ProQuest Information and Learning: Foreign text omitted.
Where the Dog is Buried: Clues to the Ancestry of Tsvetaeva's Canine "Devil"*
ABSTRACT: Marina Tsvetaeva's 1934 "Chert" (The Devil) forms a central part of the cycle of autobiographical prose she wrote in emigration. This article assembles clues to the hidden origins of the Devil she describes in prose about her grandfathers, some of it censored in pre-1990 editions of her works. Tsvetaeva's Devil is not simply metaphysical: it has the unusual appearance of a Great Dane. Though she goes on to trace its appearances in the literature and culture of her childhood, some of its physical features (eyes, nose, colour and posture) link it with other people in her life. The vivid details of the Devil suggest relationships, though peculiarly mediated ones. to members of her own family, especially her maternal grandfather, Aleksandr Danilovich Mein. The poet describes herself using Pushkin's poem "Utoplennik" to camouflage her own sense of self from her mother. Much of the rest of "The Devil" describes her recognition of the Devil in varying symbolic or even phonetic guises, tracing how the poet stayed faithful to him even after he ceased to appear visibly, how she found and read his symbols in surrounding reality-e.g., card games, toys, rituals for finding lost objects-and in unexpected, otherwise respectable, parts of society, including her own grandfather. As always, Tsvetaeva creates a story that affirms her identity as a poet and illustrates the work she had to do to achieve that identity.
Marina Tsvetaeva's 1934 "Chert" (The Devil) forms a central part of the cycle of autobiographical prose she wrote in emigration. The devil in Tsvetaeva's writing received a general examination by Svetlana El'nitskaia; his appeareance in "The Devil" is the subject of an article by Pamela Chester,2 this study will address a more limited question: where do some of the surprising canine features of her Devil originate? Taking a hint from Joseph Brodsky, who points out that Tsvetaeva's prose is simply poetry continued by different means,3 I will cast light on the mysterious figures that appear in her prose by tracing their tangle of associations in other works. My literary detective work seeks the provenance of the dog, following a trail that leads between stories and corpses. 'The Russian "gde sobaka zaryta" (literally, "where the dog is buried") -an expression for the solution of a mystery4-seems especially appropriate here. After examining certain details that give Tsvetaeva's Great Dane its particular resonance. I will assemble clues to the dog's hidden origins in prose about her grandfathers, some of it censored in pre-1990 editions of "The Devil." The results, I will argue, prove that this Devil is related to Tsvetaeva's own relations.
Like the figure of Tsvetaeva's childhood Devil, all of "The Devil" is rich. detailed and full of potential shocks for a prosaic or sanctimonious reader. Chester shows how the piece expresses a subversively unexpurgated child's sexuality, fueling formation of the poet's verbal creativity.5 The child meets the Devil in the same room where she reads forbidden books, hidden from her mother. The room belongs to her half-sister Valeriia and is furnished with decadent feminine objects redolent of love, lust and vaguely necrophilic mystery. The Devil's centrality is obvious, since Tsvetaeva names him in the title-no doubt in part to surprise and upset the largely Russian Orthodox readers in the Paris emigre community of the 1930s. This is a distinctive Devil; he blesses and condemns her to a life of love without constancy, of solitude and pride, and of constant immersion in language--beginning with the forbidden books of the first pages, the search for rhymes that distracts the older child from a lost toy, and ending with the adult Romantic praise of the final apostrophes. The Devil links the author to poetry, language, power, and a fertile secret life that evades her mother's arbitration of that power and its value. He is one source of the inflexible conscience in art and life that she elsewhere traces to her mother as well. To this extent, Tsvetaeva's use of the Devil is not so different from the practical function Milton's Satan had for the British Romantics.
However, her Devil is not simply literary or metaphysical: he looks like a dog, a Great Dane, and the vivid details of his appearance and posture suggest a relationship, though a peculiarly mediated one, to a member of her own family.
A Great Dane is an unlikely figure for the Devil, whose iconography, as Tsvetaeva herself shows in later sections of "The Devil," more often portrays a dark horned figure with a tail--like the devil-in-a-bottle sold at prerevolutionary Palm Sunday fairs (35, Sl)-or an unappealing swarm of flies (55). Tsvetaeva mentions the "Dog," apparently in the same context as in "The Devil," in letters to her friend Ol'ga Kolbasina-Chernova in 1925.6 but these are the only widely available references to the figure in sources written before "The Devil." The word dog in Russian means a Great Dane, and bears very different associations from the more common "sobaka" or "pes"; it sounds foreign, dark, clipped and serious, with none of the ordinary words' denigrating or proverbial baggage. In the end of the piece Tsvetaeva identifies the Great Dane as "sobachii bog" (the dog's god), suggesting that part of the Great Dane's appeal is its very name, which rhymes with "Bog" (God).
