Marina Tsvetaeva's “I keep repeating the first line.”: a dialog with the prototext (Arseny Tarkovsky's “The table is laid for six.”)

The history of the treatments of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poem “I keep repeating the first line.”, answering to Arseny Tarkovsky’s “The table is laid for six”, yields mainly analyses of intertextual connections of the two poems and exploration of biographical relations between the poets. This article offers a version of an analysis and interpretation of Tsvetaeva’s text in its form-content unity determined by Tsvetaeva’s set for a dialog with Arseny Tarkovsky’s text. The main vector of Tsvetaeva’s poem’s reading in this article is from poetics and semantics of its discoursive texture to its content structure. A special attention is given to the poetics and content of the polemical paraphrasing of the prototext and the poetics of addressation. The motifs of the text editing and life / death editing, the numerical leitmotif “seven”, changes in the character of the author’s modality, a lyrical heroine’s role gradation (uninvited, self-invited, summoned) are studied in the process of analysis. The genre features of an antistrophe, a literary apocryphn, a miracle, and of “the last poem”, which is part of the mortal genres system, are defined. Two different mise-en-scènes discernible in the poem’s composition are singled out and compared. Allusions related to the miracle of resurrection created by the lyrical heroine (St. Grail, Golgotha) are revealed. When necessary, some contexts (biographica and historical-literary) commenting on the process of the poem’s analytical perception and interpretation are introduced. At the end of the article conclusions is made that the addressed content of the poem contains Tsvetaeva’s silent application for poetic reincarnation.