HISTORY AND MYTH IN MARINA TSVETAEVA’S “THE HOUSE AT OLD PIMEN”
HANNA RUUTU
When Marina Tsvetaeva, in the beginning of the 1930’s, turned to writing prose, abandoning the verse genre which had dominated her work for so long, there occurred a significant change of subject as well. Although Tsvetaeva has not yet been thoroughly examined as a historical writer per se, her oeuvre does contain several works with an explicit historical context1. Tsvetaeva’s memoirs and autobiographies in prose provide further examples of how a factual-based personal history is used as a basis for artistic transformation. Although Tsvetaeva’s precedent lyrical work from the 1910’s and 1920’s could also be characterised to a certain extent in biographical tones, in the 30’s she finds almost all of her subjects in the past, in her childhood, this process resulting in a series of essays and memoirs2. However rooted in the factual reality of the author’s life these texts may be, there is always the artistic, mythical element present. These works, in addition to many of Tsvetaeva’s lyrical works, form a peculiar kind of literary biography, an artistically constructed retelling of Tsvetaeva’s life such as the author herself wishes to portray it; there exists a clearly factual basis for this biographical creation, but the texts surging from it combine the factual elements with the author’s mythopoetic principles in such a way that a new totality is formed as a result. In this respect Tsvetaeva is, incontestably, a modernist author; as has been stated many times, the modernist perception substituted the historical linearity with the cyclical and simultaneous mythical perception. The previously strict division between past and present was erased; a modernist creator could exist at once in past and present, giving a new, fresh interpretation to previous, statically perceived events, aiming at a synthesis of past and present, myth and reality3. This wholesome, simultaneous perception of a true artist/poet, is also Tsvetaeva’s acknowledged principle in the attitude to time, contemporary events and ideologies and history as can be interpreted from one of her literary essays of the 1930’s, “The Poet and Time” (1932):
To defend against time what is eternal in time, or to eternalise what is temporary in it — however it’s put: to time, the age of this world, another age is counterposed.
Service to time as such is service to change — betrayal — death. You can’t keep up with it, you can’t oblige it. The present. Is there such a thing? Service to the recurring decimal figure. I think I am still serving the present, but I’m already serving the past and already — the future. Where is it, the praesens, and in what? (Tsvetaeva 1992: 102.)
According to Tsvetaeva, a poet is given the ability to create a synthesis of the utmost essence of a given age, forming connections between the past and the future which would be unthinkable to the surrounding public, and are revealed only to the creative mind. History and myth are not antithetical concepts for Tsvetaeva, they complement each other instead, existing in her prose in equal measure and providing material for this regenerating process of the author. 
The aim of this article is to take a tentative look into one of Tsvetaeva’s autobiographical prose works, “The House at Old Pimen” (1934) in the light of the relationship it forms between the poles of history and mythology; I am going to take a look into how the factual, historical content of the text is transformed by the narrator’s action and made to be a specific expression of the subjective, mythopoetic worldview of the author. I am going to focus on the relationship between Tsvetaeva’s poetics and the image of the factual, past reality this autobiographical text strives to portray; on the way the recurrent themes and motifs of Tsvetaeva’s oeuvre are in this text intertwined with the details of a subjective retelling of the narrator’s (author’s) childhood. Even if Tsvetaeva assigns herself the task of writing the history of her family such as she recollects it, there is in these writings a clear mythologizing principle present. This principle manifests itself mainly in the, typical for Tsvetaeva’s work, romantic motif of a poetic force, impregnating the narrator from childhood onwards, so that she is thereafter ”the chosen one”, separated by sheer creative talent from those around her, from the ordinary people who do not possess access to this realm of creation. However, the author does tend to write at the same time her version of the family history, alongside with the mythopoetic and central Tsvetaevan themes of poetic creation, death and eternity. Of particular interest in the transition from a real, tangible world to a higher, poetic reality is the myth. I aim to take a look into how it is used by the narrator in creating a counterbalancing force to the historical details in the way that, in the end, in the interaction of these two poles of context, a particular mythopoetic worldview of the narrator is formed and the whole thematics of the story rise from the historical level to the mythological.
