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The dream of the museum began... in a distant time when my father,1 the son of a poor village priest in the village of Talitsy, in the Shuisky district, in Vladimir province, set foot for the first time on Roman stone. At that time he was a twenty-six-year-old philologist, provided with a traveling scholarship by Kiev University to go abroad. But I am mistaken: in that instant was born the resolve to bring a museum into existence, the dream of a museum began, of course, before Rome—in the showery gardens of Kiev and perhaps even in the thickets of Talitsy, in the Shuisky district, where he had studied Latin and Greek by the light of a burning splinter.2 "Now if only I could see it with my own eyes!" And later, when he had seen it, "Now if only others (like him, barefooted and 'splintered') could see it with their own eyes!"

The dream of a Russian museum of sculpture was, I can boldly state, born along with my father. The year of my father's birth is 1846.

* * * * *

The city of Tarusa, Kaluga province. The house called "Pesochnaia." (An old gentry house of a vanished estate now turned into a "summer house".) The Pesochnaia house is two kilometers from Tarusa, entirely isolated, in the woods, on a high bank of the river Oka, with birches the like of which... It is autumn. The last flowers—vividly and diminutively roseate flowers, without a name, with a wonderful smell, recognizable afterwards everywhere and always—are in the lanes. Papa and Mama have left for the Urals to get marble for the museum. The young Asya is saying to the nursemaid: "Avgusta Ivanovna,3 what is a museum? "-"That is the building where will be fishes and snakes, dried out." -"Why?"--"So that the student can learn them." And, rejoicing in the future learning of "the student" and maybe simply taking advantage of my parents' absence, she unexpectedly breaks out into a blinding Tyrolean "yodel." We are writing letters to Mama and Papa. I—am the one writing, the illiterate Asya is drawing museums and Ural mountains, on each Ural peak—one museum. "And here's another Ural, and here's another Ural, and here's another Ural" and, in her diligence drawing out her tongue almost to the edge of her cheek, "And here's another museum, and here's another museum, and here's another museum..." While I, also with my tongue sticking out, dutifully and painstakingly produce: "Have you found the marble for the museum and is it strong? In Tarusa we have marble too, only not strong marble..." But I'm thinking: "Have you found a cat for us— and is it a mountain cat? In Tarusa we also have cats, only not mountain cats." But by the laws of our house, I can't bring myself to write it down.

One splendid morning our whole Pesochnaia house is filled with pieces of varicolored stone: blue, rose, lilac, with brooks and rivers, with whole landscapes. There's one like a hunk of roast beef, and this one here, all bubbly, is like dark blue coffee boiling over. We don't even look at the large, regular square of white, faintly gray, faintly sparkling stone. It's that stone that is the marble for the museum. But the mountain cat, the promised cat, my parents did not bring back.

* * * * *

One of my first impressions of the museum was—the groundbreaking. The word ground-breaking which, like many other words, entered into our life and established itself there independently, without filling out the meaning, or with a different meaning. Mama and Lera are sewing dresses for the ground-breaking. Grandfather4 will come for the ground-breaking from Carlsbad. Please God, let the day of the ground-breaking be good weather. The emperor and both empresses5 will be at the ground-breaking. Finally, one of us (not I, who always distinguished myself by the reverse of curiosity, that is, by an absolute fatalism) says: "Mama, what's ground-breaking?"—"There will be prayers, then the emperor will put a coin under a stone, and the ground will be broken for the museum."—"But why a coin?"—"For good luck."— "And then he'll take it back again?"-"No, he'll leave it."-"Why?"- "That's enough questions." (A coin—under a stone. That was how we buried birds in Tarusa, the ones Vaska bit into. Up above there would be a little cross.) We, of course, were not taken to the ground-breaking, but the day was shining, Mama and Lera set out all dressed up, and the emperor put down the coin. The ground was broken for the museum. And father for three days in a row kept humming the one and only tune of his life: the first three bars of some aria by Verdi.

