An Attempt at Jealousy

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An Attempt at Jealousy

MARINA TSVETAEVA
1928

INTRODUCTION
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
POEM TEXT
POEM SUMMARY
THEMES
STYLE
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
CRITICAL OVERVIEW
CRITICISM
SOURCES
FURTHER READING

INTRODUCTION

"An Attempt at Jealousy," by Marina Tsvetaeva (sometimes spelled Tsvetayeva or Cvetaeva), is a poem about disappointment in love. Tsvetaeva, a celebrated Russian poet writing in the early twentieth century, was known for her poems about love, loneliness, and alienation. This poem is usually said to have been inspired by one or more of her actual failed romances, of which she had many, and it is notable for its nostalgic contrast of an ideal mythologized love in the past with a present full of commonness, vulgarity, and ill health.

"An Attempt at Jealousy" was first published in Russian under the title "Popytka revnosti" in 1928 in a collection of Tsvetaeva's poems called Posle Rossii. The collection was translated into English in a 1992 edition as After Russia. The book was published in Paris, as Tsvetaeva was living there in exile at the time, having left her native Russia in 1922 after the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent civil war.

The poem is available in a number of English editions, including a selection of Tsvetaeva's poems translated by Elaine Feinstein under the title Selected Poems (first published in 1971 and revised in 1999).

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Born in Moscow on October 9, 1892, Marina Tsvetaeva was the child of a pianist mother and a father who was a professor of art history at Moscow University. Though well off as a child and adolescent, Tsvetaeva felt alienated and lonely. She had an especially difficult relationship with her mother, who wanted her to pursue a musical career when she much preferred literature.

After her mother died of tuberculosis in 1906, Tsvetaeva was able to concentrate on writing poetry, and she published her first collection of poems, Vechernii al'bom (Evening Album) in 1910 to much acclaim. She was beginning to develop a reputation as an important poet when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917. Feeling herself part of the cultural elite threatened by the revolution, Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922, joining many other Russian intellectuals in exile first in Berlin, then in Prague and Paris.

Though she married another writer, Sergei Efron, in 1912, Tsvetaeva pursued numerous romances with other men and women throughout her life. She did this when separated from her husband during the civil war that followed the revolution as well as when they were reunited in exile. Her lovers and would-be lovers were generally writers, painters, or actors and included the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, although the romantic connection with him consisted almost entirely of letters.

While in Prague in 1923 Tsvetaeva began an affair with another émigré, Konstantin Rodzevich. Like all her affairs, it ended badly, and she felt devastated. Soon after she became infatuated with the literary critic Mark Slonim, who, however, did not return her interest. According to some commentators, it was one or both of these experiences that inspired "An Attempt at Jealousy," which she wrote in Russian in November 1924 as "Popytka revnosti" and later published in her collection Posle Rossii (1928). The collection was translated into English in a 1992 edition as After Russia.

Although he had fought in the White Army against the Communists in the civil war, Tsvetaeva's husband came to sympathize with the Soviet Union and eventually became a Soviet agent. After his involvement in a political assassination became known, he fled France for the Soviet Union in 1937. Tsvetaeva followed him reluctantly in 1939, knowing that the Soviet Union would not be a congenial place for her. However, she was finding herself increasingly alienated in the emigré community in Paris and also had remained close to her husband despite their political differences and her many affairs.

In 1939, both Tsvetaeva's husband and her daughter were arrested by the Soviet authorities. Her husband was later executed. Tsvetaeva meanwhile could not publish her works in the Soviet Union and was seen as a dangerous person to associate with. In her last days she was reduced to seeking work as a dishwasher to support herself and her son.

On August 31, 1941, she committed suicide by hanging. She died in the town of Elabuga, Russia, to which she had been evacuated after the German invasion of the Soviet Union earlier that summer.

POEM TEXT

How is your life with the other one,

  simpler, isn't it? One    stroke of the oar

then a long coastline, and soon

  even the memory of me
 

will be a floating island                          5

  (in the sky, not on the waters):

spirits, spirits, you will be

  sisters, and never lovers.
 

How is your life with an ordinary

  woman?    without godhead?                      10

Now that your sovereign has

  been deposed (and you have stepped down).
 

How is your life? Are you fussing?

  flinching? How do you get up?

The tax of deathless vulgarity                    15

  can you cope with it, poor man?
 

‘Scenes and hysterics    I've had

  enough! I'll rent my own house.’

How is your life with the other one

  now, you that I chose for my own?               20
 

More to your taste, more delicious

  is it, your food? Don't moan if you sicken.

How is your life with an image

  you, who walked on Sinai?
 

How is your life with a stranger                  25

  from this world? Can you (be frank)

love her? Or do you    feel shame

  like Zeus' reins on your forehead?
 

How is your life? Are you

  healthy? How do you    sing?                    30

How do you deal with the pain

  of an undying conscience, poor man?
 

How is your life with a piece of market

  stuff, at a steep price.

After Carrara marble;                             35

  how is your life with the dust of

plaster now? (God was hewn from

  stone, but he is smashed to bits.)

How do you live with one of a

  thousand women after    Lilith?                 40
 

Sated with newness, are you?

  Now you are grown cold to magic,

how is your life with an

  earthly woman, without a sixth
 

sense? Tell me: are you happy?                    45

  Not? In a shallow pit How is

your life, my love? Is it as

  hard as mine with another man?

