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Abstract:

The relevance of the research is caused by the need to reconstruct the perception of Marina Tsvetaeva’s early poetry in the literary criticism of the 1910s, while taking into account modern approaches in literary studies. The purpose of the study is to determine the conditionality of certain assessments and interpretations of Tsvetaeva’s poetry by the literary position of critics and their attitude towards women’s creativity in general. The novelty of the approach lies in the fact that the analysis of the reception of Tsvetaeva’s early poetry is refined by taking into account the gender specificity of Russian critical thought, as well as ideas about female subjectivity in Russian culture. Both well-known articles about Tsvetaeva and less well-known ones are used for this analysis. We pay particular attention to women’s magazines, which published reviews and surveys of women’s literature. It is demonstrated how, on the one hand, Russian criticism showed interest in the possibilities of women’s poetry and its advantages over male literature and how, on the other hand, this trend was significantly weakened by pointing out its usual shortcomings and weaknesses. The vast majority of critics considered Tsvetaeva’s early collections Evening Album and Magic Lantern within the framework of the discussion about women’s creativity and approached their assessment in terms of compliance / non-compliance with two polar ideas: according to the first of them, female creativity is fundamentally different from the male one (more intimate, emotional, etc.) and requires special evaluation criteria, and according to the second, the author’s gender is not decisive and the female text should be approached with general literary criteria.