* * * * *

My first vision of tin- museum was—the scaffolding. We pass through the scaffolding like birds on perches, like goats on promontories, in perfect freedom, height, and emptiness, in a perfect dream... "Now don't you jump that way. Be more careful,

goat!"

Asya and I are up ahead, the grown-ups—father, mother, the architect Klein, and some other people—are following behind. Father's peacefully-joyful narrating voice: "Here will be this, there will be thus-and-such, from here—you'll go through there..." (That "thus-and-such," "through there"—where does father see it all? And how clearly he sees it, he even points with his hand!) Down below, through the lattices of crossbeams—is the black earth; up above, through the same lattices—is blue sky. It seems like it would be as easy to fall upward from here as to fall downward. The museum scaffolding. My first wrench away from earth.

And now another vision. In the yard of the future museum, out in the frost, cheerful black-eyed people are wheeling around huge blocks of marble, higher than they are, blocks that resemble gigantic pieces of sugar, to the sound of rumbling speech made up entirely of r's, voluminous and resonant like that marble. "And those are the Italians; they've come from Italy to build the museum. Tell them 'Buone giorno, come sta!' "6 In answer to the greeting—teeth, whiter than any marble and sugar, in the flesh and blood setting of very grateful smiles...

* * * * *

We children invariably heard the word "museum" surrounded by names: Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, Nechaev-Maltsev, Roman Ivanovich Klein and also Gusev-Khrustalny. The first name makes sense because the Grand Duke was "the patron of the arts," the architect Klein also makes sense (he was the man who built the Dragomilovsky bridge over the Moscow river), but Nechaev-Maltsev and Gusev-Khrustalny must be explained. Nechaev-Maltsev was a very large producer of crystal in the town of Gusev, for which reason the town came to be called "khrustalny" "crystal." I don't know why, whether out of straightforward love for art or simply "for his soul," for the salvation of his soul— (the consciousness of the injustice of money is ineradicable in the Russian soul)—in any case under the tireless and ardent influence-of my father (you might say that father worked on Maltsev the way the Italians worked the marble), Nechaev-Maltsev became the museum's main contributor... (There was even a jest that went around Moscow: "Tsvetaev-Maltsev.")

Nechaev-Maltsev did not live in Moscow and in early childhood we never saw him, but we constantly heard of him. Nechaev-Maltsev was almost a daily routine. "A telegram from Nechaev-Maltsev." "Lunch with Nechaev-Maltsev." "Journey to see Nechaev-Maltsev in Petersburg."... "What can I do with Nechaev-Maltsev?" complained father to mother after each of those lunches, "all kinds of poulards and oysters again... And I don't take even one of the oysters, not even to speak about any Chablis. Now why should I, a village priest's son, have oysters? And he forces me, the villain, he forces me! 'Oh no, my dear dear sir, kindly keep me company!' And what if I do hold back when my heart's bursting from the pity of it: on that hundred rouble note alone—what you could do for the museum! He bargains for every door hinge—what and why—but on his own innards, on those unworthy oysters, he doesn't skimp one hundred roubles. Money out the window! Let them go to me—for the museum! And lunch with him tomorrow, and the day after, so now we'll lunch our way through a whole five hundred. If he'd at least hand me over my share! The most painful thing is that I myself am eating up the museum..."

With the lapse of time my father's principle with Nechaev-Maltsev became: set him down in front of an accomplished fact, that is, a bill. His calculation was right: a final bill—must be paid; a suggestion—must be refused. For a man of business, a bill is destiny. A bill is fate. A request means complete freedom of the will and giving willfulness free play. The whole distance from: "You must" to: "If you don't have to..." All this my father, the most impractical of unbusinesslike people, took into account. And so Nechaev-Maltsev fed my father on truffles, and father fed Nechaev-Maltsev on bills. And always towards the end of lunch, accompanying that same peremptory Chablis, he would say: "Waiter, give him his bill, and me mine, separate checks..."--"And what happened?"--"Nothing. He growled once." But when my father, carried away and forgetting, rushed on ahead of events (the end of a lunch and the completed fact of an order) and said: "It would be good, Julius Stepanovich, to order from abroad..." the alerted Mycenas, without letting him finish, would say: "I can't. I'm bankrupt. The workers... You want me to go bankrupt once and for all? Why this is really some kind of bottomless pit! Let the emperor contribute!..." And the less the produced expense— the more final the backer's refusal. And so with an old man's and millionaire's stubbornness, he never approved certain trifles...