The connection between an autobiographical text and the factual (extratextual) reality from which it surges is a largely problematic question for those who want to analyze any kind of autobiography. As Magdalina Medaric (1996, 36) points out, even though the division between fact and fiction does not apply to the autobiographical genre, the reader and the author still have to make a decision on whether to consider the actual background or not when interpreting a certain text. Indeed, the veracity of the facts is often the central question where the analysis of an autobiography is concerned. The interest in the factual, “truthful” background of “The House at Old Pimen”, however, remains beyond the scope of this essay. What interests me is what Tsvetaeva does with the details of her childhood; how the theme of the self-recognition of the poet is brought forward and mediated by the symbols arising from reality and, on the other hand, from mythology. The text seems to shift constantly between the fields of “reality” (albeit an intra-textual one) and “mythology” (this term comprising alongside with the more generally acknowledged, universal myths, e.g. classical myths, the typical for the author thematic concepts of the poet and the mythology of the self — the individual myths). Within the limits of this article it is not possible to take into full account the background of allusions to Russian history and folklore, existing in the text. Suffice here to state that they are used in the narration largely in the same way as the classical imagery the text contains, creating a timeless and eternal dimension to past events (the most important Russian subtext being, of course, the legend of Boris Godunov to which I refer to only in passing). It should also be mentioned that in the following I base my analysis on the assumption that the narrator of this autobiographical text is very close, if not identical, to the author, as is typical for the genres of memoir and autobiography4. 
Themost prominent task Tsvetaeva assigns herself in her autobiographical prose of the 1930’s is the resurrection of a past world which exists no more, the eternalization of the people, circumstances and events of her childhood5. This is overtly stated many times in her stories, and even in this story this kind of an artistic resurrection of the past is brought forward as a sort of an ideal task for the author: “For what is all art, if not the finding of lost things, the immortalization of things lost?” (SP 1980, 231). Thematically this type of immortalization through art is juxtaposed in “The House at Old Pimen” to the task of a historian, who purely states certain facts, describes them from the outside, without giving them new, eternal life in a work of art. Grandfather Ilovaisky, a historian by profession, becomes in this way a symbol of this alien behaviour that the narrator of the story for the most part rejects; he is described from the beginning onwards as something entirely separate from the lives of the children (the narrator and the children of his own), appearing in the house with gold pieces for his young grandchild6, sitting in the middle of the ballroom on a chair, entirely separated from other human beings; most importantly, not seeing the children, not remembering who is who, remaining forever alien to them — but at the same time not being able to touch them, nor harm them in any way because of this alienation, and therefore the children are safe from his influence. The narrator also states that the grandfather has no interest in the children because they are not part of history, nor historically important. This concept forms an antithetical relation to the frequently perceived myth-creating process of the poet-narrator, and is explicitly expressed in the statement of the eternality of art. Even the newspaper “Kremlin” which the Grandfather publishes himself and then distributes to the relatives is seen by the narrator as a futile action, a project which has no meaning, which can never rise to the level of art and mythology, and therefore never become eternal. Also the fact that Ilovaisky is, later in the story, pictured as ignoring the fatality of his children dying, as unable to see the mythical level of this tragedy (which, naturally, is acutely perceived by the poet-narrator), contribute to the contextualization of this character as belonging to the realm of history. But the narrator’s action in the rest of the story succeeds in turning even Ilovaisky himself up to the level of art; the grandfather is mythologized, made into a symbol and eternalized through the action of narrating. The first incident of this mythologizing process is the implicit link established between the grandfather and the monk Pimen from Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov”, overtly alluded to already in the title of the essay. As Olga Peters Hasty writes:
The central connection is the fact that Ilovaiskii is, like the monk Pimen, a historian. This alignment with the chronicler monk highlights his total absorption in the past and complete oblivion to the present. (It emerges in the course of the essay that Ilovaiskii has never heard of Lenin and Trotskii.) At the same time — in the context of the analogy between the fate of the house and the destiny of the nation — this association intimates that Ilovaiskii’s historical records, like those of Pushkin’s monk, entail a condemnation of the usurpers of power ruling Russia at the time (Hasty 1996: 229).
Through this analogy, the epithets adjoined to the character of grandfather Ilovaisky from the beginning imply outdatedness, blindess to the surroundings and the inability to see the wider implications of contemporary happenings — perfectly in correlation with the Ilovaiskys’ later destiny in the era of the Soviet revolution, as portrayed by Tsvetaeva’s essay7. 
