“So Why Heaps / Of These Scraps...”: Marina Tsvetaeva’s Czech Notebook as Text

“So Why Heaps / Of These Scraps...”: Marina Tsvetaeva’s Czech Notebook as Text
Авторы (текстом)
Svetlana Yu. Kornienko
Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation
Keywords
Marina Tsvetaeva, creative notebook, metaphors of creativity
Abstract

The article is devoted to the question of the possibility of interpreting a writer’s creative notebook as a “highly organized text” (Yu. M. Lotman), with its own pragmatics, integrity, and communicative orientation. The study was carried out using the example of M. Tsvetaeva’s Czech notebook, which includes a variety of material – work on the text of poems from 1922–1923, later included in the collection “After Russia” (1928), sketches of her letters, fragments of prose works, excerpts from a lost books “Earthly Signs”. The first part of the article analyzes Tsvetaeva’s metaphors of creativity and the discursive potential of the rough notebook. In the author’s meta-reflection, the rough notebook becomes the embodiment of the true life of the poet, ready to let the reader into his creative workshop. Tsvetaeva conceives of creative notebooks in a wide metaphorical amplitude: from the “Garden of Eden”, in which the poet finds refuge from the “terrible world”, to the very fabric of life, its chronicle. The second part of the article offers a reading of a Czech notebook from 1922–1923. Through a complex of poetic metaphors that have been developed and formed into a metaplot. Particular attention is paid to industrial metaphors of creativity – the correlation of poetic work with sewing production, implemented at different levels in a creative notebook. If in the “Factory” cycle, included in the Czech notebook, the negative connotations of labor are realized (labor will be presented as a curse, the result of the poet’s overthrow into the physical world), then in the later cycle “Poems to Pushkin” (1931) Tsvetaeva implements a positive program – her relationship with her idol will be presented through the image of an anarchist workshop, where everyone can realize themselves as a free worker.

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Bibliographic reference
Svetlana Yu. Kornienko “So Why Heaps / Of These Scraps...”: Marina Tsvetaeva’s Czech Notebook as Text
// Критика и семиотика. 2024. № 2. Pp. 327–346. DOI: 10.25205/2307-1753-2024-2-327-346.