The problem of “women’s writing” in M.I. Tsvetaeva’s lyrics: language, body, violence

The article suggests an interpretation of M.I. Tsvetaeva’s lyrics through the categories of “women’s writing” (“ecriture feminine”, Helene Cixous). “Ecriture feminine”, or women’s writing, as a bodily utterance, is a distinctive feature of Tsvetaeva’s verse. But in the case of Tsvetaeva this particular style becomes unique on the background of the literary tradition of the first third of the twentieth century. Tsvetaeva’s writing is deeply traumatic and consists in constant violence against herself and her body, realized by dissection and deformation of language forms. Moreover, the elaboration of what we call mature and aggressive Tsvetaeva’s lyrics required a difficult and long way to find her own voice, which Tsvetaeva herself defined outside of gender, class and other identifications. The path to this non-gender definition was accomplished through self-denial, first of all, denial of oneself as a carrier of female sex. To put and resolve this problem, the entire literary path of Tsvetaeva is outlined precisely in the perspective of changing and rethinking her own gender, re-understanding shifts in her corporeal self-estimation. Hence the reasons for the autoaggressiveness of Tsvetaeva’s writing. Tsvetaeva, while taking the writing process as a struggle, reproduces in the very structure of the verse this fierce contradiction, where the body, language and gender, being identified, tend to self-annihilation. Women’s writing in this sense aims precisely to eliminate all the femininity out of the text. These hypotheses are based on the material of intimate biographical and memoir confessions and testimonies of Tsvetaeva herself and her contemporaries, on excerpts from Tsvetaeva’s texts of various periods, as well as on the study of the conflictiveness of Tsvetaev’s writing on the example of the cycle “The Table”.