The Metapoetic Potential of Bettina von Arnim’s Image in Marina Tsvetayeva’s «A Living Word About a Living Man»

The paper concerns the image of Bettina von Arnim in Marina Tsvetayeva’s metapoetics. Imagining Goethe’s encounter with Bettina as that of the personified 18th and 19th centuries became a significant part of Marina Tsvetayeva’s self-identification. The moment of a poet’s entering the world of literature is stipulated by «a duel of lovers», a clash between «culture» personified by the old poet and «nature» incarnated in the young one. Transferring the initiative in the relationship to the younger poet with the latter’s subsequent submission of the older one, breaking the hierarchies, and dominating in love - these tendencies shown by Bettina von Arnim in her famous «Goethe’s correspondence with a child» are used by Tsvetayeva as patterns when building her relationship with her older contemporaries (V. Rozanov, S. Volkonsky, R.-M. Rilke). In «A Living Word About a Living Man» the dyad of heroines - the young Tsvetayeva and Elena Ottobaldovna Voloshina, the poet’s mother - is poetically conceptualized via the historical analogy with Bettina and Goethe’s mother. The same topic stipulates the presence in the essay of a large fragment dedicated to Adelaida Gertsyk who was a popularizer and translator of Bettina von Arnim’s texts into Russian.

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