A Tale of Sonia
MI Tsvetaeva
The Story of Sonia
“The Tale of Sonechka” tells about the most romantic period in the biography of Marina Tsvetaeva – about her Moscow life in 1919 – 1920. in Borisoglebsky Lane. This is the time of uncertainty (her husband has no information from whites for a long time), poverty (her daughter – one eight, another five – starving and ill), persecution (Tsvetaeva does not hide that she is the wife of a white officer, and deliberately provokes the hostility of the winners ). At the same time, this is the time of the great crisis, in which there is something romantic and great, and behind the triumph of the cattle there is seen the true tragedy of the historical law. The present is meager, poor, transparent, because the material has disappeared. The past and the future are clearly visible. At this time, Tsvetaeva met with the same as she, a pauper and romantic youth – the studio Vakhtangov, which ravish the French Revolution,
The main characters in the story are a charming young actress Sonechka Golliday, a girl-woman, a friend and confidante of Tsvetaeva, and Volodya Alekseyev, a student in love with Sonechka and bowing before Tsvetaeva. A huge role in the story is played by Alya – a child with surprisingly early development, the mother’s best friend, a writer of poems and fairy tales, an adult diary of which is often cited in The Tale of Sonechka. Younger daughter Irina, who died of hunger at the age of five, became for Tsvetaeva an eternal reminder of her involuntary guilt: “she did not save.” But the nightmares of Moscow life, the sale of manuscripts, rationing with rations – all this does not play a significant role for Tsvetaeva, although
Sonechka – the embodiment of the beloved Tsvetaeva’s female type, later revealed in dramas about Kazanova. It is a bold, proud, invariably narcissistic girl, whose narcissism is still nothing compared to eternal love for an adventurous, literary ideal. Infantile, sentimental and at the same time endowed with a full, feminine knowledge of life, doomed, dying, unhappy in love, unbearable in everyday life, Tsvetaeva’s favorite hero combines the features of Maria Bashkirtseva (Tsvetaeva’s youth), Marina Tsvetaeva herself, Pushkin’s Maruli – but courtesans gallant times, and Henrietta from the notes of Casanova… Sonechka is helpless and defenseless, but her beauty is victorious, and intuition is unmistakable. This woman is a “pair of exeliance”, and that is why all ill-wishers give her charm and mischief. The book by Tsvetaeva, written in difficult and terrible years and conceived as a farewell to emigration, with creativity, with life, imbued with excruciating longing for the time when the sky was so close, literally close, because “not for long after from the roof to heaven” (Tsvetaeva lived with daughters in the attic). Then through everyday life, the great, the universal and the timeless shone through, through the thinned fabric of being, its secret mechanisms and laws showed through, and any epoch easily gushed with the time, Moscow, the turning point, on the eve of the twenties.
In this story, there are Yuri Zavadsky, even then a dandy, selfish, “man of success,” and Pavel Antokolsky, the best of the young poets of Moscow at the time, a romantic young man composing a play about the Infantile dwarf… In the fabric of “The Tale of Sonechka” “White nights” of Dostoevsky, for the hero’s self-forgetful love for an ideal, unattainable heroine is primarily self-giving. The same dedication was the tenderness of Tsvetaeva to the doomed, omniscient and naive youth of the end of the silver age. And when Tsvetaeva gives Sonechka her very, very, very last, precious and unique corals, in this symbolic gesture of giving, giving, giving thanks to the whole unquenchable Tsvetaeva soul with its thirst for sacrifice.
And the plot, in fact, no. Young, talented, beautiful, hungry, untimely and conscious of this people converge on a visit to the eldest and most gifted of them. Read poetry, invent stories, quote favorite stories, play etudes, laugh, fall in love… And then the youth ended, the silver age became iron, and everyone left or died, because it always happens.
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