Article

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

Authors: Svetlana Yu. Kornienko

Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

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.

Keywords: Marina Tsvetaeva, creative notebook, metaphors of creativity

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