Vol. 8 No. 5 · 20 March 1986
pages 9-10 | 3748 words
Women are nicer
John Bayley
- Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, her World and her Poetry by Simon Karlinsky
Cambridge, 289 pp, £27.50, February 1986, ISBN 0 521 25582 1
- The Women’s Decameron by Julia Woznesenskaya, translated by W.B. Linton
Quartet, 330 pp, £9.95, February 1986, ISBN 0 7043 2555 1
Trotsky, who had a certain wit, even in literary matters, thought that women wrote poetry for only two reasons: because they desired a man and because they needed God, ‘as a combination of errand boy and gynaecologist ... How this individual, no longer young and burdened by the personal bothersome errands of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and others, manages in his spare time to direct the destinies of the universe is simply incredible.’ Trotsky’s view of God was as conventional as his view of women. All tyrannies with a new spiritual pretension, from Zealots and Anabaptists to the Ayatollah, want to keep women in their old place, and the Bolsheviks were no exception. After the first heady days, with Madame Kollontai preaching free love, and poetry and drama doing what they pleased, the Soviet Government discovered that it needed censorship as much as, or more than, any other repressive system. ‘Dictatorship, where is thy whip?’ inquired Pravda. A charmingly candid demand, which shows, among other things, that the Soviet system was not so hypocritical then as it has since become.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 8 No. 10 · 5 June 1986
From Simon Karlinsky
SIR: I was delighted and honoured to read John Bayley’s generous review of my book, Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, her World and her Poetry (LRB, 20 March). There are, however, two statements ascribed to me in that review which I never made or implied. One is that Marina Tsvetaeva had a ‘tempestuous affair’ with Natalie Clifford Barney, ‘the wealthy and elegant Amazon of the Parisian Thirties’. All that I said was that Tsvetaeva appeared on one occasion at Barney’s literary salon and that she later wrote an essay in French, addressed to Barney. I do not see how these two events qualify as ‘an affair’, tempestuous or otherwise.
The other misreading is the statement, attributed to me, that Tsvetaeva’s fellow émigrés in Paris thought of her as ‘a Dostoevskian infernal woman junior grade’. These words do appear in my book (p. 86). They refer not to Marina Tsvetaeva but to her friend, the actress Sophia Holliday, with whom Tsvetaeva associated in Moscow before emigrating to the West. The phrase is my own description of Holliday’s behaviour, as reflected in Tsvetaeva’s memoir about her, ‘The Tale of Sonechka’. After studying Tsvetaeva’s life and writings for twenty-five years, I cannot think of anyone whose temperament was less Dostoevskian or less infernal than hers.
Simon Karlinsky
University of California, Berkeley
John Bayley writes: My deepest apologies to Professor Karlinsky for these misunderstandings. His brilliant book does so much for Marina Tsvetaeva, and I am sorry to have accidentally distorted, in two particulars, the portrait he gives of her and of her work.
