This is another of the books I read in retirement. Apparently, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak carried on a three-way correspondence in the summer of 1926. And this correspondence has now been made into a book.
Rilke, who taught himself Russian, to his correspondents’ delight, died later that same year.
Pasternak, of course, would later have a major success with his novel, Doctor Zhivago, and its later beautiful film adaptation, by David Lean. Tsvetaeva spent most of the 20s and 30s in Paris, Berlin, and Prague, moving back to Russia, specifically to the village of Yalabuga in 1939. She committed suicide there in 1941. It has never been easy to be a poet.
The book is fairly boring. Tsvetaeva is a lot more enthusiastic than either of the two men. As a woman she got to. It was still a time when women could be emotional but men could not. But the thing that distinguished the book, that made it head-rearranging, was that it shows how poets recognize the poetic impulse in other poets. From that perspective Tsvetaeva’s enthusiasm makes great sense. She was thrilled to correspond with Rilke, recognizing in him that gift of expressing the ultimate reality, through a few carefully chosen words, while understanding that any words—in any language—were inadequate.
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