POEM SUMMARY

The title is interesting for its suggestion that the poem is merely an attempt at jealousy, as if the speaker is not really jealous but has to try to appear jealous for some reason. Perhaps that is the point: the speaker is trying to appear indifferent or nonchalant, as if not caring about her rival, trying to make it seem that her rival is not worth being jealous over.

Stanza 1

After suggesting that her ex-lover's life must be simpler now with another woman, the speaker conjures up an image of rowing, as if the ex-lover is rowing away, gliding on the water, away from the speaker, who is represented as both an island and a coastline. There is a calmness here that belies the storminess to come, perhaps suggesting how easy it was for the ex-lover to leave.

Stanza 2

The speaker at this point seems merely curious to know how long it took the memory of her to disappear, as if this were merely an idle inquiry. At the same time she describes herself as a floating island, floating in the sky, not on the water. Perhaps the significance of the island here is that the speaker is somehow high above, not down below with her ex-lover.

Sarcasm now emerges in the poem, as the speaker suggests that her ex-lover and his new woman will be not lovers but sisters. This seems a jab at her ex-lover's masculinity and also perhaps an expression of hope that what goes on between him and the new woman will not be sexual love but something platonic. The references to them as spirits or souls may also suggest that any love between them will be nonphysical.

Stanza 3

In the third stanza the speaker's feelings become more intense. She describes her rival as ordinary and herself as a sort of god or monarch. Her former lover has abandoned the divine or royal life with her and has gone down to something lower. There is an image of revolution here, of a sovereign being forced from the throne, just as the Russian tsar was forced from his, resulting in a sort of descent not only by the sovereign but by those who overthrew the sovereign; the tsar or queen or spurned woman has been hurt, but the one doing the spurning has been hurt as well, at least in the speaker's view.

Stanza 4

The nature of the hurt is elaborated on in the fourth stanza. The former lover, it seems, must deal with endless banality and commonplaceness with the new woman. The speaker even affects to feel sorry for him. The poem's aim has quickly become to make the former lover feel the speaker's contempt and also to feel that he is paying a tax or a high price for abandoning the speaker.

Stanza 5

The fifth stanza begins by varying the pattern whereby the speaker has been asking more and more insistent and belittling questions. For its first two lines, the speaker allows the ex-lover to speak, though of course it is really the speaker remembering something the ex-lover said, namely, his explanation for leaving, which is that life with the speaker had contained too many emotional upheavals.

Interestingly, the speaker does not dispute the characterization of life with her as one involving emotional upheavals or, to follow another translation, anxiety and discomfort. That perhaps is the price to pay for being with the speaker, a price that she thinks is well worth it, because she after all is goddess-like and her rival is a nobody.

Stanza 6

The rest of the poem builds on this contrast between divinity and commonplaceness, offering a variety of references to divinities from different traditions. These divinities are mostly ways of describing the speaker. For instance, stanza 6 contains a reference to Sinai, which no doubt means Mount Sinai, the place where Moses encounters God in the Bible. The suggestion seems to be that the ex-lover was Moses and the speaker was his God; the speaker even refers to him as the one she chose, just as God chose the children of Israel as his special people.

Yet the ex-lover has turned his back on his God and is making do with an image or an imitation, a delusion perhaps, someone who makes bad food, food that may have seemed more to the ex-lover's taste originally but which now threatens to sicken him. In fact, the speaker suggests that her ex-lover's health in general is threatened; she speaks of a wound or ulcer or pain that he must suffer. The imagery conjures up a sense of actual physical illness. The speaker is perhaps trying to make her ex-lover feel ill.

Stanza 7

Besides illness, the ex-lover is suffering also, so the speaker suggests, from shame. It is just a suggestion, of course, as is everything the speaker says about her former lover. In fact, the things she says are technically not even suggestions, just questions—but every question is heavy with the weight of accusation. In the seventh stanza, the speaker first asks the lover if he loves the new woman and then provides an alternative, wondering if instead he feels shame. The idea here is that someone who mingled with gods should feel shame to have lowered himself to an ordinary woman.

The shame is compared to the reins of Zeus in this stanza, again a reference to a deity, this time one from ancient Greece. The image conjured up is one of Zeus as a charioteer lashing the poor lover, who must be some sort of horse. It is as if the speaker has acquired the power of the sorceress Circe, who is able to turn a man into a beast. This perhaps is part of her revenge, part of her jealousy.

Stanza 8

The speaker here suggests that the ex-lover must be suffering from a bad conscience, presumably for abandoning her. In this stanza she also wonders if he still sings, which may really be a suggestion that he no longer does anything joyful, singing being an example of the joyful things the two of them used to do when they were still together.

Stanza 9

The speaker returns to the notion of price again in the ninth stanza, referring to the new woman as goods from the market which cost too high a price, the price presumably being the vulgarity referred to in stanza 4. The speaker also calls the other woman mere plaster of Paris, whereas she, the speaker, is Carrara marble, a type of marble considered to be of high quality. During the Renaissance Michelangelo used Carrara marble for his famous sculpture of David. This double metaphor, therefore, once again compares the new woman unfavorably with the speaker; the new woman is like some ordinary plaster, as opposed to the fine marble that best describes the speaker.

