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 gen-
erally expressed support for the prerevolution-
ary 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 Tsve-
taeva’s distaste for the idea of rule by the masses
advocated by the Bolsheviks. At the same time,
Tsvetaeva was no friend to Western commercial-
ism 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 biographyMarina 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 intro-
duction to her translation of Tsvetaeva’s
Selected Poems, follows the poet Anna Akhma-
tova in grouping Tsvetaeva with Boris Paster-
nak, 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 cele-
bration 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 preoccu-
pied 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 e ́migre ́community, where she gave
readings and found publishers for her books and
poetry. However, she managed to antagonize the
e ́migre ́community by issuing a critical work of
her own, ‘‘A Poet on Criticism,’’ in which she
criticized e ́migre ́commentators. She also alien-
ated 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 com-
ing 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 inMarina
Tsvetaeva: A Critical Biography, Soviet com-
mentators 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 Tsve-
taeva 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.’’ TheModern Lan-
guage Reviewcritic 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 pain-
ful emotion of love irretrievably ended.’’AnAttemptatJealousy