The article is based on the report made by the author at the conference
devoted to Marina Tsvetaeva and cultural practices of modernity. The report
presented the content of two notes written at different times, on different
occasions and in different genres. The conference created an opportunity and
an occasion to return to two particular subjects that clarify certain issues
of Tsvetaeva’s poetics.
The first of the plots is comparative in nature and connects the poetry
of Tsvetaeva with the artistic world of the poet of the magazine «Satirikon» Petr
Petrovich Potemkin (1886–1926). Potemkin's influence on Tsvetaeva was insignificant,
but in 1925 V. F. Khodasevich drew attention to him. He pointed out in the review that the reception of a given rhyme, but not a word in the poem
Tsvetaeva written in 1922 was first applied Potemkin in one of the poems of his
collection «Funny love» (1908). Almost simultaneously with Tsvetaeva to the
same rare reception addressed V. Mayakovsky’s poem «About This» (1923).
Two cases when the innovative versification search of Tsvetaeva is similar
or genetically related to the methods of Potemkin's comic verse are considered.
In one case we are talking about the search for «shaky” rhyme. In some cases,
the two poets consonance of words is possible only against the background
of rigidly organized metric structures of the previous text, due to inertia. The
complexity of the reception in Potemkin in the poem «Dignitary and Cheerful
Girl» is deployed on a concentric principle, in one of the poems of the cycle
Tsvetaeva «Poems about Moscow» it is linear. Nevertheless, we can assume
a conscious or unconscious memory of the spectacular poems of Potemkin, intended
for performance on the literary stage and in the cabaret. The second example
connects the poem by Potemkin «Van’ka Klyushnik and Egyptian» with
the poems of Tsvetaeva from the cycle «Stenka Razin». The common features
are an appeal to the story about the meeting of the monster and the beauty, the
beauty of which is emphasized by the foreign origin (Egypt, Persia) and diminutive
suffixes. It is concluded that the important for Tsvetaeva was not humor and
not a comic image of life and language of the townspeople, and that part of Potemkin's
poetry, which is associated with parodies of the symbolists.
The second note is devoted to the analysis of one poem by Tsvetaeva, written
at the end of 1924. An appeal to the autograph allowed to clarify the graphic
design of the poem, distorted in publishing practice. The genetic connection
of the poem with poetics of a cycle of Alexander Blok «On the Kulikov’s
Field», and several literary monuments of ancient Russian literature is shown.
The special attention is paid to the sophisticated poetic form of the poem, based
on the word transfers from one line to another, rich alliteration and unexpected
reversive rhymes. It is shown that the sound of the poem imitates the singing
of an arrow in flight, and its composition and graphic design contain common
structural elements not with the text, but with the action – archery. The bow, its
elements and the adjacent concepts (bowstring, arc, arrow, quiver, force impulse,
rotation, recoil) are complexly encoded in the sounding fabric of the poem.
The assumption is made that the idea of a short (11 lines) poetry
of Tsvetaeva’s masterpiece rises from the Manifesto of the literaryphilosophical
association «The Scythians», published in 1917.
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