Where are those poods of Tsvetaevo-Maltsevian correspondence, which father, to provide gainful employment, gave to one of his nieces, the round-faced priest's7 daughter and student Tonya to copy out by hand into a huge folio, which poor Tonya, sweating and fretting and not understanding anything (she was a medical student!) woefully named "my bald spot"? I remember that for three months' work the girl received thirty roubles. That's what values were. But that too was the special— the museum!—penuriousness of my father. "She'll earn the thirty roubles and also at least learn what a museum is now and how it's built. It's better than drowning in tea with her friends!"

My father's closest co-worker was my mother, Maria Alexandrovna Tsvetaev, nee Meyn. She carried on all his voluminous foreign correspondence and often, by using his particular epistolary eloquence, by a certain special grace of wit or flattery (with a French correspondent), a line from a poet (with an English one), some question about the children, the garden (with a German)— by using that human touch in a business letter, a personal note in an official communication, and sometimes by simply making a good use of apt words, she would succeed in something that my father might achieve only with labor and quite differently. But the main secret of her success was, of course, not the apt words, which are only aids, but that ardor of the heart without which the gift for words is nothing. And, speaking of her help to father, I am first and foremost speaking about the indefatigability of her spiritual participation, the miracle of a woman's partisanship, the way she entered into everything and emerged from everything—a victor. To help the museum was, first and foremost, to give spiritual help to my father, to believe in him and, when necessary to believe for him too. Thus, from the door handles of the stubbornly resisting Mycenas to the scroll on the column heads, the museum stands in toto on feminine participation. I, the juvenile witness of those years, must state this, for in my place no one will (for no one knows so deeply). When in 1902 she fell ill with tuberculosis and went abroad with the younger children, her

participation was not only not weakened, but was even strengthened—by the whole force of her longing. From Moscow to Genoese Nervi, then to Lausanne, then to Freiburg8 came detailed accounts of each centimeter added to the growing girth and height of the museum. (So too parents, in celebration, mark off a child's growth on a door and in a diary.) And the same kind of letters came from Nervi, Lausanne and so on—loving, inquiring letters. When her health, or rather, her sickness permitted, she took father's commissions around the old town of Germany with which my father had special links, selecting and directing, hurrying and heartening, winning both reductions and smiles. (And to win a smile from a German businessman...) Asya and I didn't forget our gigantic brother either. In every letter, from Lausanne, or from Freiburg, after the description of some tour du lac9 or the walk up the usual hill in the Schwartzwald, would come an added note, at first, because we were so young, completely foolish: "How is Vaska? How is the museum?," but with time more enlightened. Around 1911 I also was drawn into the work, that is, during the summer when we would all come together, I would write father's German letters. (Father knew languages quite well, but since he was self-taught both in writing and speaking he translated—just that—from Russian. Except for Italian, which he knew like his native language and in which he had read during the long years of his youth at the University of Bologna.) I remember as if it were now Hildesheimer Silberfund and Professor Freu. And then what pride beamed out when, in the letter answering such and such an item, at the end, would come the added note: "Grussen Sie von mir Ihrliebeswurdiges und pflichttreues Tochterlein. "10

I carried on father's German correspondence right up to his death (1913).