The first pages of "The Devil" offer a detailed portrait of the Devil:
The Devil sat on Valeriia's bed, --naked, in a grey skin, like a Great Dane, with white-- blue eyes, like a Great Dane's or a Baltie baron's...
The main signs were not the paws, not the tail,-[they are] not attributes, the main thing was the eyes: colourless, indifferent and merciless. I knew him first of all by the eyes, and I'd recognize those eyes-without all [the rest of it].
A brief quote from the final pages of the piece returns to the Baltic baron, though this time it describes the dog's nose: "tvoi dlinnyi seryi baronskii zamshevyi dogov nos" (55; your long, grey, baronial, suede, Great Dane nose). These combined details will help lead to further clues to the dog's parentage: the pale-blue or colourless eyes, and the semblance (in the eyes or nose) of a baron, even a Baltic baron.
A few pages later Tsvetaeva records a dream where the devil--in human form, and no longer silent and immobile-pulls her out of the Oka river as she is about to drown, a gesture J. Marin King has interpreted as release from the mother's smothering musical essence and prelude to a sacred betrothal to the art of poetry.7 Despite her mother's chilly manner, the child cannot resist telling her about the dream. As her mother's predictably negative reaction unfolds. she feels that she is getting too close to the truth and interrupts her. turning the conversation aside with imagery from Pushkin's poem "Utoplennik" in order to conceal the link between the drowned man and the devil. This allows her mother to understand without understanding too much. and so to leave the subject without spoiling it.
Fearing that she had guessed and would now say it, and by so doing cut it off forever, I [added] hastily, "But they really were drowned men, absolutely for real, dark blue ones...
And into the swollen body
Black crayfish had sunk their claws!
Here Pushkin is not so much a model for the speaker's own creativity as a cover for her dream life, an authoritative source for a poetic red herring.8 She cites him in fear that her mother's taste for viewing and describing life and behaviour in terms of opposite extremes (automatically preferring angels9) will lead her to name the Devil and cut the thread forever. The verb "presech"' means to cut short, that is, to end or interrupt something prematurely. A typical concern in literature or folklore is that naming the Devil will summon him. This child's very different fear, namely, that her mother will drive the Devil away, suggests again that he functions (like Pushkin) as a space of freedom from her mother's regressions and prohibitions--a space the child will need time to grow into, and therefore cannot give up now. Elsewhere in her autobiographical cycle, Pushkin's poems offer revelations of the nature of love and serve as a source of forbidden vocabulary (she lets the word "strastnye" [passionate] slip in to describe a doll, but quickly corrects herself to the phonetically similar "strashnye" [frightening, horrible] to avert maternal displeasure). In the cream of the drowned man, though, Pushkin is a tool for censorship. the opaque garment or neutral expression the speaker dons to hide the fact that she is "swallowing the red-hot coal of a secret."
The passage analyzed above shows the poetic canon- available to the budding poet through reading and memorization--as a mechanism for concealing truth from disapproving authority. She reaches for Pushkin not only to create poetic transformation, but also for reasons of simple self-interest, to protect the things that inspire her from her mother's interruptions. Pushkin's dual potential role as model and camouflage is applicable to Tsvetaeva's use of plots or citations from other writers, especially those from the recognized male canon.11 The child's tactic of burying truth at a safe depth beneath quotation resonates with the mature poet's vision of a poetic process that calls for a reader's cocreative effort.12 Much of the rest of "The Devil" describes her recognition of the Devil in varying symbolic or even phonetic guises: mahota peering through tealia, an attitude toward art that Tsvetaeva would have known well from her contacts with the preceding literary generation in Russia. the Symbolists. No wonder the Devil, though so fulsomely and physically presented in the first page of "The Devil," is hard to interpret. The piece goes on to trace how the poet stayed faithful to him even after he ceased to appear visibly, how she found and correctly read his symbols in surrounding reality--e.g., in card games, toys, rituals for finding lost objects--and in unexpected, otherwise respectable, parts of society, including as it turns out her own grandfather.