History is present in the story also as the explicit material for the poet’s mythologization; the overall structure of the narration shifts between concrete retellings of reality-based incidences in the personal history of the characters and the mythological level. Often the real incidences give way to the mythological elaboration of the fates of the characters concerned, and it is as if the narrator then consciously returned to the factual, historical world and to the level of personal history, only to then again return to the mythologization after a while. This happens constantly throughout the story, and the shifts between these two realms — the “level of reality” and the “level of mythology” are numerous. This can be interpreted in coherence with the principles of Tsvetaeva’s overall poetics, according to which the history and the tangible world often present the material and the substance for the poet’s work, whereas the creative work itself, as a process and its result, resides on the eternal level of mythology and timelessness (this principle is constantly referred to by Tsvetaeva-scholars as the “byt” — “bytie” — dichotomy)8. The scene in which grandfather Ilovaisky’s works on history open up for the narrator a whole new world of living people, of real history, could also be interpreted in this light — the narrator, Tsvetaeva’s alter ego as a child, the poet-to-be, encounters the living history from her grandfather’s writings (in opposition to the aged, static interpretations of history that are read at school) and, more importantly, she reveals the essence of art (which is, as mentioned earlier in this article, to preserve an incident for generations to come). In this way the factual-based substances of the narration are mediated by the poet to the reader, and thus preserved for the future (such being, for instance, the family history, the accounts from the years of the Russian revolution and the early post-revolutionary Soviet reality which can be attributed to the author’s personal history)9. Therefore, the position of the historian and that of the poet are thematically coexisting in the narration, implying that they are in fact not to be perceived as entirely antithetical. The central difference propagated by this text is the total existence of the grandfather in the level of time, perceiving only his actual surroundings and the concrete, linear dimensions, his inability to perceive myth, versus the acute eternalization of the poet, the ability she possesses of existing at the same time in the world and outside it, mythologizing reality-based events and thus preserving them for the future, making them eternal and discovering the hidden truth and meaning in seemingly irrelevant events of the past. 
The theme of the self-recognition and growth of a writer, poet, creator of art is mediated from the first chapter onwards by means of the repeated statements of incomprehensive words being pure magic in the narrator’s mind — the focus of the narrator being here on the sound the words not understood leave in the listener’s mind10. The theme of the poet’s isolation from her surroundings and the unique character of her existence is a central one in all of Tsvetaeva’s work, poetry and prose alike, and it is significant in this respect that the elaboration of this theme starts from the gold piece which the grandfather gives to Andryuscha in the beginning of the story. When the housemaids start whispering in foreign languages about the boy being a wealthy heir, these words remain incomprehensible to the other children, thus signifying, on the one hand, that the new, musical language, cryptic but tempting at the same time, is “pure magic” but also that the meaning of “wealthy heir” is completely alien and redundant for the poet, for whom earthly possessions are unnecessary11. This obsession with the sound of the word, with the assonances and rhymes, in the child narrator’s mind is from the beginning an indication of the fact that the narrator is a poet growing up. There is a long digression in the first chapter, an indirect discourse in which one word evokes in the narrator’s mind a memory of a particular event, just to leave the place to another word evoking another past event. The central thing is that the starting-point of a digression is always the naming of the object:
A boy dressed up like that is called a page, a pazh. (And the black chord with a snakey head they use to hold up a skirt is a pazh.) And this long knife is called an épée. Failles, moires, fermoirs. Boxes, bandboxes... That — the way all this smells — is patchouly. Andryuscha, convinced that there won’t be another long knife, whirls around us on a “steckenpferd”. Timidly I say to mother: “Mama, how... beautiful”. — “I can’t find it. And it has to be taken care of because it’s Lera’s dowry”. — “But what silvery snow!” — “That’s naphthalene. So the moths won’t eat anything”. Naphthalene, moths, dowry, patchouly, there’s no sense to it, it’s just magic, pure magic (SP 1980, 227).
Another theme apparent in this extract is the seclusion of the poet from childhood onwards; in Tsvetaeva’s oeuvre, the fact that the poet is elected to her path makes her so different from the other people surrounding her that they are in the end destined to misunderstand each other. Here this is aptly described in the way that the mother and the child speak on entirely different levels and about different things, past one another, not understanding each other at all12. 