Now I will tell about his, mother's and all our terrible grief when, in the winter of 1904-05, part of the museum's collection burned (obviously, the wood sculpture which had been ordered in Germany). I think it was at Christmas because father was with us in Freiburg. A telegram. Father silently passes it to mother. I remember her stifled, gulping voice that said, seemingly without the word: "Oh-h!" And father's—she was already very sick at the time—pacifying, submissive, infinitely broken: "No matter. God will help. Somehow." (The telegram, sent in haste, said: the museum is burning.) And his wordless tears, from which Asya and I, who had never seen him cry, turned away in horror.

Mother to the final second remembered the museum and in dying,11 with her last voice, from the last of her lungs, wished father the successful maturation of his fledgling (and hers too!). I think that it was not only us, fully grown, that she envisaged before she died.

* * * * *

About two years before the opening of the museum, they proposed to my father that he move to the official director's apartment which had just been completed. "Just think, Ivan Vladimirovich," said our old housekeeper Olimpievna temptingly, "spacious, quiet, all the rooms in a row, a kitchen right there—we won't have to carry things across the yard; and electricity—we won't have to fill lamps; and a bathroom—you won't have to go to the bathhouse. Everything will be within reach... And this one—could be rented..."—"Rented, rented!" with unexpected irritation father responded. "All my life I've had high standards!..." And, speaking to himself with detachment: "In this house all my children were born... I myself planted the poplar..." And now utterly quietly, almost inaudibly and quite incomprehensibly for the housekeeper: "I have laid down fourteen years of my life on this work... Why do I need electricity?! Assign the apartment to museum workers with r'amilies, you'll have exactly four smaller apartments, good ones... two rooms and a kitchen each..." And that's what was done.

1. The genesis and fate of the four prose pieces that follow provide an illuminating perspective from which we can study the entire body of Tsvetaeva's autobiographical prose of the middle thirties. Without doubt the years from 1933 through 1936 can be termed the "autobiographical period," since Tsvetaeva's most sustained efforts during that time were devoted to recording the story of her family and childhood. Of course, this is also the period in which the two long literary portraits of Voloshin and of Bely were written and the earlier sketch of Kuzmin reworked, but this genre can be said to complement rather than compete with autobiography, for both prose currents sprang from the same source: Tsvetaeva's determination to remember and reaffirm what she herself had seen as an eyewitness. As in the cases of Voloshin and Bely, moreover, the autobiographical project summoned Tsvetaeva through the shock of a reported death. Sometime in the spring of 1933 she received word from her sister Anastasia in Russia that their half-brother Andrei had died in April. By the beginning of August, Tsvetaeva was thoroughly immersed in the writing of a new prose work. It grew organically, stage by stage, and without any preliminary master plan, taking on some of the traits of the Russian genre known as the detstvo or "childhood," and partially adopting the organizational scheme of a family chronicle, but all the while steadily evolving by its own inner rules into a thoroughly original type of autobiography. Tsvetaeva did not prepare an outline. Spurred on by the news of Andrei's death, she simply sat down and began to write. Only when the work was already under way did she begin to request more information atout the older generations from Vera Nikolaevna Bunina, a fellow emigre who had been close to the family. Some of the material from Bunina's letters, and the scenes recovered from Tsvetaeva's own memory, evoked a strong emotional response, and this response, in turn, made itself articulate in poetic and rhetorical forms: in repetitions, paranomastic word-chains, and in an extremely intricate, coherent system of metaphoric and nymic relations. Some of the facts Tsvetaeva learned, however, remained in their original status of relatively raw historical data; they were left untouched or only partially transformed by Tsvetaeva's poetic imagination. And the result is a clear stylistic division of the autobiographical prose into two categories. The longer works display the full panoply of poetic device, whereas the short prose pieces do not go much beyond Tsvetaeva's initial, conscious purpose-to give an accurate, eyewitness account. That purpose appealed to Tsvetaeva's sense of honor and duty, and she was not dissatisfied with her shorter sketches. With hindsight it is not difficult to see that the subject matter of the various prose works must have had its part to play as a main determinant of style.

