- Essays
- On literature
- Tsvetaeva
- The theme of the Motherland in Tsvetaeva’s work
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva is one of the most controversial and attractive figures in Russian poetry of the Silver Age. Having loved Russia as much as anyone else, by the will of fate Tsvetaeva lived for fourteen years in Paris, and upon returning to her homeland she realized that the years of emigration had not passed without a trace. Everything has changed - power, orders, laws. That is why the poetess’s lyrical works about the Motherland are filled with longing for the past - sometimes subtle, and sometimes simply tearing the soul apart.
Perhaps one of Marina Tsvetaeva’s most powerful poems about Russia is “Longing for the Motherland.” It is in the lines of this work that all the bitterness and pain of a person who finds himself far from home is felt. Filled with sadness, hopelessness and even a gradually increasing indifference to everything that is happening, the poem seems to reflect all the feelings and experiences of the poetess during that incredibly difficult period of life, making readers shudder internally with the realization of how cruel fate can be towards a person.
I believe that it is impossible not to notice that Tsvetaeva’s lyrics on the theme of love for the Motherland have another side - a truly patriotic one, glorifying the strength and courage of the Russian people. For example, the poem “You will not die, people!”, filled with energy and power, can provide truly strong support in a difficult life situation. A laconic, but very accurate work helps to perk up, and the clear comparisons that Marina Ivanovna uses (“clean like crystal”, “hot like a pomegranate”) allow you to better and more fully feel Tsvetaeva’s mood while writing this poem.
Marina Tsvetaeva's works about the Motherland are very different. Each of them contains a special feeling that is well known to each of us - it can be loneliness, pride in one’s country, nostalgia, and regret about the past that will not return. Tsvetaeva’s poems seem to penetrate into the most hidden corners of the reader’s soul, leaving their imprint there. In my opinion, this is the special feature that makes Marina Ivanovna’s lyrics on the theme of the Motherland truly unique.
Essay "Motherland" in Tsvetaeva's lyrics
Marina Tsvetaeva carried her love for the Motherland throughout her life; she dedicated many works, which mention all her boundless love for the country in which she was born and raised. She liked everything that was connected with Moscow, because the poetess was born in this city.
Marina Tsvetaeva, like the artist who mixes a palette of colors, so in her poems she unites her love for the Motherland, people, and poetry. In every work of Tsvetaeva one can feel her character, her love for the Russian word, traditions, nature and Russian culture. The poetess treated everything connected with her Motherland with awe and love; she could not help but love all the beauty that surrounded her.
When in 1922 Marina Tsvetaeva was forced to leave Russia and go abroad following her husband, her poetry changed. Tsvetaeva’s poems show how much she misses her Motherland, its endless fields and meadows and the bewitching beauty of Russia. She really missed Russian patriotism abroad, because she was there completely alone among strangers, in a foreign land.
The poetess recalled the beauty of the fields at dawn and how pleasant it smells when only the first rays of the sun touch the wheat. Tsvetaeva considers Russia her own mother, who fed and raised her. She really misses the entire Russian people, who know how to love and give themselves entirely to their Motherland, if necessary. She is separated by many thousands of kilometers from her native Russia, about which she constantly writes.
Being far from her homeland, Tsvetaeva still follows everything that happens in her native country. This is how a poem appears about the Chelyuskinites, of whom the poetess is proud and glorifies them in her poem.
Although Tsvetaeva was far from her homeland, she never forgot about her Russian land, which warmed the poetess just by the thought of it. She really liked that Russia is a very unusual country and enormous in its beauty. Tsvetaeva bequeaths to her son that he must get to know such a vast and huge country as Russia and love it, just like she does.
In her poem, she encourages her child to respect and honor the Motherland, which has given him so much. First of all, Tsvetaeva is grateful that she was born in such a beautiful country and was able to see many beautiful places. She greatly respected and honored everything that was connected with her Motherland, and urged everyone to never betray the Motherland.
For 11th grade
Images and symbols
The poem “Motherland” is written in the first person, which allows you to create a psychological portrait of its lyrical heroine. She has features common to all Tsvetaeva’s lyrics: she sees the world as a game of contradictions, clashes of incompatibles, expressed by antonymic pairs: distance - near, homeland - foreign land. Tsvetaeva's heroine emphasizes the paradox of her situation, trying to convey the unnaturalness of exile.
