Marina Tsvetaeva on Recollection

• In Event: Crafting Memory: Where Writers [don’t] Meet Readers

Abstract

In her prose of the 1920s and 1930s, Tsvetaeva devotes considerable attention to explications of poetry and self-presentations that affirm her poetic selfhood. Memory, with its imaginative and individualizing potency, fittingly assumes a central role in this project. Beyond recording what she remembers, Tsvetaeva uniquely foregrounds the process itself of recollection and the creative energy it activates. This paper focuses on her idiosyncratic depictions of the complex dynamics of remembering and considers the manifold ways in which she has it signify in her prose.

Author

• Olga Peters Hasty, Princeton U