Crying as a Dance in the "After Russia" book : On the Addressee of Marina Tsvetaeva's Poem "A Gypsy's Lament for Count Zubov"

This article examines the question of the addressee of M. I. Tsvetaeva's poem "A Gypsy Woman's Lament for Count Zubov", included in her poetry collection After Russia. New archival material is brought into consideration, and the poetics of the work are analyzed. The avant-garde nature of Tsvetaeva's text is revealed in the collage-like fragmentation of poetic imagery, linguistic play, and its proximity, at the level of poetics, to her experiments with Futurism and Constructivism, Biographical research aimed at identifying the prototype of Count Zubov has shown that this figure is a composite one, combining features of several historical personalities: from a diverse gallery of Zubovs, most of whom were associated with military service, to Count F. Tolstoy the American, who was once saved by a Gypsy woman. All these characters share the adventurous and aristocratic traits that attracted Tsvetaeva. Tsvetaeva's creative laboratory, as represented by her draft notebook, reveals the connection between the imagery of the poem and a nearby draft letter to B. L. Pasternak, which have been noted by leading critics (V. Bulich, D. Svyatopolk-Mirsky, Vl. Khodasevich, G. Adamovich). To solve the tasks, a combination of textual and historical-literary analysis methods is used. A week before composing the poem, Tsvetaeva sent Pasternak a personal letter in which she articulated a complex of her authorial phobias and reflected on her creative influences, focusing on a number of poems in the book Themes and Variations that he had given her. This book included Pasternak's "Pushkin-esque" poems ("Cloud. Stars. And from the Side...", "So They Begin. When I Was About Two..."), which contained references to the poem "Gypsies". The image of a lamppost serves as a marker linking Count Zubov to Pasternak; it is no coincidence that this detail appears in both the poem and Tsvetaeva's letter. "The Gypsy Woman's Lament for Count Zubov" can be thus classified as an example of addressed lyric poetry. Using a short dissolve, Tsvetaeva creates a dual image of the recipient of the Gypsy woman's frenzied dance (lament): explicitly, the notional Count Zubov, and implicitly, Boris Pasternak, who announced his departure for Soviet Russia.