Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892-1941)
Autograph poem, 'Popytka komnaty'. 1926
Autograph manuscript poem, ‘Popytka komnaty‘ (‘An attempt at a room’), n.p., n.d. [St Gilles-sur-Vie, June 1926].

In Russian. 158 lines (of 207) on two pages, 255 x 199mm, closely written in two columns on blue paper, two lines on p.2 cancelled and rewritten, one other word cancelled on p.1, blue pencil lines dividing columns, blotted light blue ink figures at upper and lower margins.

Steny kosnosti sochteny
Do menya. No — zaskok? sluchaynost'? —
Ya zapomnila tri steny.
Za chetvortuyu ne ruchayus'.

Autograph manuscript of ‘Popytka komnaty‘: apparently the first poetic autograph of Tsvetaeva to appear at auction. The brilliant, surrealist ‘An Attempt at a Room’ is one of a series of poems prompted by Tsvetaeva’s intense epistolary relationship withy two other poets, Rainer Maria Rilke and Boris Pasternak: its direct inspiration was a dream of Pasternak’s in which, as he wrote to her on 20 April 1926, ‘I was with you in a happy, translucent, endless dream…in a bright, immaculate hotel’. The poem, opens with an uncertain attempt to reconstruct that room (‘I remember three walls. / I cannot vouch for the fourth’), in which the poet could summon up an encounter with the addressee — though the room gradually dissolves in the course of the poem.

The present text comprises 158 lines out of 207 in the published version: it omits lines 123-124 (‘Veter, veter, nad lbom — kak styagom Podymayemyy nashim shagom!’) and lacks the last 47 lines, which were presumably on a second leaf; its division into sections (numbered I-IV) is also a distinctive variant. The completed poem was originally sent in a letter to Rilke on 6 June 1926; it was first published in the journal Volya Rossii (Prague. 1928. № 3). Tsvetaeva is considered one of the greatest of all Russian poets of the 20th century. Any autograph material by her is scarce (ABPC and RBH record only three lots of autograph letters), and we have traced no record at international auction of any autograph poetic manuscript, let alone for a major poem such as this one.

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