The first autobiographical prose work, already well under way in early August 1933, was entitled "Grandfather Ilovaisky," the "grandfather chapter" of the as-yet-unnamed family chronicle. Tsvetaeva sent out the manuscript of "Grandfather Ilovaisky" on August 21. By that date a second manuscript was already in progress-a prose work on the Alexander III Museum, an art museum planned and built by Tsvetaeva's father. Such a work could serve as the "father chapter" of the family chronicle, and in fact, that term now appears for the first time in the letter to Bunina of August 26: ". . . on Tuesday, so they told me at the editor's office, my 'Alexander III Museum' will appear, the family chronicle of its coming into being before it was opened. ..." The next work in the autobiographical series was the piece on her mother, "Mother and Music," written sometime in the second half of 1934 (after the portrait of Bely was finished). It was followed late in 1934 by "The Devil," which deals in part with Tsvetaeva's older half-sister Valeria, and eventually in 1936 by "My Pushkin," which describes Tsvetaeva's own "birth"— actually a second mythic birth— as a poet. Tsvetaeva seemed to be following a perfectly logical (even if unplanned) order: grandfather, father, mother, older sibling, and her own birth. But in the long run the "father chapter" fell out of the family chronicle altogether, and the great prose autobiography has four and not five parts. What happened to the prose on Tsvetaeva's father and on his museum? Tsvetaeva's correspondence gives a partial answer, for it reveals certain key moments in the process through which the autobiographical project grew away from a conventional family memoir and towards a more mythic conception of a family ruled by Fate. The ongoing autobiography changed, page by page, but the "father chapter" stayed as it was, remaining primarily an historico-memoiristic sketch. Very likely Tsvetaeva's memories of her father simply did not rouse in her the painfully strong, conflicting emotions evoked by her relationship with her mother. Tsvetaeva's work on the "Grandfather Ilovaisky" chapter, moreover, and the vision that began to emerge as new pages were added, turned the chronicle towards the story of the female rather than the male line of descent. After Tsvetaeva had sent "Grandfather Ilovaisky" to the publishers, Vera Niko-laevna Bunina supplied her with new information about the Ilovaisky family. She had known well the daughters of old Ilovaisky by his second marriage. The destiny of the women in that family took a stronger and stronger hold on Tsvetaeva's imagination: she found many correspondences between the fate of the Ilovaisky women and that of her mother's female ancestors. By the end of August, editors had twice rejected "Grandfather Ilovaisky." And it is fortunate for us and for literature that they did.

Back on Tsvetaeva's desk the manuscript was now reworked, reconceived, and subjected to the mythologizing intensity of Tsvetaeva's new vision. The manuscript now became the story not of grandfathers, grandmothers, and their offspring, but of a House ruled by Fate itself, a House which imprisoned and killed its women. The final title of the work reflects that mythic vision, "The House at Old Pimen," for the emphasis was now on the structure itself, a stone, tomblike, enclosing set of walls. Meanwhile the prose on the Alexander III Museum went its own way. Tsvetaeva wrote the story of the museum in three parts, the exact contents and divisions of which can be only tentatively reconstructed on the basis of the various short prose pieces which were eventually published. Part I, the "family chronicle of [the museum's] coming into being "before it was opened," was not published in late August 1933 as Tsvetaeva had informed Bunina. Apparently the editors of The Latest News rejected it. On September first Tsvetaeva writes that she is finishing the second part. Part III was to be, in Tsvetaeva's words, 'The Opening, and father's death (indissolubly interconnected)." Of Part II, Tsvetaeva only tells Bunina that "In my second part father emerged as his living self; I hear his voice, probably you too will hear it." We may cautiously suppose that Part II contained much of the material related to the immediate preparations for the museum opening: the sewing of the girls' dresses, the ordering of Professor Tsvetaev's uniform, the gift of the laurel wreath. That material, probably in a much revised form, now appears in the prose pieces "The Uniform" and "The Laurel Wreath" (both of them published in a Russian version translated from French autographs), and in the last five pages or so of "My Father and his Museum"in the journal Encounters (Vstrechi), 2 (1934), in Paris. Two other short pieces also have a connection with the Alexander III Museum, but there is virtually no information about them in Tsvetaeva's published correspondence: "The Intended," written in Russian and dated September 1933; and "Charlottenburg," the autograph of which is in French and dated 1936.