If the poem "Utoplemik" is a cover for the dream she tells her mother, perhaps its connection to the Devil offers a clue to the Great Dane's origins. She quotes the same two lines in another prose work, the 1937 "Moi Pushkin." Tsvetaeva asserts that, unlike the confusing historical references of Pushkin's Poltava, "Utoplennik" held no questions for her, only surprises. And yet the description of her childhood reading of the poem shows that even here she interpreted by guessing from things she already knew. The exclamation "uzho" (a colloquial word unfamiliar to a child growing up in a protected and cultured home) becomes the name of the dead body, fusing with the "uzh" [grass-snake] she knew from summers in Tarusa:
If someone had asked ine then, the picture would have been approximately this: in the earth live grass-snakes---and dead people, and this dead person is named Uzho, because he's a bit snakey, snake-like, he's been lying next to a grass snake.
Tarusa also provides her with experiential knowledge of drowned people:
Someone would always drown in the summer, most often boys-one got pulled under a raft again--but often drunk people as well, and often sober people too-and once a whole lumber raft went down, and then grandfather Aleksandr Danilovich died [...] and even though I knew it was a sin-because grandfather loved me more than Asya, and stupid--because grandfather didn't drown at all, but died of cancer.... -from cancer [rak]? But after all:
And into the swollen body
Black crayfish [raki] have sunk their claws!"
This passage illustrates how circumstantial associations (her grandfather's death around the time of a drowning in the Oka river) and poetic ones (the dual meaning of "rak" as both disease and underwater creature) create deep links for the poet despite her awareness that they are "stupid" and even sinful. She concludes her description of the multiple image of the drowned man: "... " (78; An Uzho-dead-man with the indeterminate doubling face of grandfather Aleksandr Danilovich and the drowned raftsman). Like the child Tsvetaeva in her dream, grandfather Mein has fallen into the water of poetry,13 and when he reemerges he looks upsettingly different. The two lines of the poem she quotes to clarify the child's sense of blurred meanings, of course, are the same two that led her mother off the track of her dream's true meaning in "The Devil." Their recurrence at significant points hints that her maternal grandfather may illuminate the nature, identity and ultimate resting place of this diabolical Dog.
To substantiate the link between Aleksandr Danilovich Mein and the Great Dane, I must outline how he appears in her prose cycle. lie is most often referred to there by his first name and patronymic, Aleksandr Danilovich. He shares this first name with the exemplary poet, Aleksandr Pushkin (and-almost-- Tsvetaeva herself, as she points out in the beginning of "Mat' i muzyka" 10]); this pulls Pushkin, along with Aleksandr Danilovich, into the complex web of the Tsvetaev family names.14 Moreover, Aleksandr Danilovich is a Russified Baltic German, like the Great Dane of "The Devil," who is described "... " (32; with pale-blue eyes, like a Great Dane or a Baltic baron), with "..." (55; a baron's nose). The shared pale blue colour that is almost a lack of colour suggests that her grandfather's eyes were like the Dog's, i.e., colourless, indifferent and pitiless ("...").15
The baronic equation recurs later in "The Devil," as Tsvetaeva describes learning the card game "Schwartze Peter" from the children's governess, "... " (40; from the Dorpat [prerevolutionary Tartu] woman. Augusta Ivanovna, directly from his baronic homeland). Indeed, Augusta Ivanovna is the first of the women listed who "..." (call in) the child Tsvelaeva to her half-sister's room where the Great Dane awaits her (32), and when Augusta Ivanovna leaves the household the Dog ceases to appear -" ... " (50; ceased in visible terms, ceased---on Valeriia's bed). Elsewhere in "The Devil" Tsvetaeva comments that mental repetition of "Dog-Chert" (Great Dane-Devil, also readable as "Great Dane is the Devil") instead of the blasphemous "Bog-Chert" (God-Devil, or God is the Devil) would have spared her much sin and horror (43). That solution, however, breaks down if she slips into German, which--as she persists in reminding her reader-is a native language for her, inherited from her own mother and Baltic German grandfather. The German "Dog-Gott" is almost as good a reversal (adapted to the rules of phonetics) as the English "Dog-God."