Stanza 10

The metaphor in the ninth stanza about marble leads into a slight digression in the tenth stanza, in which the speaker talks of a god made from a block, presumably a block of marble; this is a statue she is talking about, one that has been destroyed. It is as if a god once existed, in this case perhaps meaning the whole relationship rather than just the speaker, or perhaps the speaker again is the god. The destruction of the god thus may mean the destruction of the relationship, the divine relationship between the speaker and the ex-lover; or it may mean the destruction of the speaker herself, who is unable to live without her worshipful ex-lover. In a way, both interpretations come to the same thing, for without a worshipper, how can there be a god? It is as if the speaker's whole existence was bound up with that of her worshipful lover, and now that he is gone, she has been smashed to pieces—or at least their relationship has.

The speaker goes on to compare herself to Lilith, in Babylonian mythology a seductive demon and in Jewish folklore Adam's first wife, before Eve. Being like Lilith might not seem entirely positive, but the demonic aspect of the woman seems, at least the way the speaker puts it, a small price to pay for the magic and divinity of a relationship with her. Or perhaps demonic power is something the speaker thinks should be thought appealing.

Stanza 11

In this stanza the speaker again compares her rival to a market commodity or someone of the earth, as opposed to someone with a sixth sense, like the speaker presumably. There is also talk of magic, in most of the translations as associated with the speaker, which again draws a contrast with the supposedly more ordinary woman that the ex-lover is now with.

Stanza 12

The lover, however, has renounced Lilith and her powers and now, according to the speaker, must content himself with a bottomless pit, which sounds like Hell. As the poem draws to a close, the speaker seems almost to feel bad over this possibility, that her former lover may be in a hellish relationship; she uses an endearment in asking her second-to-last question. And her last question suggests that if life is hard for the ex-lover, it is also hard for her. For a moment it seems that the speaker has put aside the vengefulness and spite that seems to be motivating her and is expressing empathy for her old lover's plight.

But then the last phrase of the poem seems an attempt to reestablish the speaker's superiority and distance from her former love. After suggesting that life is hard for both of them, she turns the final question into a statement that she is with another man. This is a hard life perhaps, because she would prefer to be with her ex-lover, but she has moved on and found someone new and thus does not need her ex-lover. It is a dismissive statement, suggesting that the speaker has no need for jealousy because she has turned her eyes in a new direction—and yet of course she has written a whole poem about her ex-lover, such that she may not really be over him. Life must still be hard for her; her new man must not be consolation enough.

THEMES

Jealousy and Abandonment

As the title suggests, the whole poem is about the speaker's jealousy over the ex-lover's abandonment of her for another woman. It is not an entirely original theme for a poem; in Victorian England, Alfred Tennyson, for one, built one of his famous poems, "Locksley Hall," on the basis of his speaker's unhappiness over a romantic rejection. However, whereas Tennyson uses his speaker's jealousy as a jumping-off point leading into discussions of the social and political state of England, Tsvetaeva's poem stays resolutely fixed on the notion of jealousy and abandonment and in stanza after stanza conveys the speaker's feelings of hurt and pain over the situation, feelings only slightly masked by a surface layer of contempt and indifference. Over and over she suggests that she is highly superior to her rival, as if not understanding how her lover could have left her for such a rival. And as a form of revenge for her abandonment, she imagines her lover suffering almost physically and certainly paying an emotional price for choosing another over her.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

Write a poem about feelings of jealousy and abandonment in the wake of a failed romance.
Research the different political movements competing in Russia on the eve of the revolutions in 1917. What happened to them? Did any of them survive outside of Russia? Write a paper detailing your findings, including whether any political movements from before 1917 have followers in Russia today.
Research the different literary movements in Russia in the early decades of the twentieth century. What happened to them? Did any of them influence literary movements outside of Russia? Write a paper detailing your findings, including whether any literary movements from before 1917 exist in Russia today.
Research the mythological figure of Lilith. Find out if she appeared in any other literary works of the era of Tsvetaeva's poem. Write a paper detailing your findings, including the different ways Lilith has been portrayed.

Nostalgia

By implication, Tsvetaeva's poem is a celebration of the past, of a time of majesty, grandeur, and divinity. Her speaker conjures up numerous images of what the relationship of that time used to be like for the departed lover. It was like walking on Mount Sinai with a divinity or being in the presence of royalty; it was like living with the finest marble instead of a cheap imitation or experiencing a time of magic. The present that the speaker imagines for her lover is immeasurably inferior to the divine time to which she keeps referring.

Tsvetaeva's nostalgia, it is noteworthy, does not stem just from the passage of time but from a specific and misguided action. It was the lover's deliberate decision to leave her for an unworthy rival that destroyed the paradise that they had together. Just as Adam and Eve forfeited paradise by an act of disobedience, thus did the dethronement of the sovereign in Tsvetaeva's poem mean the destruction of a past so nostalgically remembered.

Revolution

"An Attempt at Jealousy" is not on the surface a political poem, but it contains political implications especially relevant to Tsvetaeva's own life. The third stanza, with its reference to the overthrow of a monarch, though on the surface referring to the speaker as the monarch, also conjures up thoughts of the Russian tsar, overthrown in Tsvetaeva's lifetime. This poem thus fits in with Tsvetaeva's political nostalgia for a time before the Russian Revolution, in her view a superior time of artistic achievement before the revolutionaries subjected Russia to rule by the masses. It can thus be seen as a poem opposed perhaps to revolution in general but more pointedly to the Russian Revolution in particular.