The three French manuscripts of 1936 belong to a period when Tsvetaeva hoped to earn money by writing her prose in the popular feuilleton form and selling it to French periodicals. No doubt Tsvetaeva drew on the pages about her father and his museum which she had written back in August-September 1933, but she must have reworked them to make each stand as a relatively self-contained unit. But judgments about these three works must be highly tentative since their only published text is a Russian version produced by Tsvetaeva's daughter, Ariadna Efron. "The Tower of Ivy," written in Russian and dated 1933, stands quite apart from the rather intricate history of the "Museum Pieces." It belongs with the set of Tsvetaeva's writings on Rilke and on German culture.

One further observation may be added as a kind of postscript to the history of Tsvetaeva's sketches of her father. In "The House at Old Pimen," the first chapter of her autobiographical masterpiece, Tsvetaeva compares the relationship between her mother and Old Ilovaisky to the relationship between Sofia Nikolaevna and her father-in-law, Grandfather Bagrov, in Sergei Aksakov's Family Chronicle (1856). For all the differences in style and notwithstanding the contrast between Aksakov's realistic approach and Tsvetaeva's mythical vision, there are important parallels in the way both authors deal with the older generations, so important that the Family Chronicle might well be considered a semi-conscious model for Tsvetaeva. Both Aksakov and Tsvetaeva depart from a strictly factual autobiographical account. Both devote much attention to a strong male figure of the grandfather generation. And for both of them the father remains a somewhat shadowy figure, whereas the mother's temperament and sensibility is shown to have had an important influence on the fate of the next generation.

2. A slender stick of burning wood was used for illumination in households which were too poor to afford candles or kerosene.

3. Avgusta Ivanovna vas a German-speaking nursemaid from Dorpat (now Riga) in Latvia, a region on the Baltic Sea to the northwest of central Great Russia. She lived in the household during most of Tsvetaeva's childhood and figures in all the autobiographical prose works-mainly as a continuing source of her charges' exasperation.

4. Alexander Danilovich Meyn (1836-1899), Tsvetaeva's grandfather on her mother's side. "He died when I was seven years old," Tsvetaeva wrote to Bunina, "I remember him very well, as also, incidentally, everything and everybody from the age of two..." (Letter to V. N. Bunina, August 6, 1933, N.P., p. 409.)

5. The reigning Emperor and Empress were Nicholas II (1868-1918) and his wile Alexandra. Before her marriage, Alexandra was Princess Alix of Hesse; she was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. The other empress referred to here is Maria Fyodorovna (formerly Dagmar of Denmark), the wife of the previous Tsar, Alexander III (1845-1894), and the mother of Nicholas.

6. Italian. "Hello, how are you!"

7. Tonya is the daughter of Professor Tsvetaev's oldest brother, Peter Vladimirovich, who became a priest like his father. (See Note 6 to "A Captive Spirit.") Unlike their Roman Catholic counterparts, priests of the Eastern Orthodox Church were allowed to marry and raise families.

8. During their years abroad Marina and Asya lived in three different countries. In 1902-03 they lived with their mother in a Russian pension in Nervi, Italy. The next year, 1903-04, they were sent to a French school in Lausanne, Switzerland. The year 1904-05 was spent at a German school in Freiburg, Germany. The winter of 1905-06 was spent in Yalta in the Crimea where Maria Alexandrovna's disease took a final turn for the worse. The mother returned with her daughters to the Tsvetaev summer home in Tarusa in June 1906.

9. French. "A visit to a lake."

10. German. "Send my greetings to your estimable and dutiful daughter."

11. Maria Alexandrovna died in Tarusa on July 5, 1906.