The next hint to the Great Dane's origins comes in a succeeding chapter of the autobiographical prose, "Khlystovki." It links Aleksandr Danilovich, already associated through his death with the drowned rafter on the Oka river, to another aspect of the Tsvetaev family's summers. The Khlystovki, or Kirillovny, were a community of schismatic women, complete with their own schismatic Christ and Mary, who lived on the edge of Tarusa. For the child, a salient characteristic of these women is their love for her:
The Kirillovny, I assert this with relish, loved me best of all, perhaps precisely because of this greed of mine, my flourishingness, my strength-Andriusha was tall and skinny, Asya small and skinny-because they would all, childless, have wanted such a daughter, one for all of them!
Like her half-sister Valeriia, who puts forbidden books into the hands of the child and whose room and bookcase continue to harbor "the knowledge of good and evil" while their owner is away at boarding school, the Khlystovki stuff berries into the child's mouth while her mother's back is turned, thus recognizing the hunger and desire that the mother's eyes forbid (95). This understanding and indulgence reinforce a special affection and create an odd alliance between the schismatics and the grandfather in the child's mind:
"But the khlystovki love the better!" I would fall asleep, my feelings hurt, with that thought. "Mama loves Asya better, so does Augusta Ivanovna and Nanny (papa out of good nature loved everybody 'best'---but grandfather and the khlistovki love me better!" The formal Baltic emigrant would [hardly] have thanked me for such a grouping!
This special appreciation comforts the child even though the adult knows that her very proper grandfather would not have been flattered by the contiguity. Several other images in "Khlystovki" find parallels in the passages where the Devil appears. For example, the paradisal garden where all the berries ripen at once but where there are no apples (93), recalls the richly red room where the Devil sat, and to which the child was always summoned by a woman of a group of women-though never by her own mother (32). While haymaking with the Khlystovki the child's blissful state is conveyed in language that recalls her dream of drowning, or rather of rescue, on the Oka river: "... " (97, with them I dove under and reappeared). The schismatic women are thus connected both with her grandfather Mein and with the Devil-the latter is also close to them through their religious unorthodoxy and the ambiguous stories the religiously orthodox tell about them. This raises an issue that I neglect in this discussion, one that is not in the foreground of "The Devil": how the child Tsvetaeva comes to interpret her Great Dane as a Devil by reading the culture and adult behavior around her.
Even the death of Aleksandr Danilovich brings a kind of affirmation to the narrator of the autobiographical prose: her mother enters the room in mourning with a wet face, wearing a new black-striped blouse, and says, "... " (15; Musia, grandfather loved you very much). The mother, who is previously shown as emotionally stingy and irritated by Musia's superior accomplishments and understanding, is nonetheless generous in reminding her of this special love when she tells the child about her grandfather's death. Grandfather Mein, then, is inscribed in the child's memory as someone who loved her and gave her support, who perceived and appreciated her particular character and essence: the story of his own life ends and is summed up with the assertion that he loved her. Musia's hunger to belong, to he a wanted child, arises again when the Khlystovki tease her, saying that they will take little "Masha" (as they affectionately call her) into their garden and raise her as their own daughter (97). Such love makes her dangerous and free. She is able to use language as she wishes and even pretends to assume the role of her mother - whose real name was Maria, though she did not go by the nickname Masha--as arbiter of behaviour.
Grandfather Aleksandr Danilovich also appears briefly in the passage of "The Devil" devoted to a German song that Tsvetaeva's mother and half-sister Valeriia sing during the summers beside the Oka river (49--50). The text shows the creative incomprehension of the child, who uses German vocabulary she already knows to interpret more complex and unfamiliar words. The resulting web of meanings casts the unspeakable luster of love over every person and concept involved: "A Seelen ...)" (163; And Seelen [souls] are of course See [the Baltic "die See"--the sea!]). The word for soul becomes the word for sea, itself embodied in the Baltic or "Fast-Sea," source of the adjective she regularly uses to describe her grandfather's origins, though linked to her as well through her name's maritime meaning.16 She does not yet know the verb "meinen" [to consider, to opine], so interprets it as her grandfather's last name, "Mein," adding, in Latin letters. the archaic spelling that her mother continued to use despite updated German orthography, "Meyn."17 The sounding of his name means that Aleksandr Danilovich too is implicated in this song about love: "...... (50, From this inclusion in the song grandfather was unwittingly included in the mystery: it suddenly began to seem to me that grandfather- [was in love] too). The song continues to resound until the girl Marina turns seven, at which time its bearer, German governess Augusta Ivanovna, returns to her own (Baltic) home in Dorpat.