Commercialism

Indirectly, Tsvetaeva's poem is an indictment of commercialism and ordinary life. She refers to her rival as something bought in the market and speaks of the price or tax her ex-lover must now pay. The life of money and commerce, the life of everyday things, is contrasted with a life of divine magic. Tsvetaeva in real life devoted little time to moneymaking and other mundane activities, as she sought to devote herself to art; this poem expresses the notion that there is a sphere far superior to the everyday world of market goods, ordinary food, taxes, and vulgarity. In this respect the poem is reminiscent of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth's work titled "The World Is Too Much with Us."

Love as Magic and Miracle

Finally, the poem is a celebration of the magic and miracles associated with the speaker and with love. The speaker is able to float in the air; she is or has been a deity or a queen; she had a sixth sense and demonic powers; and the relationship with her was like a walk with God upon Mount Sinai or like a statue of a god. It is not entirely clear whether the speaker is suggesting that she was divine or that the relationship between her and the lover was divine; perhaps both are implied. In any case, the idea is that love with the speaker involved something magical, divine, and perhaps demonic all at the same time. This is perhaps meant to suggest something about the nature of true love or just something about the speaker.

STYLE

Repetition

Tsvetaeva's most obvious poetic device in this poem is repetition. Over and over again, eleven times altogether, the speaker asks the same question of her departed lover: How is your life now with the other woman? The force of the repetition becomes like hammer blows attacking the old lover, building from a fairly innocuous reference to the rival simply as the other woman to more insulting references calling her ordinary or simple or a piece of merchandise from the market or a piece of plaster dust. The movement of the poem is from the asking of neutral questions to the asking of loaded ones. But the point of the matter is not just that the questions become insulting; the very number of questions, the repetition of the questions, becomes an attack in itself, expressing the intense emotions of the speaker by means of a relentless interrogation.

Imagery in Opposition

The poem conjures up a number of images, not all apparently consistent with one another but most tending to depict a glorious, divine past, as contrasted with a mundane, vulgar present; or to put it another way, contrasting the glorious, divine speaker with her mundane, vulgar rival. The floating island in the sky suggests a superior past, with the speaker hovering above; the image of a sovereign being dethroned suggests the royal nature of the speaker and of the relationship with her; walking on Sinai suggests God and a divine experience; Carrara marble suggests a grand work of art, contrasting with cheap plaster; and references to the marketplace create an image of the vulgar hustle and bustle of vendors—the life the lover has chosen in contrast to the more glorious one suggested by the imagery about Sinai and a throne.

The image of the reins of Zeus on the lover's forehead and the reference to an ulcer or wound are somewhat different but still fit in with the theme of jealousy and revenge. They suggest pain and suffering for the lover, something the speaker seems to wish on him.

Only one image in the poem neither glorifies the speaker and the old relationship nor casts aspersions on the rival nor depicts pain for the lover: the opening image about rowing, which seems such a neutral, peaceful image of the lover pulling away from the coastline that is the speaker. Perhaps this neutrality is meant to suggest that the rupture with the old world can seem to be quite peaceful, yet, as the rest of the poem suggests, it may in fact be something catastrophic. Or this image can simply represent the speaker warming up, speaking in neutral tones until her emotions overtake her and lead her into more intense images.

And yet even that opening image of rowing away contains something violent in it, for it is described by referring to the stroke of an oar. The use of the word stroke, found in at least four published translations, though in context just what an oar does in the peaceful act of rowing, does suggest a striking or a blow. Thus, even at the beginning there is a hint of the anger that is to come.

Pointed Metaphors and Allusions

Most of Tsvetaeva's uses of imagery in her poem also serve as examples of her use of metaphor and allusion. To mention Sinai is to allude to the biblical story of Moses and God on Mount Sinai. To speak of the reins of Zeus is to allude to the king of the Greek deities, and the mention of Zeus's reins on the lover's forehead is a metaphorical description of him as some sort of animal, perhaps a horse, pulling a chariot. Similarly, the mention of Carrara marble is both an allusion to a famous building material and also a metaphor in which the speaker becomes this famous and superior building material, while her rival metaphorically becomes much less valuable plaster dust. To call oneself a queen or sovereign is also to use metaphor, as it is to implicitly compare bad conscience to an ulcer or wound.

A special type of metaphor called synecdoche may be at work in stanza 8, when the speaker asks the lover if he still sings. This may simply be a literal question, but singing, which she implies he is no longer doing, could represent something more. In asking if he still sings, she may be asking if his whole relationship is joyful and exultant. The singing, or lack thereof, is thus seen as representing the whole relationship.

Enjambment

More than once in her poem, Tsvetaeva uses enjambment, running a sentence from one stanza into the next. This is not so uncommon a practice in modern poetry, in contrast with more traditional works, in which thoughts and sentences more often end and remain in one stanza. In Tsvetaeva's case, the enjambment may reflect the passion of the poem, which leads to the thoughts overflowing the bounds of the stanzas.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Prerevolutionary Russia

Tsvetaeva lived through difficult times in her native Russia and abroad. During her childhood and adolescence, protests against tsarist rule in Russia culminated first in the failed revolution of 1905 and then in the two revolutions of 1917, the February revolution, in which the tsar was overthrown and replaced with a liberal provisional government, and the October revolution, in which the Bolsheviks or Communists took power, leading to the civil war between the Red Army of the Bolsheviks and the White Army of their opponents.

Before the 1917 revolutions Russia had been a place of ferment in both the political and literary spheres. New political parties sprang up, and the government experimented with representative government, while in the literary sphere the conventional realism of the nineteenth century was challenged by a number of modernist movements, including symbolism, acmeism, and futurism.

