Literary sources of the image of Spain in the works by Marina Tsvetaeva

Abstract

This paper analyzes literary sources of Spanish themes in the poetry of M. Tsvetaeva. The Spanish theme in Russian culture and Russian-Spanish relations have been fruitfully studied for a long time, but insights of this scholarship are rarely applied to Tsvetaeva’s works (generally when speaking about the images of Carmen and Don Juan, or about the Federico Garcia Lorca translations). Despite the fact that there are many works about the reception of different countries by Tsvetaeva, there are no studies analyzing Spain throughout the poet’s work. But Spanish motives appear in one of the first poems of Tsvetaeva, “The Street woke up”, and the last year of poet’s life is related to the translations of Garcia Lorca. For the first time, this paper takes a panoramic view of the author’s Spanish texts and reveals their literary basis. Among the sources identified we find the texts of Spanish literature and folklore that Tsvetaeva read in translation: folkloric songs, plays by P. Calderon, M. Cervantes, F. Garcia Lorca, etc. But the corpus of non-Spanish sources is much more extensive: here we have the works of Russian poets (A. Pushkin, A. Tolstoy, S. Parnok, P. Antokolsky and others) and foreign authors (P. Merimee, V. Sardou, J. Sand, G. Aguilar, O. Wilde and others). We conclude that Tsvetaeva’s image of Spain is a variant of the European Spanish myth. It has a heterogeneous character and is formed by sources of polyethnic origin.