something similar in their temperaments. What
that similarity was may have been a desire to find
a paradise in some time other than the present.
Mayakovsky, described by Feiler as a ‘‘romantic
hooligan poet’’ who yearned to be a Communist,
looked to the future to the better society he had
convinced himself could be built through Com-
munism. Tsvetaeva, in contrast, looked to the
past, generally yearning for the prerevolutionary
past and for places she used to live; in ‘‘An
Attempt at Jealousy’’ she has her speaker look
back to an idealized romance that for some rea-
son is no more.
There is of course a third alternative to the
past and the future, and that is the present. In
‘‘An Attempt at Jealousy,’’ however, this is not a
pleasant alternative. Whereas the past is a time
of paradise, the present is a time of vulgarity,
illness, shame, and guilt for the departed lover
(at least, the speaker hopes that that is what his
present is like); and for the speaker the present is
a time of remembering a better past and issuing
bitter vituperations toward her former love. The
present, in other words, is unbearable, and the
past is like a refuge. But the past is gone and the
speaker can conjure it up only in fragments.
Now, these fragments are very appealing
fragments. They speak of grandeur and divinity.
They make love seem like paradise. But perhaps
the true message to take away from ‘‘An Attempt
at Jealousy’’ is not to trust such idealized por-
trayals of love. Love so portrayed must almost
certainly lead to disappointment. The opposi-
tion in this poem is between the majestic and
divine love of the past and the rejection and
abandonment of the present. Tsvetaeva’s
speaker is mired in this hopeless present with
only a probably mythical past to console her. It
is perhaps the yearning for myths and paradise
that is her problem, combined, one might add,
with an excessively admiring view of herself.
Seeing oneself as a sort of deity or queen is
perhaps not the best way to maintain a relation-
ship with a mere mortal.
One can say that the attitude expressed in
‘‘An Attempt at Jealousy’’ is perhaps not the
healthiest one. It is a mixture of hurt, jealousy,
and fantasizing. This does not, however, detract
from the power of the poem. It is a poem about
love, and in love people are prone to feelings of
hurt and jealousy, along with fantasizing. This is
a poem in the end that perhaps springs from a
deeper hurt than is found on the surface—not
the hurt of some passing love affair but some
earlier pain. In Tsvetaeva’s early life, she suf-
fered from an unsympathetic mother and a dis-
tant father. She later lived through the privations
of the Bolshevik Revolution and War Commu-
nism. And throughout, though this may have
been a subjective feeling or a situation she helped
provoke, she felt alienated and alone, friendless,
unsupported. In such a situation, what is more
natural than to imagine a perfect love? And what
is more natural than to be disappointed in the
search for it?
In the Greek myth of Zeus and Semele,
Semele, a young maiden, is burnt to a crisp
when her lover, Zeus, appears to her in all his
true glory. Such are the dangers of loving a
deity. Tsvetaeva, according to the reports of her
biographers, was something like Zeus in relation
to her lovers. She burned them up with her inten-
sity; she was too passionate for them. Bereft of
love, suffering and alone, the alienated one seeks
much too intensely for love, dooming herself over
and over to disappointment and rejection. It is a
cycle not peculiar to Tsvetaeva, which explains
the power of this poem about doomed love.
Source: Sheldon Goldfarb, Critical Essay on ‘‘An
Attempt at Jealousy,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cen-
gage Learning, 2009.Pamela Chester
In the following review of a collection including
‘‘An Attempt at Jealousy,’’ Chester comments on
the difficulties of translating Tsvetaeva’s poetry.
One of the welcome effects of last year’s
Cvetaeva centennial celebration is the appear-
ance of several new volumes on the poet and
her work. Michael Naydan, with Slava Yastrem-
ski as his native informant, has produced a com-
plete translation ofPosle Rossii, the last, best,
and most difficult of Cvetaeva’s poetry collec-
tions. The volume includes side-by-side Russian
and English versions of the verse as well as notes,
commentary, and afterword.
Cvetaeva’s lyrics are notoriously complex
and obscure, even for the native speaker of Rus-
sian. A bi-lingual edition of her poetry is a wel-
come aid not only for the student of Russian
approaching Cvetaeva for the first time, but for
the graduate student or researcher probing the
rich ambiguities of these poems. As Naydan
points out at the outset (xii), some of these
poems present almost insuperable difficulties
for the translator. A translation of a poem is byAnAttemptatJealousy