Bolshevik Rule

Tsvetaeva did not participate in any political or literary movements, but she did use the freedom provided by the times to experiment with new forms of poetry, making innovative use of words and rhythms. However, after the triumph of the Bolsheviks, literary experimentation was gradually suppressed in favor of socialist realism, one of the reasons Tsvetaeva felt herself to be out of tune with the new Soviet Union created by the Bolsheviks.

The first few years of Bolshevik rule, called "War Communism," were also a time of starvation and poverty for many, including Tsvetaeva, her property having been confiscated. Members of the elite like Tsvetaeva, unless they joined the Bolsheviks, were denounced as bourgeois, in a way a totally inappropriate term for Tsvetaeva, who had no interest in money or material possessions.

Russian Émigrés

Many Russian intellectuals and aristocrats fled the country after the revolution and civil war, establishing émigré communities in Paris, Prague, and Berlin in the 1920s. These communities contained representatives of various prerevolutionary movements and schools of thought, from monarchists and conservatives to liberals and non-Communist socialists. Tsvetaeva found she did not fit in well with such thinkers because she was not inclined to adhere to any movement and would even praise Soviet poets if she admired their poetic abilities, much to the dismay of her fellow Russian exiles.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

1920s: Russia is in turmoil, having just endured a revolution and civil war, and is beginning to pose a threat to the West because it is led by a Communist Party dedicated to the destruction of capitalism.
Today: Iraq is in turmoil, suffering through an ongoing war, and extremist elements now based there pose a threat to the West.
1920s: The Soviet Union establishes a closed society, censoring literature and other works.
Today: With the rise of the Internet, information and literature flow much more freely, though attempts to block the flow of information are still seen in places like China.
1920s: In the wake of World War I, the collapse of empires, and revolution in Russia, intellectuals like Tsvetaeva experiment with new ideas and attitudes and are much freer in their personal relationships.
Today: The freedom that began a hundred years before continues to lead to new experimentation of various sorts in the arts and in personal relationships.

Russia under Stalin

In consolidating their power, the Bolsheviks, especially under Joseph Stalin, repressed dissent and resorted to mass arrests of those labelled counterrevolutionary. They also established a secret police force called first the Cheka and then the NKVD (later to be called the KGB). Tsvetaeva's husband became an agent of the NKVD, but this did not save him when he returned to the Soviet Union, where he was quickly arrested and executed. Upon returning to the Soviet Union herself in 1939, Tsvetaeva found a society filled with fear, even in the arts allowing no deviation from the rules set down by the Communist Party, which essentially meant that Tsvetaeva could no longer publish her works, because she would not conform to the rules. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 as part of World War II, she felt that the situation had indeed worsened, as she now had German bombs to fear in addition to her other hardships, and she also worried that her son would be exposed to danger in the army; he did in fact die in the war.

Prerevolutionary Nostalgia

Tsvetaeva was not a political poet, so much of her work ignores the political upheavals of her day, though she did write sympathetically about the deposed tsar and the White Army and generally expressed support for the prerevolutionary world that vanished after 1917. When it refers to the dethroning of a sovereign, "An Attempt at Jealousy" may be drawing on these feelings of nostalgia for the prerevolutionary era, and in its dismissiveness of vulgarity and ordinariness it may be expressing some of Tsvetaeva's distaste for the idea of rule by the masses advocated by the Bolsheviks. At the same time, Tsvetaeva was no friend to Western commercialism either, another notion that emerges in the poem. However, this work, like many of her poems, is primarily about personal relations rather than historical context or political events.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

Lily Feiler, in her biography Marina Tsvetaeva: The Double Beat of Heaven and Hell, calls the poet "one of the major Russian poets" of the twentieth century. Elaine Feinstein, in her introduction to her translation of Tsvetaeva's Selected Poems, follows the poet Anna Akhmatova in grouping Tsvetaeva with Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, and Akhmatova herself as the four leading non-Soviet Russian poets during the Soviet era. Tsvetaeva also won praise from famous commentators like Joseph Brodsky and Susan Sontag, and with the fall of the Soviet Union, she became an object of study and celebration in Russia, as she had already become in the West.

According to Feiler, from her biography, Pasternak called Tsvetaeva "the greatest and most innovative of our living poets," and even her earliest book of poems was hailed as doing something new in exploring personal, intimate experiences—the sort of approach she takes in "An Attempt at Jealousy" and many other poems. She later won praise from the exiled Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

On the other hand, Soviet commentators often condemned Tsvetaeva. In the early days of the revolution, the Bolshevik political leader Leon Trotsky denounced her for being preoccupied with love and religion, and later the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky denounced her as a counterrevolutionary. By this time she was in exile, however, and winning great acclaim in the Russian émigré community, where she gave readings and found publishers for her books and poetry. However, she managed to antagonize the émigré community by issuing a critical work of her own, "A Poet on Criticism," in which she criticized émigré commentators. She also alienated anti-Soviet circles by praising the work of some Soviet poets like Mayakovsky, while the more conservative critics were put off by some of her literary innovations.

Posle Rossii, the 1928 collection of poetry in which "An Attempt at Jealousy" first appeared in Russian, did not have the success Tsvetaeva would have liked, and it was the last book she published in her lifetime. After her death, her reputation declined in the 1940s but began to recover in the 1950s, even in the Soviet Union. The relaxation of literary controls after the death of Stalin led to the publication of another book of her poems in 1961, with a larger edition coming out in 1965. Meanwhile, poems of hers that were still not permitted to be published openly circulated through underground samizdat, or clandestine literary press operations.