A central, if not governing, trait in the overall image of the coming-into-being of a poet that the story presents is the ability to exist on the level of mythology — which the narrator clearly possesses. The mythological level is especially prominent when the motifs of the house at Old Pimen and the deaths of Seryozha and Nadya are brought in the narration. The house at Old Pimen is a place where death resides, a realm of death which the narrator’s action places outside time and history, outside the tangible world, in the realm of mythology13. These qualities and the themes attributed to them make the fate of the house’s residents rise to mythical dimensions; it is here that the Ilovaisky family are suddenly presented with their mythological counterparts, and the whole family history acquires traits of a classical tragedy. The tragic fate of the family is allegorically compared to the fate of the house of Priam, perishing under the curse of the Olympian gods. Inasmuch as the (somewhat alien for the narrator) character of the grandfather is presented in the tragedy of outliving two of his children and his first wife, the narrator’s view on the character becomes more compassionate. The grandfather (and, of course, the rest of the family) is placed in an analoguous relation to the eternal, timeless level of the Greek myths, thus accentuating the tragic dimensions of the family’s fate, already departing from the level of family history, the level of reality and moving towards timelessness and myth.The house only seems to act as a symbolic catalyst to this tragedy. In the narrator’s view, it is almost as if the house in itself brought a curse of an early death on its young inhabitants; the closed, dark space and the thick stone walls of the house, its suffocating vaults, are juxtaposed to the wild, untamed and dark garden surrounding it, forming in this way an almost Freudian allegory of the unconscious. The only one surviving — as it would seem — eternally there is Grandfather Ilovaisky, who has to attend to the death of his both children, Nadya and Serezha, and is even likened by the narrator to the Greek divinity Chronos, devouring his own children, and ultimately to Hades, the ruler of the netherworld. In Tsvetaeva’s point of view, this is like a law of nature; the iron will keeping the grandfather alive is also the same will that suffocates his children, forcing them to sleep with their windows open so that they catch tuberculosis and die thereof. And, on the other hand, the whole family is ruled by fate; the grandfather’s fate is to outlive his children and his first wife, a beauty whose shadow hangs over the future like a curse. The grandfather’s acute tragedy, according to the narrator, is like that of the classical Greek prophetess Sibyl who, in exchange for the gift of prophecy, was given eternal life, and in the end grew so weary of living that she prayed to die14. As I already noted, the grandfather himself does not perceive these mythical dimensions of the events around him; he purely states them as a historian, suffers but does not question fate, nor his own actions, and remains completely ignorant to the level of myth and, consequently, to the ultimate meaning of the tragic events. 
With regard to the, central to the story, characters of Seryozha and Nadya, the tragically deceased two children of grandfather Ilovaisky, it can be stated that in their description there exists also a clear mythologizing principle throughout the narration. Seryozha, in wishing to read the narrator’s poems, symbolically dedicates the “chosen one” to her future destiny; standing in front of him the narrator suddenly becomes aware of the fact that she is different from the others and that there is no possibility of ever returning to being like the other, common, children are15. The much idealized Seryozha becomes a symbol in the story for a lost epoch with its habits and mores; in the story he symbolizes the narrator’s nostalgy for a lost world, which despite its shortcomings had its good qualities as well — he is the symbol of a way of life which never will return. Of course, Nadya is the character who is even more intensely mythologized, and the deaths of these two are the central turning point of the story. It has to be noted that even if death for Tsvetaeva is not always an allegedly negative motif — death in her poetry is often seen as a shift to a higher reality, to the timeless poetic eternity which, evidently, is the ideal for the lyrical speakers — it does seem that in this text death is, in the first hand, perceived as a tragedy. However, there can also be perceived in this story certain traits of the more positively interpreted thematics of death as a transition into a higher, timeless realm so often portrayed in Tsvetaeva’s work. Let us look closer at the scene when Seryozha has died, and her still living (but mortally ill) sister Nadya looks at the coffin being carried away from the house through the window:
... now she looked at the brother whom she loved and who now would never come again. After whom she herself would follow. She would go through the same snow out there, the same spruce branches, on the same shoulders... There for the last time, she looked down from up above, from up so very far above, looked down so very far, down headlong as never before, at something newly-understood, highly-remote, understood and pointless, nearby as if on the palm of your hand, remote as if at two miles’ remove! (SP 1980: 254).
