to be jealous, in other words. But since the
speaker is in fact clearly jealous, what she is
doing is pretending to pretend. It is not a failure
to be jealous, as Heldt suggests, but a disguise of
indifference covering up very real jealousy.
Since the poem is permeated by jealousy, it
may also be fruitful to consider what balances
the jealousy. The corollary to the feelings of
rejection and hurt is the nostalgia in the poem
for a time when there was no hurt, when there
was in fact the opposite of hurt—a time when the
lovers walked on Sinai, and there was a god of
marble in their lives, a time of magic and perhaps
demonic possession, a time of godliness and
majesty. Did such a time ever exist? It is interest-
ing that Tsvetaeva’s speaker describes this time
only in retrospect, after it is gone. One could
imagine another sort of poem in which such a
paradise of love could first be described while it
is happening, but that is not how this poem is
written.
For a poem in which such a paradise is
indeed described as it seems to happen, one can
turn to Alfred Tennyson’s ‘‘Locksley Hall.’’ In
the first part of this poem, the speaker remem-
bers the love he shared with his cousin Amy. He
does not simply describe it to contrast it with a
time when the love has gone but instead lets it
run forward as if it were happening in the present
without any shadow of a parting over it. Thus,
for at least a few lines the speaker loses himself in
a description of love in springtime, with lovers
kissing and looking out to sea together.
After a few lines of this in Tennyson’s poem
the speaker sinks into bitter gloominess,
denouncing Amy as false for leaving him for
another and sounding much like the speaker in
Tsvetaeva’s poem. The difference between the
two poems, then, is that in Tennyson’s it is
more possible to believe in a time of love between
the speaker and the object of affection; that love
is presented as actually happening. In Tsvetae-
va’s poem, not even a few lines are devoted to the
time of paradise; there are just brief allusions to a
better time, all harnessed to the service of show-
ing that the present is not as good as the mythical
past—mythical in the sense of deriving from old
myths, such as those of Lilith and Zeus and the
traditions of the Bible, but also mythical in the
sense of being of dubious validity. In Tsvetaeva’s
poem it is hard to believe in the time of true love.
Here, then, is the intersection of Tsvetaeva’s
life with this poem, and no doubt with other
poems by her: In her life, according to her hus-
band and Karlinsky and other commentators,
she was constantly falling in love and then hav-
ing to deal with one failed romance after
another. Karlinsky reports that she herself
expressed, perhaps with some exaggeration,
that she could be in ten relationships at a time
and make each lover feel special, but at the same
time, as she wrote, ‘‘I cannot tolerate the slightest
turning of the head away from me. I HURT, do
you understand? I am a person skinned alive,
while all the rest of you have armor.’’
It is perhaps fair to say that Tsvetaeva is a
poet of hurt, at least in this poem and in many
others. As Karlinsky suggests, Tsvetaeva almost
sought out hurt so as to have material for her
poems. And thus, in trying to understand ‘‘An
Attempt at Jealousy,’’ it is important not to take
the poem entirely at face value. In addition to
being a poet of hurt, Tsvetaeva seems to be a
poet of idealized fantasy. The reader may won-
der how real the paradise was that her speaker
alludes to in ‘‘An Attempt at Jealousy.’’ In her
biography, Feiler notes that when she was in
Prague, Tsvetaeva wished she was back in Ber-
lin; when she was in Paris, she wished she was
back in Prague. She never wished she was back in
Russia, but of course the Russia she might have
wanted to return to no longer existed. She seems
to have been one of those people ever unhappy
with where she is and always imagining that
where she used to be was better.
Before leaving Moscow at the end of the
civil war, Tsvetaeva met the Communist poet
Vladimir Mayakovsky, who would later
denounce her as a counterrevolutionary. Despite
their diametrically opposed political views, how-
ever, they got along—perhaps because of their
commitment to poetry and perhaps because ofBUT PERHAPS THE TRUE MESSAGE TO TAKE
AWAY FROM ‘AN ATTEMPT AT JEALOUSY’ IS NOT TO
TRUST SUCH IDEALIZED PORTRAYALS OF LOVE. LOVE
SO PORTRAYED MUST ALMOST CERTAINLY LEAD TO
DISAPPOINTMENT.’’AnAttemptatJealousy