According to Maria Razumovsky in Marina Tsvetaeva: A Critical Biography, Soviet commentators on "An Attempt at Jealousy" debated the identity of the man that Tsvetaeva addresses in the poem. Victoria Schweitzer comments in her biography, Tsvetaeva, that it may in fact not be addressed to a single man but to all past and future lovers, and Razumovsky notes that Tsvetaeva actually sent the poem to several different men with whom she had been involved.

Aside from debating the addressee of the poem, critics have not devoted much attention to "An Attempt at Jealousy." The Modern Language Review critic Barbara Heldt has pointed to the poem as one that "gives us poetic models for female experience" and also provides a "highly disciplined and crafted poetic response to a painful emotion of love irretrievably ended."

CRITICISM

Sheldon Goldfarb

Goldfarb has a PhD in English, specializing in the literature of Victorian England. In this essay, he seeks out the underlying dynamic beneath the surface jealousy, pain, and fantasizing in "An Attempt at Jealousy."

At the end of her analysis of "An Attempt at Jealousy" in Modern Language Review, Barbara Heldt seeks to explain the poem's odd title by saying that the attempt at jealousy fails at the end because the other woman does not really exist for the speaker. This is an odd conclusion to reach, for if Tsvetaeva's poem expresses anything, it expresses jealousy.

Over and over again, Tsvetaeva's speaker attacks the other woman and imagines a horrible plight for her ex-lover. The other woman is ordinary, says the speaker, and like plaster of Paris, not fine Carrara marble or a deity or a queen like the speaker. The ex-lover must be suffering ulcers or wounds and paying a high price in living with this other woman, the speaker says. She wonders if he can be happy; he must be sick of the other woman's cooking, and his forehead must be lashed by the reins of Zeus.

All this speaks of a jealous mind, and indeed the historical record suggests that Tsvetaeva was an extremely jealous person, sensitive to the slightest slight, so it would not be surprising if her poetry reflected this attitude. Indeed, in Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World and Her Poetry, Simon Karlinsky goes so far as to suggest that Tsvetaeva almost deliberately set herself up to be slighted and rejected so as to produce material for her poetry. She would frequently idealize men she was interested in (and women too), attributing to them qualities they did not have. According to Karlinsky, her husband understood the pattern well, calling Tsvetaeva "a creature of passions" who liked to "plunge headlong into a self-created hurricane" of attraction for almost anyone. The passion would then end, and Tsvetaeva would plunge into "an equally hurricane-like despair," followed by ridicule of the former object of desire.

The one twist on this pattern that is seen in "An Attempt at Jealousy" is that the ridicule in this poem is directed less at the former lover than at the rival woman. In the failed romance described in this poem, the focus is less on the wrongdoing of the departed lover than on the shortcomings of the romantic rival. It is in fact a poem all about jealousy, making the title highly ironic.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

Other poems by Tsvetaeva can be found in Selected Poems (1999), translated by Elaine Feinstein. The volume provides a comprehensive overview of Tsvetaeva's work.
Tsvetaeva's writings on poetry have been collected and translated under the title Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry (1992). The essays are translated by Angela Livingstone.
For a much older poetic treatment of a relationship's end, see Michael Drayton's poem "Since There's No Help, Come Let Us Kiss and Part" (1619). The poem's speaker seeks to be calm and not jealous or resentful.
For an eighteenth-century novel about disappointment in love, see Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).
For William Shakespeare's classic work on jealousy, see Othello, written around 1604 and published in quarto form in 1622.
For a fictionalized account of the Russian Revolution by one of Tsvetaeva's friends, see Boris Pasternak's, Doctor Zhivago (1957).
For an enthusiastic account of the Russian Revolution by an American sympathizer, see John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World (1919).
For a highly critical account of the Russian Revolution written on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, see Richard Pipe's The Russian Revolution (1991).

Taken literally, the title would suggest that the speaker feels no jealousy and is having to make an attempt to display some—pretending to be jealous, in other words. But since the speaker is in fact clearly jealous, what she is doing is pretending to pretend. It is not a failure to be jealous, as Heldt suggests, but a disguise of indifference covering up very real jealousy.

Since the poem is permeated by jealousy, it may also be fruitful to consider what balances the jealousy. The corollary to the feelings of rejection and hurt is the nostalgia in the poem for a time when there was no hurt, when there was in fact the opposite of hurt—a time when the lovers walked on Sinai, and there was a god of marble in their lives, a time of magic and perhaps demonic possession, a time of godliness and majesty. Did such a time ever exist? It is interesting that Tsvetaeva's speaker describes this time only in retrospect, after it is gone. One could imagine another sort of poem in which such a paradise of love could first be described while it is happening, but that is not how this poem is written.

For a poem in which such a paradise is indeed described as it seems to happen, one can turn to Alfred Tennyson's "Locksley Hall." In the first part of this poem, the speaker remembers the love he shared with his cousin Amy. He does not simply describe it to contrast it with a time when the love has gone but instead lets it run forward as if it were happening in the present without any shadow of a parting over it. Thus, for at least a few lines the speaker loses himself in a description of love in springtime, with lovers kissing and looking out to sea together.