What interests me particularly in this extract is the shift of perspective in Nadya’s point of view as she looks down from her window on the second floor. Symbolically it is central that she is now upstairs, which differs entirely from the position of the Ilovaisky children noted earlier in the story (downstairs, below their parents); interpreted in this light, she can already be seen as partly belonging to the realm of the gods, the Tsvetaevan eternal, “higher world”, she has already departed from the tangible reality in the sense that she knows she is dying, or the knowledge of this enters her mind then and there, and even if the narrator thereafter states that Nadya wanted to live, it is clear that in her opinion this fate is accepted, if not welcomed16. Because Nadya is now ready to be resurrected by the future poet, by “her own poet” as Tsvetaeva so modestly puts it, she is a suitable target for the exact mythologizing action which is attributed to the characters of the whole story, albeit in various ways. And when the young Tsvetaeva, the 1st person narrator of the story, hears about Nadya’s unexpected death while studying at a private school in Freiburg, she begins an assiduous quest for the resurrection of her dead friend in her mind, through poetic creation and mythologization. The recollection of memories on Nadya becomes the poet’s first re-creation of reality, the poet’s first work, her secret and ardent love, which she hides from the rest of the world17. It has to be noted also that when Tsvetaeva — the poet — begins her ardent resurrection of Nadya as she was when she was still alive, the only somewhat successful encounters with her deceased idol occur either in memory (“with the eyes of the soul”, “seeing inward” — typical symbols of the thematics of creation in Tsvetaeva’s work) or in sleep, in a dream18. The ties of the creative abilities of the writer to the realm of the unseen, spiritual, death become apparent and explicitly stated in the story:
And so I say: this love — was longing. A deathly longing. A longing for death, for meeting. The child’s impatient “right now!” And since it can’t be here — then not here. Since it can’t be alive — then: “To die, so as to see Nadya”, that is how it was stated, more firmly than two times two, as firm as “Our Father”, that is how I would have answered in my sleep to the question: what do I want most of all? And further? Further — nothing — everything. To see, to look at her. To look at her — always (SP 1980: 258).
The death of grandfather Ilovaisky and her wife A.A. reside more in the factual reality than the poeticized and largely mythologized deaths of Serezha and Nadya. The realias of revolutionary Russia play a central part in the narration here, and in this way Tsvetaeva once again returns to factual matters and extratextually-based history after a long mythopoetical digression concerning the poetic resurrection of Nadya. However, even the facts concerning the grandfather and his wife have to be told, but there is nevertheless a clear feeling of an anti-climax in the laconic statement of the grandfather’s death, of which the narrator (so she claims) knows nothing. The historical surroundings of the revolutionary Russia serve to accentuate the difference between the old and the new styles of life; it should be noted that there is a clearly positive tone in the treatment of the old-style society life of the higher classes, whereas the somewhat sordid realias of the turmoils of the new order are darker in tone. This is, of course, a clearly symbolic expression of how Ilovaisky’s life turned out as well; after losing all his wealth to Revolution (which is stated also earlier in the story several times) he is now reduced to an outdated relic in his home country and even imprisoned because of his “German orientation”. The fact that the poverty-stricken A. A., selling her last possessions, is slain by the bandits in her own home (although this is not overtly stated) is also a clear example of the way the new order is in no way idealised in this text. Even the death of A. A. is, however, raised to the level of mythology by referring to the house; the house at Old Pimen claiming, as seems to be thought, its last victim. But the last days of A. A. are mythologized by the narrator symbolically, as well; firstly, the single room of A. A. is now in the cellar, half-underground — she is no longer a resident of the upper floors of the house, as before, but lowered (as the children were earlier) into the almost-netherworld of the house of death. That there is a, several times repeated, characterization of the light in A. A.’s room as lifeless, unwavering, white and high up is also a connotation of the approaching death and of the non-living qualities attributed to its inhabitant. It adds to the earlier depictions of the character (notably, the fact that A. A. in the narrator’s mind resigned of life and happiness when she married Ilovaisky)19 and casts a ruthless light on her, existing as if stuffed in the middle of all her materialistic possessions, which in the end remain as futile as in the beginning. And if we bear in mind the often positive characterization in the essay regarding darkness and the emptiness the narrator seems to attribute to whiteness20, it can be stated that even this room of the house is depressing and negative, alien to the poet-narrator, just as its inhabitant is. Secondly, the room used to be Nadya’s — and it has windows overlooking the garden (therefore, the subconscious, untamed, wild garden), which plays a central part in the events of A. A.’s death; the bush which darkens the room with its snowy branches, knocks warningly on the window (and is unheeded by A. A. — again the incapability of the parents of the family to perceive the unconscious, mythological level) can be seen as a counterforce to the organized, material lifestyle A. A. has propagated all her life, an untied poetical force which has clear ties to the subconscious. It is important to note that even in this extract the existence of snow ties the scene to that of the deaths of Seryozha and Nadya, in which the image of snow was repeatedly evoked as well. These details mythologize even A. A.’s death, however sordid the factual reality behind it may be, and create a mythopoetic representation of it.
