Bells and Cupolas: The Formative Role of the Female Body in Marina Tsvetaeva's Poetry

Abstract

Like many other Russian women writers, Marina Tsvetaeva did not merely include women's language and physical experience in her poetry; they were central to her concern with poetry and poetic creation. These elements of her work have in recent years evoked an interest from women readers and feminist scholars of Russian literature which is reflected in the number of studies devoted to aspects of her work. Antonina Gove discusses the presence and chronological development of female roles in Tsvetaeva's poetry; Anya Kroth illustrates the importance of gender and specifically androgyny in Tsvetaeva's construction of a dichotomous world-view. Barbara Heldt's landmark study of women in Russian literature, Terrible Perfection, devotes several pages to Tsvetaeva as an autobiographer and a woman poet liberated from the “split selves” of her predecessors.