In its initial publication during Tsvetaeva's lifetime, "The Devil" was quite heavily censored. respecting the sensibilities of her Russian emigre editors and readers. The sections of text restored in recent Russian editions of her prose contain significant material for this investigation. The description of the poet's first confession in the Orthodox church includes much fuller detail. She does not confess her actual sins, at first out of reluctance because the venerable priest knows her parents, who have already made her aware of the dangers of speaking the truth. Ultimately, she keeps her thoughts to herself because the priest asks routine humiliating questions and clearly lacks understanding.18 After this description, she discusses her fear of priests, and from there moves to her other grandfather, Vladimir Tsvetaev:
The first such fear was towards my very own grandfather, my father's father, archpriest Father Vladimir Tsvetaev from Shuia (whose textbook of church history, by the way, Bal'mont used in school) already a very old man, with a white beard a bit like a fan and a standing doll in a box in his arms-into which I all the same did not go.
Anyone familiar with the history of the Tsvetaev family will recall that her grandfather Vladimir was not so much "a very old man" in the poet's early childhood, but in fact dead since 1884--eight years before her birth. He undergoes a sort of retrospective resurrection in this piece, in the section that puts priests and grandfather into a single category of people who should not be told unpleasant or overly graphic truths:
I don't know why, but, in spite of their frightfulness, clergy have always seemed to me a little bit like children. Just the same as grandfathers. How can you tell disgusting things to children (or grandfathers)? Or frightening things?
This equation of priests and male ancestors-perhaps motivated by the use of terms like "otets" and "batiushka" ("father") for priests as well as by her father's family clerical origins-casts old Tsvetaev's shadow onto the other grandfather, Mein. The memory of a visit from a grandfather who was in fact dead by the time the writer was born takes on a quality of the arrival of the Stone Guest.19 While the strongly visual quality of her "memory" of this other grandfather suggests that, unless she confused him with an uncle or one of her father's friends from the seminary, the fanlike white beard and black cassock originate in a photograph. This again recalls the Great Dane, who sits as still as if he were being photographed-like a Riazan' peasant woman, or like the stove in her half-- sister's room in Tarusa. They too are all black and white---or else grey (the colour of a black-and-white photograph). The blue eyes, though pale and cold, are the Great Dane's only hint of motion and colour-and the trait that links the Great Dane with the grandfather who lived long enough for Tsvetaeva to see him in the flesh rather than in a picture, though he may have dressed in the same severe black and white that his daughter, Tsvetaeva's mother, favoured.20 ,Me deaths of the poet's grandfathers, before her birth or during her childhood, are hardly surprising in the case of an elderly population, but they seem to underline the assertion that she always thinks of priests and coffins in the same breath:
For me in my childhood that same black coffin stood behind each priest, quietly, behind the brocade back, rolled its eyes [at me] and threatened. Where there's a priest, there's a coffin. If it's a priest-then there's a coffin.
Thus a further connection between priests and grandfather-, is death and the material signs of death, the coffin and the body. Death is also the primary meaning of the Ace of Spades in the maid Masha's fortune-telling, though the child Tsvetaeva chooses to read it more positively as udar [a blow], a secret sign from her Devil (39-40).
Priests inspire fear in the child and are linked with the mysterious exchanges of money (silver), as in the case of the priest who clumsily elicited her first (non-)confession and to whom she was obliged to give the ruble she held. Priests arrive when someone has died (47); to frighten and to extort money that could otherwise be used to buy picture books (or a toy devil from the Palm Sunday fair!); and to sing, which, she believes, convinces the dead to remain peaceful and still. The censored sections included in recent publications richly convey the threatening figures in black and the whole complex of cold, fear and compulsion the child associated with visits to the Orthodox church. The author herself expected the Paris emigre community to react with outrage to the publication of "The Devil."21
At the same time, in this piece and elsewhere in her prose cycle, Tsvetaeva shows that fear is something the child poet enjoys passionately. This suggests that the priests' frightening black robes may not really be so unlike the thrilling threat of the ace of spades or the card Black Peter-or the black robes the Khlystovki want to dress her in (97). While staying at a Catholic pension in Switzerland during her mother's long treatment for tuberculosis, she reveals her
"Bog-Chert" (God-Devil) at confession to a Catholic priest. He is in fact both priest and devil: "OH, ..." (he, [or] more accurately that one), as she says (43), uniting the opposites in a single being. She goes on:
In my childhood priests always seemed like sorcerers to me. They walk and sing. They walk and wave [the censor]. They walk and cast spells. They walk about. They fumigate. They, dressed so much and so magnificently, seemed to me to be not-ours [author's note: a folk name for the devil], rather than that one---humbly- and greyly-- naked, even poor were it not for his deportment, on the edge of Valcriia's bed.