The mention of the “Kaluga hill” also adds autobiography to the image of the heroine of the poem. This image is associated with Marina Tsvetaeva’s memories of her childhood in Tarusa, a city in the Kaluga region, where her family’s dacha was located on the high bank of the Oka River. This reference supports the unattainably beautiful motif of the house.
The image of the homeland in Tsvetaeva’s work is often animated, endowed with its own will. In this poem it is not present in a tangible and visible way, as in Akhmatova’s “Native Land,” but as an idea that wounds the heart of the lyrical heroine. To denote it, Tsvetaeva chooses the word “distance” - denoting both space, breadth, and distant space. We see how the once familiar image of Russia loses details in the memory of the lyrical heroine, the lack of which is compensated by intertextuality: the line “but even from the Kaluga hill it is revealed to me” is consonant with the refrain in “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”: “O Russian land! You’re already over the hill!”
16 pages, 7524 words
Comparison of the creativity of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva
... The prefix “ras” in this poem has a special meaning. It is the skillful use of it that helps the poetess convey the feeling of separation and disconnection. Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva are original poetesses and very different, but... both poetesses did not accept or understand the revolution. Akhmatova sought in her poems to escape politics into the world of human feelings and relationships, while Tsvetaeva turned to the distant past, ...
Means of expression
The paths used in the poem “Motherland” are varied and individual: Tsvetaeva makes aesthetic discoveries in each poem.
- The most common epithets in the text are: “unyielding tongue”, “to the highest stars”, “natural” distance. They not only decorate the work, but also introduce new meanings into it through associations. Thus, the epithet “far away land” convinces the reader that the homeland is seen by the lyrical heroine as almost impossible, as if a fairy-tale place, and at the same time, the connection with the traditional poetic form of folk art reminds of national originality.
- Metaphors are also of great importance: “I poured distance on my forehead”, “I will sign with my lips on the scaffold” - in the last phrase the metaphor is based on the contrast of images of the scaffold and lips, execution and kiss - this metaphor enhances the impression of the internal conflict of the lyrical heroine.
- Comparisons serve to strengthen connections within the figurative system: “distance, innate as pain,” “doves of water.”
- Enjambements enrich the rhythmic and intonation structure of the text, bring variety to a single iambic rhythm: phrases that freeze at the end convey an excited intonation, a slightly confused, rapid pace of the heroine’s speech: “So much the homeland and so/Rock that everywhere, through all...”. In addition, the enjambment in the fourth quatrain shifts the emphasis to the word “Home!”, as if torn off from the previous line and highlighted by a caesura within the verse.
Author: Ksenia Kotchenko
Essays
Marina Tsvetaeva is a poetess who had to live abroad most of her life. At first, she studied abroad, and later, after the revolution, Tsvetaeva emigrated with her children and husband, leaving the borders of Russia. But who then thought that terrible melancholy would cover her with its blanket and the poetess would not only dream of returning to her native land, but also dream of her Motherland. In order to somehow ease her soul, to calm her longing for her Motherland, Marina Tsvetaeva began to express her thoughts on sheets of paper, and most often these were works where the theme was the Motherland in Tsvetaeva’s poems.
Return. Moscow
In 1939, Tsvetaeva returned to Stalinist Moscow. As she herself writes, she was driven by the desire to give her son a homeland. It must be said that from birth she tried to instill in Georgy a love for Russia, to convey to him a piece of this strong, bright feeling of hers. Marina Ivanovna was sure that a Russian person could not be happy away from his Motherland, so she wanted her son to love and accept such an ambiguous Fatherland. But is she happy to be back?
The theme of the Motherland in Tsvetaeva’s works of this period is the most acute. Returning to Moscow, she did not return to Russia. It’s a strange Stalinist era with denunciations, boarded up shutters, general fear and suspicion. It’s hard and stuffy for Marina Tsvetaeva in Moscow. In her creativity, she strives to escape from here into the bright past. But at the same time, the poetess extols the spirit of her people, who went through terrible trials and did not break. And she feels like a part of him.
