Marina Tsvetaeva's literary prose: Poetics against the background of tradition

Abstract

The article studies the poetics of Marina Tsvetaeva's literary essays. It deals with such themes as Tsvetaeva's standpoint in the literary life of the 1910s, her outlook on nature and criticism objectives, relationship of the critic and the poet, and implementation of theoretical views in critical practice. The study was conducted in order to identify the links between Tsvetaeva's patterns and literary methods and the traditions of Russian modernist critics of the early 20th century. The objective of the study was achieved by involving structural, semiotic and biographical methods alongside with the elements of linguistic analysis of a literary and critical text as well as other interdisciplinary approaches required for the contemporary study of literary and critical text. Both Tsvetaeva's essays and her correspondence revealed after 2001 served as sources of information. The structure of the article is based on the following principle: at first, Tsvetaeva's view of criticism and critics is reconstructed, and then her theoretical position towards the characteristic methods of poetics of literary essays is described. The article provides a number of examples to argue Tsvetaeva's commitment to literary criticism as well as her negative attitude to formal approach, vulgar and biographical, historical and genetic research methods of literary creativity. To achieve the objective, structural, semiotic and biographical methods were used alongside with the elements of linguistic analysis of a literary and critical text. Both Tsvetaeva's essays and her correspondence served as sources of information. It has been proved that Tsvetaeva seems to have taken the literary discourse outside the existing framework of institutional conditions and recognized the exclusive right to criticize the poetry only of a "real" poet while professional criticism was deprived of the usual status in literature. Her critical work is associated with the category of responsibility that was important for Tsvetaeva. Detours on aesthetic themes are typical of the poetics of her essays. Having analysed Tsvetaeva's essays, the author concludes that her spirit is strongly manifested in her criticism. Its peculiarity is expressed in the offensive tone of indisputable and irresistible confidence. Tsvetaeva's essays evolve a number of trends in the modernist criticism of the early 20th century (in the text she introduces her memoirs, personal experience and the emotions she got from a piece of art). Another form of Tsvetaeva's communication with the traditions of modernism is the semantic and structural stress on the importance of other people's texts, the special role of the poetic word in the essay, rhetoric of oppositions, and appeal to the possibilities of the genre of parallels. The findings are essential for the study of poetics criticism of the 20th century and works by Marina Tsvetaeva.