After a few lines of this in Tennyson's poem the speaker sinks into bitter gloominess, denouncing Amy as false for leaving him for another and sounding much like the speaker in Tsvetaeva's poem. The difference between the two poems, then, is that in Tennyson's it is more possible to believe in a time of love between the speaker and the object of affection; that love is presented as actually happening. In Tsvetaeva's poem, not even a few lines are devoted to the time of paradise; there are just brief allusions to a better time, all harnessed to the service of showing that the present is not as good as the mythical past—mythical in the sense of deriving from old myths, such as those of Lilith and Zeus and the traditions of the Bible, but also mythical in the sense of being of dubious validity. In Tsvetaeva's poem it is hard to believe in the time of true love.

Here, then, is the intersection of Tsvetaeva's life with this poem, and no doubt with other poems by her: In her life, according to her husband and Karlinsky and other commentators, she was constantly falling in love and then having to deal with one failed romance after another. Karlinsky reports that she herself expressed, perhaps with some exaggeration, that she could be in ten relationships at a time and make each lover feel special, but at the same time, as she wrote, "I cannot tolerate the slightest turning of the head away from me. I HURT, do you understand? I am a person skinned alive, while all the rest of you have armor."

It is perhaps fair to say that Tsvetaeva is a poet of hurt, at least in this poem and in many others. As Karlinsky suggests, Tsvetaeva almost sought out hurt so as to have material for her poems. And thus, in trying to understand "An Attempt at Jealousy," it is important not to take the poem entirely at face value. In addition to being a poet of hurt, Tsvetaeva seems to be a poet of idealized fantasy. The reader may wonder how real the paradise was that her speaker alludes to in "An Attempt at Jealousy." In her biography, Feiler notes that when she was in Prague, Tsvetaeva wished she was back in Berlin; when she was in Paris, she wished she was back in Prague. She never wished she was back in Russia, but of course the Russia she might have wanted to return to no longer existed. She seems to have been one of those people ever unhappy with where she is and always imagining that where she used to be was better.

Before leaving Moscow at the end of the civil war, Tsvetaeva met the Communist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who would later denounce her as a counterrevolutionary. Despite their diametrically opposed political views, however, they got along—perhaps because of their commitment to poetry and perhaps because of something similar in their temperaments. What that similarity was may have been a desire to find a paradise in some time other than the present. Mayakovsky, described by Feiler as a "romantic hooligan poet" who yearned to be a Communist, looked to the future to the better society he had convinced himself could be built through Communism. Tsvetaeva, in contrast, looked to the past, generally yearning for the prerevolutionary past and for places she used to live; in "An Attempt at Jealousy" she has her speaker look back to an idealized romance that for some reason is no more.

There is of course a third alternative to the past and the future, and that is the present. In "An Attempt at Jealousy," however, this is not a pleasant alternative. Whereas the past is a time of paradise, the present is a time of vulgarity, illness, shame, and guilt for the departed lover (at least, the speaker hopes that that is what his present is like); and for the speaker the present is a time of remembering a better past and issuing bitter vituperations toward her former love. The present, in other words, is unbearable, and the past is like a refuge. But the past is gone and the speaker can conjure it up only in fragments.

Now, these fragments are very appealing fragments. They speak of grandeur and divinity. They make love seem like paradise. But perhaps the true message to take away from "An Attempt at Jealousy" is not to trust such idealized portrayals of love. Love so portrayed must almost certainly lead to disappointment. The opposition in this poem is between the majestic and divine love of the past and the rejection and abandonment of the present. Tsvetaeva's speaker is mired in this hopeless present with only a probably mythical past to console her. It is perhaps the yearning for myths and paradise that is her problem, combined, one might add, with an excessively admiring view of herself. Seeing oneself as a sort of deity or queen is perhaps not the best way to maintain a relationship with a mere mortal.

One can say that the attitude expressed in "An Attempt at Jealousy" is perhaps not the healthiest one. It is a mixture of hurt, jealousy, and fantasizing. This does not, however, detract from the power of the poem. It is a poem about love, and in love people are prone to feelings of hurt and jealousy, along with fantasizing. This is a poem in the end that perhaps springs from a deeper hurt than is found on the surface—not the hurt of some passing love affair but some earlier pain. In Tsvetaeva's early life, she suffered from an unsympathetic mother and a distant father. She later lived through the privations of the Bolshevik Revolution and War Communism. And throughout, though this may have been a subjective feeling or a situation she helped provoke, she felt alienated and alone, friendless, unsupported. In such a situation, what is more natural than to imagine a perfect love? And what is more natural than to be disappointed in the search for it?

In the Greek myth of Zeus and Semele, Semele, a young maiden, is burnt to a crisp when her lover, Zeus, appears to her in all his true glory. Such are the dangers of loving a deity. Tsvetaeva, according to the reports of her biographers, was something like Zeus in relation to her lovers. She burned them up with her intensity; she was too passionate for them. Bereft of love, suffering and alone, the alienated one seeks much too intensely for love, dooming herself over and over to disappointment and rejection. It is a cycle not peculiar to Tsvetaeva, which explains the power of this poem about doomed love.

Source: Sheldon Goldfarb, Critical Essay on "An Attempt at Jealousy," in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Pamela Chester

In the following review of a collection including "An Attempt at Jealousy," Chester comments on the difficulties of translating Tsvetaeva's poetry.

One of the welcome effects of last year's Cvetaeva centennial celebration is the appearance of several new volumes on the poet and her work. Michael Naydan, with Slava Yastremski as his native informant, has produced a complete translation of Posle Rossii, the last, best, and most difficult of Cvetaeva's poetry collections. The volume includes side-by-side Russian and English versions of the verse as well as notes, commentary, and afterword.