In this article I have attempted to show how this autobiographical text can be interpreted equally in a historical context (understood as ”the story of a family” as well as the thematic juxtaposition provided by the character of grandfather Ilovaisky and the narrator-poet) and in a mythical context (comprising especially the allusions to classical mythology and the symbols arising from Tsvetaeva’s own constant mythopoetic themes). Allusions to classical mythology are used in the narration mainly to portray the theme of artistic creation, which transforms the fact based realias into art, the linear, historical concept of time to a circular, mythological one, with no disruptions between past or present, present or eternity. Subsequently, the artistic and mythological structures are juxtaposed to the field of history, which consists of moments separated in time and perceived linearly, with no cyclical connections to their past, present or future being formed. For Tsvetaeva, the mythopoetic perception of reality is often superior to the historical retelling of facts, although these levels often appear side by side — the poet, rooted in his own time, cannot be fully separated from the historical context, even if the ideal sphere of his existence would be found entirely outside the limits of time, in the romantic notion of the “higher realm” so often perceived in Tsvetaeva’s work. Needless to say, the relations of the mythological material of this story to the other mythopoetic contents of Tsvetaeva’s work have to be further examined in the future, as well as the way this story relates to the other autobiographical material of her poetry and prose.
NOTES
1	Here it may suffice to bear in mind the poems of the collection from “Lebedinyi stan’” (The Demesne of the Swans), inspired by the Russian civil war, and the longer poem “Perekop” with its revolutionary thematics. Numerous also are her diary entries from the years of the Bolshevik revolution, when Tsvetaeva endured the harsh surroundings of the famished Moscow, and which were later published under the title “Zemnye primety” (Earthly Signs), and having thus a clear factual background. Tsvetaeva had also planned an unfinished poem of the Russian royal family, which was never completed. 
2	The most central of Tsvetaeva’s childhood autobiographies are “Mother and Music” (1934), “The Devil” (1935), “My Pushkin” (1937). Their leitmotif is the coming-to-being of a poet and they are often perceived as a trilogy. “The House at Old Pimen” (1933) is usually regrouped among Tsvetaeva’s several prose text memoirs of contemporaries, although it can be said that the story has several autobiographical traits as well. In addition to these works Tsvetaeva wrote several shorter pieces concentrating on her childhood, for example “The Tower of Ivy” (1933), “The Laurel Wreath” (1933), “The Opening of the Museum” (1933) and “Father and his Museum” (1936). 
3	For a thorough description of the modernist attitude to the interplay of history and myth and the cyclical concept of time, see Mints 1978, 87–95 and Gasparov 1992, 2–4. 
4	As Magdalina Medaric claims, the author, narrator and main protagonist of an autobiographical text are usually perceived by the reader to be the same (see Medaric 1996, 37, 44). 
5	See, for instance, Tsvetaeva’s letter to Vera Bunina from the 6th of August 1933, when she worked on the story and poses several detailed questions about the history of the Ilovaisky family:
Можете совершенно сокращенно, в виде контекста, пробелы заполню любовью, мне важны факты, я хочу воскресить весь тот мир чтобы они не даром жили и чтобы я не даром жила!
You may <tell me the facts. — H. R.> entirely shortly, as a context, because the blanks I shall fill with love, the facts are important to me, I want to resurrect that whole world — so that they will not have lived for nothing — and so that I will not have lived in vain! (SS 7, 241. Translation mine. — H. R.).
6	The complex relationships of Tsvetaeva’s family are essential in understanding the background of this story. It is symbolic that on a sublevel there exist two sets of marriages, which in a way are parallelled; the death of Tsvetaeva’s father’s first wife, the daughter of Grandfather Ilovaisky, from which allegedly Tsvetaeva’s father never recovered, and the second marriage of Grandfather Ilovaisky to A. A. The children of I. V. Tsvetaev’s first marriage are Valeriya and Andrei, from the second marriage Marina and Asya; the children of Ilovaisky’s second marriage are Nadya, Sergei and Olga, of which the two former are portrayed centrally in this story. 
7	These characteristics connect the grandfather with the tragic character of Boris Godunov as portrayed in Pushkin’s play, blinded by his desire for power, which drives him to impassioned and brutal acts, slaying the destined heir of the throne and putting himself in his place, acquiring in this way an incurable guilt which in the end becomes his doom and destiny. In Tsvetaeva’s interpretation, the grandfather’s blindness to myth and tragedy form a similar kind of curse, his iron will suffocates his children in the way Boris devoured his, and this implicit juxtaposition creates a foreboding pressentiment of forthcoming tragedy in the story. 