This passage connects the frightening and negative traits identified with priests to sorcery and deviltry-traits the poet admires. On the other hand, the presumably magical and terrifying Devil has a much less frightening appearance and a spiritually appealing poverty of dress. By appearing as the opposite of the priest-grandfather Tsvetaev, the Great Dane points up the devilish aspects of the orthodox clergy, illuminating the poet's childhood confusion of societal images of good and evil.
These elements add complexity to the Great Dane and to the mysteriously associated figure of A. D. Mein: being a grandfather, bearing the same title and relationship as her other grandfather, he too is like a child and like a priest. Talking to a grandfather is like confessing to a priest: you must pretend to be good, not volunteer anything of what is really inside you--in short, this sounds just like Tsvetaeva's experience as a child when talking to her mother. Indeed, in "Khlystovki" her mother tries to turn Aleksandr Danilovich (calling him "papasha," which identifies him as her own father rather than a grandfather) into a sort of didactic tool for reproach (96). Like all the other relatives he never experiences motion sickness, and so Musia's weak stomach-in the mother's eyes-is a flaw that sets her apart from the rest of the family. At the same time, because Mein is not a priest, he is different from the other grandfather, Tsvetaev, and thus allied with the Devil's side of that dyad.
The poet's assertion that children, like grandfathers, should not be told upsetting things rebounds oddly off the unchildlike childhood Tsvetaeva describes: accustomed to "swallowing the red-hot coals of secrets," almost preternaturally aware of a romantic rivalry between her mother and half-sister, the child Musia is greedy for upsetting things. If grandfathers are like children, they show the way opposites come together, how priest or God may blend into Devil, old age into infancy, and God into Dog-as long as the child or poet can assert her authority to define them, to choose the aspect that nourishes her own verbal and personal power. The Romantic paeans to the Devil that end the uncensored version of "The Devil" air thus not only a blend of epatage and worship, but also praise of the poet's ever-asserted right to choose and exalt the underdog, to insist on her own essential isolation in the universe, and to ensure that she does not echo the comfortable flaws of her society-themes widespread in her other writing.
The last significant clue in this investigation is the number seven. As she writes to Rainer Maria Rilke, it is not merely a number that Tsvetaeva considers particularly Russian.22 She also cites it regularly, especially in the autobiographical prose, as a marker of the ending of childhood, the limit of the unforgettable, and early formative experiences and learning that she calls dosemiletie. In a 1922 autobiographical fragment, she notes that she began writing at the age of seven.23 In the brief 1940 autobiography, she describes the importance of her early childhood, again marking its boundary at seven:
... (6)
All that I loved-I loved before seven. and I never came to love anything else. Forty seven years from my birth I can say that everything I was fated to learn I learned by seven, and the ensuing forty [years]-I was realizing [it].
The number seven is especially frequent in "The Devil."24 It is toward the age of seven that she becomes passionately interested in cards (39); her first confession in the Orthodox church, as was normal, took place when she was seven (44). Since she was already literate, the graphic change of date from the 1800s to the 1900s that took place a few months after her seventh birthday must also have made an impression. The departure of the German governess Augusta Ivanovna and of the song that her mother and half-sister sang together (50) is not the only ebb of German influence to occur as Tsvetaeva nears the age of seven in 1899: that is also the year her grandfather, the German from the Ostsee, died. His death invests his formerly comforting love for her with some of the threats associated with priests, death, and "the other side," where he now resided as one of the people who loved her best. Her seventh year is, finally, the year when the Dog ceased to appear to her on Valeria's bed. This cluster of losses suggests that the end of the special emotional protection Tsvetaeva's grandfather had provided also moved the poet from childhood into youth and from intuitive perception into language, taking away her ability to see the Devil except in the symbols she goes on to describe.