Cvetaeva's lyrics are notoriously complex and obscure, even for the native speaker of Russian. A bi-lingual edition of her poetry is a welcome aid not only for the student of Russian approaching Cvetaeva for the first time, but for the graduate student or researcher probing the rich ambiguities of these poems. As Naydan points out at the outset (xii), some of these poems present almost insuperable difficulties for the translator. A translation of a poem is by necessity an act of interpretation, and by its nature Cvetaeva's verse tends to defy any single interpretation. Naydan's solution is to supply ten pages of annotation, indicating other possible translations, and clarifying some of the many mythological, literary and Biblical allusions.

This combination of translation, Russian text, and notes is ingeniously calculated to draw the bilingual reader into a dialogue with poet and translator. Inevitably there are places where another reader of Cvetaeva will remain unsatisfied; one early example is the translation "a hand/Rustling over silk" (9) for Cvetaeva's phrase "шeлкa/Paзбpacывaющaя pyкa" (8), where the sense of the hand spreading or casting aside the silks (and the contrast with the lips smoothing the silks in the following two lines) is lost, and with it much of the erotic charge of the stanza.

At times, the English translation over-exaggerates the difficulty of the Russian diction: Naydan's neologism "exerted freneticality" (7) renders the standard Russian of "в тpyднoй cyдopoжнocти" (6) (Oжeгoв, CΩoβapь pyccкoso языкa, 10th ed., M., 1973, 715). By contrast, his invented words "transorally" and "transvisually" (161), if not entirely successful, are certainly motivated by Cvetaeva's neologisms "зaycтнo" and "зaглaзнo" (160). One might also quibble with some of his decisions about word order, stanza structure, and enjambment, but on the whole the shape of Cvetaeva's verse is changed remarkably little.

One stated goal of the translation is to make Cvetaeva accessible to non-Russian speakers (xii). Here the translator may have misjudged his audience. His refusal to overinterpret the verse, as some earlier translators have done, honors what he calls Cvetaeva's "telegraphic terseness" (xii), but it results at times in translations so bare that they may be quite misleading to the reader with no knowledge of Russian. "—Sky!—like the sea I color myself into you," a word-for-word translation of "—Heбo!—мopeм в тeбя oкpaшивaюcь" (228-229), may convey less than "with the sea I color myself [to look] like you"; admittedly, this loses the exact parallelism with the following stanza. A more informative translation of "нa coн кpecтил" might be "blessed for the night" or even "put to bed" rather than "baptized the earth into a dream" (66-67). An exotic word like "yataghan" (211) surely merits a note of explanation. Some phrases appear to be simply mistaken, like the translation of "пpocтoвoлocыe мoи" as "My straight-haired ones" (42-43); oddly enough, "bareheaded" does occur in the translation of "Здpaвcтвyй! He cтpeлa … " (17). In "An Attempt at Jealousy," Cvetaeva's faithless lover is told, "You don't have yourself to blame" and her hyperbolic 100,000th woman is scaled back to a mere "one-thousandth."

The problem of reconciling the different gender systems in Russian and English, exemplified in this last phrase, could be solved with a reference in the notes. Often Naydan's translation elides the gender of the Russian. For example, the four words "He тoт.—Ушлo./Ушлa." (8) play on all three genders, but Naydan offers only "Wrong one. Gone./I left." (9). Similarly, a notable shift occurs when the phrase "Kaждaя из нac—Cинaй/Hoчью …" (174) is rendered (by a male translator) simply, "Each of us is Sinai" (175). A refreshingly frank discussion of Cvetaeva's affair with Parnok is included in the afterword. It seems odd, then, that Sappho's sexuality is misrepresented in Note 101 (241); Sumerkin at least notes that this heterosexual Sappho is the stuff of legends (Cvetaeva, Cmuxomβopeнuя u noэмы, t. 3, NY: Russica, 1983, 456). In this case, as in a number of others, the reader is left wishing for more detailed commentary.

In many instances, Naydan finds economical, highly expressive solutions for nearly insoluble translation problems: the chime of "alive," "a lie" for "zhivu", "lzhivo" (220-221) and the laconic "God/Is gratis" for "Besplaten/Bog" (174-175) are among the rewards of reading this collection.

The Afterword is somewhat uneven. The first section begins with an error of fact, minor but misleading: Naydan repeats the common misconception that "Varvara Ilovaisky died prematurely of tuberculosis in 1890" (245) when Cvetaeva's own account in "House at Old Pimen" refers to a blood clot in early postpartum (пpoзa, M., 1989, 131).

It seems that perhaps Naydan was not well served by his editors at Ardis. Misprints such as, "In a letter to Vera Bunina dated March 20, 1928, Cvetaeva announced that the book would soon appear […]. Two months later on March 23 […]" (261), and typographic errors like those in the verse at the bottom of 271 (struchkoi and Vremia; ty menia obmanesh'!), mar the volume unnecessarily.

The Afterword concludes with an excellent discussion of the publication history and a very interesting section on structural and thematic features of Posle Rossii; some points are arguable, but Naydan's discussion of time and space, Biblical and historical themes, and Cvetaeva's exploration of the chronicle structure is insightful and stimulating.

This monumental fruit of the translator's labor belongs in every library which serves undergraduate students of Russian, and offers a thought-provoking reference for the scholar.

Source: Pamela Chester, Review of After Russia, in Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer 1994, pp. 382-86.