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Arkatova Anna E.,
Doctor of Philosophy, PhD of University of Illinois (USA);
Associate Professor of the United International College,
Hong-Kong Baptist University;
Centre of Foreign Languages and Cultures (China)
e-mail: arkatova_anna@yahoo.com
The article is devoted to the interpretation of the image of the “devil” in the Marina Tsvetaeva’s autobiographical prose. As a rule, the devil trope was viewed by scholars outside its phonetic connotations and the verbal context as a whole. The essays “Devil” and “My Pushkin”, however, are distinguished by deep intertextual connections with Tsvetaeva’s youthful poem “My verses, which I wrote so early”, where the ‘devil’ is a direct bearer of a poetic speech, as in ‘my poems’ — ‘little devils’. The poetic meanings generated by this image are actualized in the above-named essays. The lexical pair ‘devil — poem’ becomes an overarching trope through which Tsvetaeva’s prose and poetry start to mirror each other. Such a reading reduces the infernality of this image by removing it from an anti-Christian discourse. The devil trope also generates a meaningful connection to the personality of Aleksandr Pushkin and his monument at Moscow’s Tverskaya Gates: devil — Pushkin-statue — poem.
Keywords: Tsvetaeva, Pushkin, devil, monument, poem, splashes, wine, bare, black
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