8	See, for instance, the extracts from Tsvetaeva’s literary essay from 1932, “The Poet and Time”, which elaborate her thorough principle of existing more outside time and history than actually in it:
Every poet is essentially an émigré, even in Russia. Emigré from the Kingdom of Heaven and from the earthly paradise of nature. Upon the poet — upon all who belong to art, but most especially upon the poet — there’s a particular mark of discomfort, by which you’ll know him even in his own home. An émigré from immortality in time, a non-returner to his own heaven (Tsvetaeva 1992: 93).
Contemporality is in itself a selection. The genuinely contemporary is what is eternal in time, thus not only what is indicative of a given time, but what is timely for ever, contemporary with everything. Pushkin’s poem “To the Sea”, for example, with the shades of Napoleon and Byron on the eternal background of the ocean (Tsvetaeva 1992: 99).
9	A whole another point of view is required for the mythical retellings of the history of which the narrator hasn’t been a witness, for instance, the death of A. A. — It is stated that this has occurred when Tsvetaeva has resided in Europe during the 1922–1939 (the death occurred in 1929) and she has only heard of this cruel robbery and murder being retold. In these cases there is a pure example of an artistic mythologization in progress, a vision of the author’s myth-creation presented to the reader as an absolute truth, completely as another fact. However, within the intra-textual space it is futile to pose questions about the text’s external truthfulness, the research of which question we shall have to leave beyond the limits of this essay. 
10	It is, perhaps, useful to point out here the overall musicality of Tsvetaeva’s verse, which relies largely on sounds, assonances, repetitions and rhythmic structures. These traits can also be detected in her prose, which has in several accounts been referred to (even by herself) as lyrical. 
11	This theme is further developed in the motif of A. A.’s heritage, the luxurious objects which the children are not allowed to touch, but which the mother takes out of the trunk and which are then hidden away again. One of these is the coral necklace, which creates a mythopoetic allusion to the garnet necklace of the beauty Nadya and also alludes to the granate apple seeds of the Greek divinity of the underworld Persephone, staying in the realm of the dead for half a year, then the other half on Earth among the mortals. This connection, it has to be noted, is largely symbolic: in the beginning of the story Nadya’s fate is already foreseen by the narrator in the allusion from the granate necklace to the granate apple seeds of Persephone. In this way the seemingly harmless allusion contains in itself already the anticipation of  Nadya’s fate, an untimely death, which transfers her to the netherworld too early. Also, Nadya can be seen to be likewise resurrected from the realm of the oblivion through the author-narrator’s creative efforts, in the same way as the maiden Persephone was granted a return to the living for half a year, existing the other half in Hades. 
12	It has to be noted that this is also an expression of the narrator’s complicated relations to her mother, a motif which appears in many of Tsvetaeva’s autobiographical stories exactly in connection with the secluded nature of being a poet. For more examples on this thematics, see for instance the stories “Mother and Music” (1934) and “The Devil” (1934). 
13	It is significant in this respect that the house is alluded to by the narrator as a dichotomous realm, in which the adults live high on the top floors (like the Greek gods) and the children live downstairs (like mortals):
The children, in actual fact, lived underneath the parents as if under a seal of interdiction. The region where the parents treaded the floor, with everything that weighed on them, with all their own weight, was overhead for the children, that is, was simply reposing there on their heads. Like Atlas holding up the vaults of heaven with its heavenly inhabitants (SP 1980, 236).
14	The myth of the Sibyl is a recurrent one in Tsvetaeva’s lyrical work of the 1920’s, even if it acts there as a prominent metaphor of the poet. Here, however, this myth is used mainly to illustrate the tragic measures of the neverending aging of the grandfather, without significant connotations to the thematics of the poet. 
15	It is notable that Tsvetaeva in describing the meeting with Serezha suddenly states: “I, like a Negro, was ashamed of my own incorrigible blackness” (SP 1980, 251). If we bear in mind that later Tsvetaeva was to elaborate this metaphor into much wider symbolic dimensions in, for instance, the story “My Pushkin” (1937), where the blackness of the Pushkin-statue becomes a central symbol for the creative poetic force, it can fully be possible that this statement can be interpreted even here as an acknowledgement of power, as an open statement of the narrator of being different, of realizing that she is different. Perhaps she does not want to be that, yet, but one could claim that she knows she is elected and there is no turning back. 
