable-let me not understand, so that I may not be seduced ... let me not hear, so that I may not answer ... The poet's only prayer is a prayer for deafness.
And the signature two-step of Rilke's life, as we know from his letters to a variety of correspondents, mostly women, is flight from intimacy and a bid for unconditional sympathy and understanding.
Although the younger poets announce themselves as acolytes, the letters quickly become an exchange of equals, a competition of affinities. To those familiar with the main branches of Rilke's grandiose, often stately correspondence, it may come as a surprise to find him responding in almost the same eager, jubilant tones as his two Russian admirers. But never has he had interlocutors of this caliber. The sovereign, didactic Rilke we know from the Letters to a Young Poet, written between 1903 and 1908, has disappeared. Here is only angelic conversation. Nothing to teach. Nothing to learn.
Opera is the only medium now in which it is still acceptable to rhapsodize. The duo that concludes Richard Strauss's Adriadne auf Naxos, whose libretto is by one of Rilke's contemporaries, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, offers a comparable effusiveness. We are surely more comfortable with the paean to love as rebirth and self-transformation sung by Ariadne and Bacchus than with the upsurges of amorous feeling declared by the three poets.
And these letters are not concluding duos. They are duos trying, and eventually failing, to be trios. What kind of possession of each other do the poets expect? How consuming and how exclusive is this kind of love?
The correspondence has begun, with Pasternak's father as the intermediary, between Rilke and Pasternak. Then Pasternak suggests to Rilke that he write to Tsvetayeva, and the situation becomes a correspondence à trois. Last to enter the lists, Tsvetayeva quickly becomes the igniting force, so powerful, so outrageous are her need, her boldness, her emotional nakedness. Tsvetayeva is the relentless one, out-galloping first Pasternak, then Rilke. Pasternak, who no longer knows what to demand of Rilke, retreats (and Tsvetayeva also calls a halt to their correspondence); Tsvetayeva can envisage an erotic, engulfing tie. Imploring Rilke to consent to a meeting, she succeeds only in driving him away. Rilke, in his turn, falls silent. (His last letter to her is on August 19.)
The flow of rhetoric reaches the precipice of the sublime and topples over into hysteria, anguish, dread.
But curiously, death seems quite unreal. How astonished and shattered the Russians are when this "phenomenon of nature" (so they thought of Rilke) is in some sense no more. Silence should be full. Silence that now has the name of death seems too great a diminishment.
So the correspondence has to continue.
Tsvetayeva writes a letter to Rilke a few days after being told he has died at the end of December, and addresses a long prose ode to him ("Your Death") the following year. The manuscript of Safe Conduct, which Pasternak completes almost five years after Rilke's death, ends with a letter to Rilke. ("If you were alive, this is the letter I would send you today.") Leading the reader through a labyrinth of elliptical memoirist prose to the core of the poet's inwardness, Safe Conduct is written under the sign of Rilke and, if only unconsciously, in competition with Rilke, being an attempt to match if not surpass The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), Rilke's supreme achievement in prose.
Early in Safe Conduct, Pasternak speaks of living on and for those occasions when "a complete feeling burst into space with the whole extent of space before it." Never has a brief for the powers of lyric poetry been made so brilliantly, so rapturously, as in these letters. Poetry cannot be abandoned or renounced, once you are "the lyre's thrall," Tsvetayeva instructs Pasternak in a letter of July 1925. "With poetry, dear friend, as with love; no separation until it drops you."
Or until death intervenes. Tsvetayeva and Pasternak haven't suspected that Rilke was seriously ill. Learning that he has died, the two poets are incredulous: it seems, cosmically speaking, unjust. And fifteen years later Pasternak would be surprised and remorseful when he received the news of Tsvetayeva's suicide in August 1941. He hadn't, he admitted, grasped the inevitability of the doom that awaited her if she decided to return to the Soviet Union with her family, as she did in 1939.
Separation had made everything replete. What would Rilke and Tsvetayeva have said to each other had they actually met? We know what Pasternak didn't say to Tsvetayeva vhen they were briefly reunited after thirteen years, in June 1935, on the day he arrived in Paris in the nightmarish role of official Soviet delegate to the International Writers' Congress for the Defense of Culture: he didn't warn her not to come back, not to think of coming back, to Moscow.
Maybe the ecstasies channeled into this correspondence could only have been voiced in separateness, and in response to the ways in which they failed one another (as the greatest writers invariably demand too much of, and are failed by, readers). Nothing can dim the incandescence of those exchanges over a few months in 1926 when they were hurling themselves at one another, making their impossible, glorious demands. Today, when "all is drowning in Pharisaism" - the phrase is Pasternak's -their ardors and their tenacities feel like raft, beacon, beach.
Susan Sontag