Let me conclude my examination of A. D. Mein's place in Tsvetaeva's mythology of self by citing some of her writing about the man himself, outside the autobiographical cycle where he is mentioned frequently, though always briefly. In a letter from January 26, 1937 to her Czech friend Anna Teskova, the poet shifts from a rather gloomy assessment of her own compulsion to duty into a description of her grandfather:
Now, adding up accounts, I can say: I have lived my whole life in captivity. And, strange though it is--in willing captivity, for no one, after all, forced me to take everything so seriously--it was in my blood, in its Germanic part (my mother's father-Aleksandr Danilovich Mein-Meyn-was a Russian Baltic German, a kind of a baron: fair-haired, blue-eyed, hook-nosed, very strict.... He figured ine out right away, by the way-and loved [me]).
Even in this rather pessimistic piece of self-analysis, the appearance of the grandfather lets the writer move from the grim first part--describing the (Germanic) sense of obligation that has made her life unduly difficult-to the same affirmation her mother offered after Mein's death. Her grandfather loved her, and that love was based on an intuitive understanding ("srazu ugadal") that suggests he was able to perceive her essence: she did not need, and perhaps was not even able, to conceal it from him, but therefore faced no reproach and restriction. Tsvetaeva wrote this letter some three years after "The Devil," and so perhaps the terms she used to describe the Great Dane could also describe her grandfather without troubling her or causing her to censor them, even though she wrote to Teskova, as always, with care and thoughtfulness, as if intending the letters simultaneously for posterity.
Common details of appearance and nobility ("a kind of baron"--a reference to the Baron in Pushkin's "Covetous Knight"?) suggest more is at work than just her sense that both Dog and grandfather make her special. There is a recurrent element of love despite restrictions: she loves the Great Dane although no one is supposed to love the devil; Aleksandr Danilovich loved her although his own daughter was always pointing out her shortcomings. This love grants the child a sense of belonging though she is not a favourite in the household, and it compensates for her loneliness. The lifelong unbending conscience she both treasures and bemoans to Teskova, by making her take everything too seriously, resembles the scorn for silly play and group celebrations that the Devil bequeaths to her:
No, I was done with play! The devil of my infancy left me this inheritance, among much else: an inevitable [reaction], like the short yawn of the Great Dane. that everything that was a game was bo-o-oring!
The phrase "ostavil v nasledstvo" stresses, again, the (almost) familial relationship Tsvetaeva insists on, given that the Devil adopts her much as the Khlystovki threaten. His presence erases her other ties of relationship: "On ..." (37; Ile didn't even know that I had a mother. When I was with him, I was his little girl, his little devil's orphan). Thus the devil replaces or displaces the mother, and the child becomes parentless in his presence, able to claim new affiliations, establish alliances based on love, and choose her relatives. Associating Aleksandr Danilovich Mein. however partially, with the incarnation of the Devil (i.e., the Great Dane) would allow her to free the special love and understanding she sensed he had for her from its coercive use by her mother. The process parallels her use of literature-another source of moral and artistic riches that her mother was obliged to respect-for learning and liberation rather than for pedagogy and limitation. Her mother's powerful repressive influence led Tsvetaeva to "bury" sources of support and inspiration in texts and relationships that her mother could not object to or would not suspect.26 Furthermore, this small project supports the idea that the whole body of autobiographical prose can be read as a cycle. a set of shapely individual pieces that add up to a whole larger than the sum of its parts.27 Indeed, in the 1930s as Tsvetaeva's writing shifted mainly to prose, her poetry too tended to come in "flocks," as she put it-in cycles.28 The cycle, a favorite structuring pattern from the Symbolists onward, offers a way to combine elements that are mutually contradictory but equally valid. Therefore it is not surprising that Tsvetaeva exploits the cycle's potential for richness and ambiguity in her autobiographical prose.
To return to the Russian expression for a mystery solved: the Dog may seem to be buried in Moscow's Vagan'kovo cemetery, where Aleksandr Danilovich Mein and other members of Tsvetaeva's family lie,29 but in a truer sense he cannot be kept underground. He flickers like a protean revenant, appearing in the hints that I have tried to interpret here, leaving traces through much of the cycle of Tsvetaeva's autobiographical prose, and fulfilling an important function of poetic support very much like the one the final pages of "The Devil" attribute to her Devil.
[Author Affiliation]
SIBELAN FORRESTER is Associate Professor of Russian at Swarthmore College. She has published extensively on aspects of Marina Tsvetaeva's work. Her research interests include other twentieth-century poets, Russian women writers. Serbian and Croatian authors, and folk culture, especially folk healing and fortune telling.
