SOURCE: "Two Poems by Marina Tsvetayeva from 'Posle Rossii,'" in Modern Language Review, Vol. 77, No. 3, July, 1982, pp. 679-87.

In the following excerpt, Heldt offers an analysis of "Rasshchelina" ("The Crevasse") and "Popytka revnosti" ("An Attempt at Jealousy"), exploring the "specifically female frame of reference in these poems."

 Power is only Pain—
Stranded, thro' Discipline,…
Emily Dickinson, c. 1861 

'Rasshchelina' ('The Crevasse') and 'Popytka revnosti' ('An Attempt at Jealousy') exemplify a kind of poetry at which the great twentieth-century writer Marina Tsvetayeva excelled—the highly disciplined and crafted poetic response to a painful emotion of love irretrievably ended, culminating in the restoration, though partial or transmuted, of the speaker's self. The strategies that open an impasse and reform an absence into a presence, a split into a unity, have a specifically female frame of reference in these poems. The controlling voice is that of a woman who selects images...