Tsvetaeva loves the capital of the past: “Moscow! What a huge hospice house!” Here she sees the city as the heart of a great power, a repository of its spiritual values. She believes that Moscow will spiritually cleanse any wanderer and sinner. “I’ll be happy where I’m dead,” Tsvetaeva says about the capital. Moscow evokes sacred awe in her heart; for the poetess it is an eternally young city, which she loves like a sister, a faithful friend.
But we can say that it was the return to Moscow that ruined Marina Tsvetaeva. She could not accept reality, disappointments plunged her into severe depression. And then - deep loneliness, misunderstanding. Having lived in her homeland for two years after her long-awaited return, she voluntarily passed away. “I couldn’t bear it,” as the poetess herself wrote in her suicide note.
Leitmotif
Marina Tsvetaeva, who spent a considerable part of her life in exile, is rightfully considered a Russian poetess. And this is not without reason. Many researchers confirm that the work of this witness to the terrible turning points in Russian history is a chronicle not only of love, but also of the Motherland at the beginning of the 20th century.
We can absolutely say that Marina Tsvetaeva loves Russia. She passes through all the disturbing, ambiguous events, analyzes them in her work, and tries to develop a clear attitude towards them. Including delving into ancient history (“Stenka Razin”).
The theme of the White Guard is also alive in her work. Marina Ivanovna did not accept the revolution; she was horrified by the Civil War.
Poem by Marina Tsvetaeva Motherland
One of Marina Tsvetaeva’s wonderful poems is “Motherland”. When analyzing Tsvetaeva’s poem “Motherland,” you understand how sad the poetess was in a foreign land, how strongly her heart yearned to go home to Russia. Here in the poem the poetess appears before us in the image of a lyrical hero who is eager to go home, yearns and remembers his country with a great feeling of love. Wherever the hero of the work was, it constantly “opened up before him - Dal, the distant land! A foreign land, my homeland."
Analyzing the poem “Motherland” by Tsvetaeva briefly, we can note that the poetess uses antitheses, epithets, oxymoron, anaphora, and rhetorical appeal. With the help of these techniques, these means of expressiveness, Tsvetaeva conveys to us her feelings and emotions, her mood and longing for her homeland as accurately as possible, and we take every line, every word as close to our hearts as possible, experiencing it together with the lyrical hero.
Composition
The last verses of the first and final quatrains give the work “Motherland” a ring composition: the epiphora “..., my homeland!” focuses the reader's attention on the movement of thought as the artistic expression develops: embedded in similar syntactic constructions, “Russia”, “foreign land”, “pride” turn out to be identical.
- The first lines of the work are a call to think about frozen, long-known words that become useless when the connection with the Fatherland is severed. It is no coincidence that a simple truth is uttered by a certain “man” - a peasant whose life is connected with the land: he sees in it the source of life, cannot imagine himself without it.
- The second quatrain reveals the depth and horror of the lyrical heroine’s separation from her homeland.
- The third is dedicated to the eternal, all-surpassing spiritual connection with the abandoned land. In this part, the Motherland becomes a character and makes an appeal to the lyrical heroine. The author highlights the inexorability, the inevitability of the mutual attraction of a person and a place: “The distance that has alienated me from nearness” - in this line we see that the everyday reality of emigration is overshadowed, pushed aside by the memory of what remains far away, in Russia. These memories accompany the heroine everywhere.
- The only couplet in the structure of the text seems to slow down the flow of thoughts, becoming a turning point - the heroine responds to the whirlwind of memories, accepts it. This brings the reader to the last quatrain - the climactic exclamation, in which the lyrical heroine says that Russia is both birth and death for her.
Russia
Discussing the theme of the Motherland in Tsvetaeva’s work, we note that her works have a strong feminine element. For her, Russia is a woman, proud and strong. But always a victim. Tsvetaeva herself, even in emigration, always considered herself part of a great country and was its singer.
Biographers admire the independence, strong and proud spirit of Marina Tsvetaeva. And her perseverance and courage were drawn precisely from her ardent and enduring love for the Fatherland. Therefore, the theme of the Motherland in Tsvetaeva’s poetry is rightfully considered one of the leading ones.
It’s amazing how emotionally powerful the poetess’s works about the Motherland are! Nostalgic, tragic, hopeless and painfully sad. But, for example, “Poems about the Czech Republic” is her declaration of love for Russia and its people.