16	The image of the spruce branches which is repeated a few times in the extract concerning Nadya’s and Serezha’s deaths is, when interpreted in the light of Tsvetaeva’s poetics, also an indication of the presence of the higher poetic realm; let us bear in mind, for instance, the lyrical cycle “Derev’ya” (“Trees”, 1922–1923) in which the trees are a metaphor of the poet, acting as mediators between the higher, ephemereal world and the real, tangible world. These branches also appear in Tsvetaeva’s long poem “Novogodnee” (“New Year’s”, 1927), written on the occasion of Rainer Maria Rilke’s death. In this poem the image of the spruce branches refer to the tangible reality, but also to the bond the poets have with the unseen, spiritual realm. The same kind of interpretation is made plausible by the accent the narrator puts on the verticality in the cited extract; the distance between Nadya and her dead brother is an overtly vertical distance and is thoroughly emphasized, symbolizing the distance between the two worlds, the realm of “byt” and that of  “bytie”.
17	The fact that this ardent reminiscencing of the memories of Nadya is meticulously hidden from the surrounding people is, undoubtedly, also a trait of the typically Tsvetaevan view of the poet’s isolation, having its roots in romanticism; in this story, Nadya (and, of course, the conscious action of creation which is attributed to her by the poet) can be seen as a symbol of the secret gift of poetic creation and the sublimal forces which have chosen the child-Tsvetaeva from young age onwards; she can in this aspect be parallelled to the symbol of the Devil in Tsvetaeva’s short story from later years, also hidden from the knowledge of the others and destined only for the perception of the chosen poet. 
18	This affinity of the poet and dreaming connects Tsvetaeva with the German Romantics, with whom she felt a great affinity; also the philosophy of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche connects the dream state organically with his concept of the Apollonic artist. The influence of Nietzsche on the poetics of Tsvetaeva has not been thoroughly examined and remains beyond the scope of this article, but deserves thorough attention in the future. 
19	In her letter to Vera Bunina from the 26th of August 1933 Tsvetaeva writes:
А в ней А(лександре) А(лександровне) жила подавленная, задавленная молодость, все неизжитое, войной пошедшее на жизнь дочерей. (Подсознательно: «Я не жила и вы не живите!» Заедала их век, а самой казалось, что оне задают ее (несбывшийся). Все в глубоких недрах женского бытия (НЕБЫТИЯ).
Существо не единолично, но глубоко-трагическое. (Трагедия всех женских КОРНЕЙ).
And in her — in A(leksandra) A(leksandrovna) — there existed a repressed, suffocated youth, everything that wasn’t lived, and which was forced into the lives of the daughters. (Unconsciously: “I didn’t live — neither shall you!” Mutilated their existence, and to herself it seemed that they consumed hers (that which didn’t become). All this in the deep veins of female existence (NON-EXISTENCE).
The essence is not personal, but deeply tragic. (A tragedy of all female ROOTS.) (SS 7, 251. Translation mine. — H. R.).
20	For instance, earlier in the text when the narrator is on her creative quest after the lost friend Nadya, she visits the dormitory and only finds whiteness and emptiness there, a muteness hindering the creative work, and decides she must find a place that is dark, which is the music room. And if we consider that in Tsvetaeva’s poetics music is often likened to poetry, and the music room is dark, it is clear that that is the place for successful creation, and, paradoxically, not the place governed by whiteness and light. In the symbolic connection between music and creation Tsvetaeva seems to adopt clearly Nietzschean undertones, which are also present in the thematic juxtaposition of history and art in this text. 
LITERATURE
Gasparov 1992: Gasparov B. The “Golden Age” and its Role in the Cultural Mythology of Russian Modernism // Cultural Mythologies of Russian Modernism: From the Golden Age to the Silver Age / Ed. by B. Gasparov, R. P. Hughes, I. Paperno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. P. 1–16.
Hasty 1996: Hasty O. P. Tsvetaeva’s Orphic Journeys in the Worlds of the Word // Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
Medaric 1996: Medaric M. Автобиография и автобиографизм // Russian Literature. XL (1996). P. 31–56. 
Mints 1978: Минц З. Г. О некоторых «неомифологических» текстах в творчестве русских символистов / Творчество А. А. Блока и русская культура ХХ века // Учен. зап. Тарт. ун-та. Вып. 459. Блоковский сборник. III. Тарту, 1979. C. 76–120.
SP 1980: Tsvetaeva M. A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose / Ed. and transl. by J. Marin King, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1980.
SS 1–7: Цветаева М. Собр. соч.: В 7 т. М., 1995–1997.
Tsvetaeva 1992: Tsvetaeva M. Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry by Marina Tsvetaeva / Transl. with introduction and notes by A. Livingstone. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1992.