Beyond the Noise of Time
Readings of Marina Tsvetaeva's Memories of Childhood
Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature, No. 35


By Karin Grelz
July 2004
Almqvist & Wiksell
ISBN: 9122020586
184 pages, 6 ˝" x 9 ˝"
$75.00 Paper Original


This is a Ph.D. dissertation. Although quite a few researchers have pointed to the significance of the childhood theme in Tsvetaeva's work, no systematic analysis of her work has been done from this perspective. Nor have her childhood reminiscences been treated as a thematically consistent whole, but have rather been read as instances of the poet's prose in general.

The present study examines Marina Tsvetaeva's memories of childhood in the context of her work and in the context of the cultural and political reality to which these reminiscences refer and in which they were written - i.e., Russia around the turn of the century and the Russian émigré world of 1930-1937. The study also touches upon the symbolic and allegorical dimension of the texts - Tsvetaeva's "otherspeak" in her prose.

It is shown that the central scenes of these texts author's narrative of childhood also appears to have been a suitable medium for articulating controversial aesthetic statements and taking a stand for a historical past and literary tradition that at the time seemed doomed to oblivion.

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