Bohemia as the Homeland of the Soul in the Letters of Marina Tsvetaeva to Anna Teskova

Abstract

The article examines the letters sent by Marina Tsvetaeva to the translator and public figure Anna Teskova, who was one of the few poet’s Czech intimate friends, whom she met during her stay in Czechoslovakia (1922-1925). In the first part of the paper the Author focuses on the echoes of Prague and its culture in this specific correspondence, trying to ascertain to which extent Marina Tsvetaeva was acquainted with the cultural world she lived in: the lack of knowledge of the Czech language and the limited relationships with Prague intellectuals didn’t allow her to get a deep insight of the Czech cultural milieu.
The textual analysis of the letters, though, on the basis of key concepts as “родной”, “родина”, “честь”, confirms the presence of a persistent feeling of Prague-homesickness in Tsvetaeva’s psycho- logical world, which brought her to develop an alternative model of Homeland, substitute to her native Russia and to Germany, which disappointed her after the rise of the Nazi Regime. Through this unique correspondence (including the first part of her Verses dedicated to Bohemia) we gain the certainty that Tsvetaeva discovered in Prague and in the Czech lands an idealized model of a pacific, beautiful and faithful Homeland.