Maria Valova

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Maria Valova
“Of Course, You and I Are Sisters...” NATALIA GONCHAROVA AND MARINA TSVETAEVA - THE HIDDEN WORLD OF GONCHAROVA’S POETRY

#2 2018 (59)

“Take Goncharova - she’s never written poetry, she’s never lived poetry, but she understands because she looks and she sees,” the poet Marina Tsvetaeva wrote in 1929, describing Natalia Goncharova’s perceptive appreciation of her poem “To the Herald”. Even though they remained in constant contact in the years 1928-1932, Tsvetaeva was not aware that her artist friend did indeed try her hand at poetry. No doubt she would have found that overlap of brush and the written word intriguing. Today, four complete notebooks and numerous separate handwritten poems are extant, and they make it clear that Goncharova used poetry as a private diary and a means of sketching fleeting impressions. It was also a mode of reflection, a way of searching for a symbol, a colour, or an atmosphere. (Sometimes Goncharova even switched into French to achieve the right tone.) Most of her poems were not dated, with the exception of those written in April and May of 1957, the year when the 76-year-old Goncharova mentioned the idea of publishing her verse in a letter to Orest Rozenfeld, although with little faith in the viability of the project: “Apart from that, there is also something I did for myself, a collection of poems that I am sure will never appear in print.”

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