Content and meaning of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem «Perekop»

The article focuses on Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem Perekop (1929),
which somehow has not received sufficient attention from scholars. As
Tsvetaeva herself pointed out, the Perekop “derives” from her husband’s Notes
of a volunteer (where S. Efron described his experience as a White Guard).
Therefore, the Perekop tends to be interpreted in way, which is apologetic towards
the White Guard movement in the revolutionary Russia. From this vantage,
the Perekop features the thinking apparent also in Tsvetaeva’s early poems
(1917–1920) from the Swan camp cycle. Such reductionist interpretation should
be replaced by a close, line-by-line reading of the poem. My analysis places the
Perekop into an intertextual field and approaches it through the prose vs poetry,
dialogue vs monologue, narrative vs lyrics oppositions. The concept of a particular
“poetic narratology” is elaborated in order to understand the purpose of the
poem on a historical topic.
Perekop is an account of events (the battle on the Isthmus of Perekop) and
therefor can be viewed as a narration. In the classic narration theory (Schmid)
the event is a change of the initial situation: it can be the “external situation” in
the fictional world being the object of narration. Or it can be an “internal event”, or a “mental one”, which deals with the internal world of personage. The main
characteristics of the narrative texts are: relevancy, unpredictability, consequence-
commitment and irreversibility. In the poetic form of narration, though,
it seems that the irreversibility and the unpredictability are replaced by their
converse. The poetic form predicts the future events (by alliteration and neologisms).
As for the irreversibility, it manifests in the linear prosaic text, while
poetry possesses a cyclic time, thus, reversible. It is the connections in absentia
(the paradigmatic ones) that offer the understanding of such a text. Hence, the
syntactic and grammatical structures are “influenced” by etymological and phonetic
connotations, and the significant-signifié relation tends to be not arbitrary.
The polyphonic (Bakhtin) structure of the Perekop is a realization of the
metaphor of “the voice of conscience”: a philosophical category, which is apparently
at the center of Tsvetaeva’s later oeuvre.
While being in the very center of the historical events the participants cannot
easily achieve its profound meaning. The guiltiness and the “pain of conscience”
are common for the intellectuals in exile. Tsvetaeva herself paid a lot
of attention to these questions, yet she has understand very early that the guiltiness
must not be “satisfied” by a new political engagement (Union for repatriation
of Russians abroad) as only an individual (not the group) can bring justice,
otherwise unachievable.