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Reading Letters Summer 1926: Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, Rainer Maria Rilke - Ploughshares

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In the summer of 1926, three poets who wished to meet, but couldn’t, wrote letters to one another. Their correspondence was in Russian and German. Its tone was by turns ecstatic and elegiac. The subject was distance or what, in his best-known poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” Robert Hass calls “longing. . . because desire is full / of endless distances.” Flat broke and finding it impossible to return to Stalinist Russia, the thirty-four-year-old Marina Tsvetayeva was living in France with her husband and two children, getting by on a Czech fellowship that would soon be withdrawn. Attempting to recover from a spiritual and creative crisis, the thirty-six-year-old Boris Pasternak languished behind in Moscow, with his own family, trying to prove to himself and to others that he was a real poet. Disaffected and suffering from a mysterious illness wrongly self-diagnosed as loneliness, the fifty-one-year-old Rainer Maria Rilke was preparing to leave his roses and empty thirteenth-century ston

In the summer of 1926, three poets who wished to meet, but couldn’t, wrote letters to one another. Their correspondence was in Russian and German. Its tone was by turns ecstatic and elegiac. The subject was distance or what, in his best-known poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas,” Robert Hass calls “longing. . . because desire is full / of endless distances.” Flat broke and finding it impossible to return to Stalinist Russia, the thirty-four-year-old Marina Tsvetayeva was living in France with her husband and two children, getting by on a Czech fellowship that would soon be withdrawn. Attempting to

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