The New Year’s Letter of Marina Cvetaeva : What Manuscripts can bring to Poetical Study
La Lettre du nouvel an de Marina Cvetaeva : l’apport du manuscrit dans l’étude poétique
Abstract
In 1927, Marina Cvetaeva wrote the New Year’s Letter in memory of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the most important poems in her creative thinking. Our study is built on a double approach at the intersection between the text and the manuscript. Cvetaeva’s archive provides us with an interesting material, including ail the drafts and the fair copy. Our method is based on the one hand on genetic criticism, which considers the drafts as an independent object, and on the other hand on Russian textology, which is oriented toward the establishment of scientific editions of texts. We also refer to the poetics of verse of Mixail Gašparov and to the structuralist method applied to manuscripts by Jurij Lotman. Our study is first and foremost a poetical study but it takes into account the transformations and movement of the poem during the time of its creation to show the dynamics of poetical discourse, and put forward a genetic poetics or a poetics of writing.