From the beginning, however, the central protagonist of the poem was the stairs, around which a whole world revolves, the world of poor, sick and hungry people in the slums. And it revolves in “a fan of steps” around a central axis, for the stairs in the poem are spiral (винтовая) as Tsvetaeva planned from the start: “A spiral staircase,” she specifies in her notes for the poem. (quoted by Shumerkin, Marina Tsvetaeva. Stikhotvoreniia i poemy, IV/ 378-79) Another important attribute of the stairs that Tsvetaeva retained from the earliest drafts is their dynamism: “The stairs,” she notes, “are always flying, never at rest.” (ibid)

During the summer when Tsvetaeva finished Stairs, she was involved in her epistolary intimacy with Pasternak and Rilke, and she apparently saw the poem as somehow connected with Rilke and her persistent thought of losing him to death. She eventually wrote Pasternak in February 1927 that Stairs was written “in order to free myself from concentrating on him – in the here and now.” (Marina Tvetaeva. Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, Moscow, 1994-1997, VI/269) The most palpable connection the finished poem appears to have with Rilke and Pasternak, however, derives from its philosophical underpinnings, the poet’s meditations on the thing and its relationship to the word, about which she often commented in her letters to both poets.

Poem of the Stairs can be divided into six parts of varying length; each part is delineated by a dominant rhythmic pulse, metrical pattern, and theme. The intense polyrhythmicality of the poem calls to mind the musical style pioneered by Igor Stravinsky in the 1910s, and the social message of the poem, most apparent in part one, has an obvious Marxist ring. Therefore, the poet is quite right to characterize the music of her stairs as “Marxist clamoring in Stravinsky’s cast.” In addition, some of the visual imagery in the poem has a dreamlike, surrealist quality that suggests some of Salvador Dali’s pictures, specifically his upended, wavy pianos. Although Dali and his art have no overt, ascertainable connection to Poem of the Stairs, his surrealistic manipulations of the piano as a living thing, and even his notion of the piano as a “lyric appendage,” do recall Tsvetaeva’s perceptions of the piano when she was a child, at least as she reconstructs them in her autobiographical prose piece, Mother and Music, 1934. Indeed, I am convinced, and hope to demonstrate in this chapter, that Tsvetaeva’s childhood relationship with the piano, her mother’s instrument, provides a heretofore unnoticed, but valuable autobiographical subtext to the remarkable music imagery and sound texture of Poem of the Stairs, especially its first, longest, and originating part. But, before delving into the specific connections between Stairs and Mother and Music, I shall create a context for them by summarizing the Poem of the Stairs and briefly discussing the symbolism of stairs in general as it applies specifically to the poem.

Part one of Stairs describes a day in the life of the spiral backstairs in a Paris tenement, from morning when the tenants leave for work down them until night when they return home up the same stairs. The quasi-animateness of the stairs in part one foreshadows the philosophic program the poem articulates, starting in part two, of things as sentient beings. The stairs are described in terms of their skeleton, or construction (e.g. they shake, wobble, totter); their voices, or the sounds they make (e.g. squeaky, creaky, quacking, crackling); their appearance and feel (greasy, dripped-on, slippery); and their motions, or life force (cascading to Hades, speeding). Yet, despite the fourteen different adjectives used to characterize the stairs, they remain hard to visualize, especially as a spiral shape. The ambiguity of their representation appears intentional, however.

At the beginning of the poem, the poet defines the stairs as the sort found in any building where people suffer from insomnia. Presumably, this means, buildings where the residents are poor and have too many problems, or work too many jobs, to get a good night’s sleep. But this hardly helps the reader visualize the stairs. To blur their image further, the poet adds that the stars are the sort that constitutes a “cascade to Hades” for the people who use them. While the reader understands what this means metaphorically about how the users of the stairs live their lives, the vision of the stairs as a cascade to Hades seems almost to contradict the serpentine slither of a spiral shape. This contradiction remains in force through most of part one, in which there is only one reminder that the stairs are spiral, that is, that they coil around an iron newel: “Seeming in Hades wound, / red-hot the ironbound / spiraling newel.” Although these three lines (136-38) are hardly a model of clarity, they are nevertheless helpfully linked, through the phrase “in Hades,” to the “cascade to Hades” image of the stairs at the beginning of the poem. The “spiral” of the stairs will, moreover, replace the stairs themselves at the beginning of part two, after which their spiral status is far less doubtful.

What is never in doubt is that the stairs are back-stairs and that they lead a life of pure instrumentality. They exist to be used by people and host a range of human activities and habits: kissing, fondling, quarreling, rushing, coughing, spitting, eating, carrying out and carrying in. Part one moves with the daily routine on and via the stairs (na lestnitse is the operative phrase) until the daily life of the stairs quiets down in the dead of night, and another life, the real life of such things, quickens.

The first three stanzas of part two are elliptical and abstract as the poet tries to express the special significance of night for things, or the thing, in general. Night is the time, she says, when things “confess,” “desire to express themselves,” suffer a “fit of high-flown language,” and “want to become straight.” Among the things wishing to straighten out are the spiral backstairs, which are curved against their will by the wall-casing humans have built around them. “You think the staircase is – / curved by its wall-casing? / Night: time of prayerfulnesses:  / Curves want elongating.”

In the fourth stanza of part two, the poet underscores the moral nature of things (their honor), which motivates their desire for “straightlinedness,” or truth: “Things’ honor is viable. / I see a lie as a / bro-ken straight line.” Because things possess honor (which has been mortgaged to the uses people put things to), and because, in the poet’s view, “a lie is a broken straight line,” a curved thing (a screw or spiral, both denoted by vint) is by definition false, and its honor makes it desire to become true, or go straight. A screw desires straightening into the nail it originally was, and spiral stairs want to stretch up into the straight up-and-down stairs they originally were.

The rest of part two expands on the idea of things wanting to reacquire their true being or prelapsarian purity. The asphalted, horribly neglected and deformed courtyard, for example, “raves about flowers, berries, and the suburbs.” Things want their basic selves back, they are like Jews who are sick of being Christian converts and want to sport their side-locks. The aboriginal power of natural (essential) things contends with the manmade parodies and refinements of those things until the poet imagines an inevitable explosion: The divine elements of fire and water still alive within manmade heating and plumbing systems will burst the prisons man has crafted them into and assert their true godly nature: “Fire, coal-heap’s prisoner: / “I was god and will be him!” // What’s with the faucets, then? / “God fell, and I’ll rise as him!”

In part three of Stairs the poet inquires into how essential things got into their sad, oppressed and false condition in the world of men, and answers her own questions by rewriting the story of Original Sin as a fable of man’s Original Craft against the Thing, basing it on pre-Socratic philosophical principles. Like Thales, Tsvetaeva holds that all things possess souls and are alive and that everything was originally of the gods. But, into this paradise, man dreamed up and introduced through craft (deception and design, i.e. fabrication) “the most calumnious of lies, the inanimate object.” Similarly to the pre-Socratic philosophers, Tsvetaeva distinguishes animate or essential things from inanimate, or soulless artificial objects. As essential things she cites: the poet (I), chalk, iron, sand, straw, flax, fire, trees, cliffs, water, and Jacob’s Ladder. Their false, refined or crafted variants are: bourgeois, propertied people (you), tiles, iron filings, glass, mattresses, rope, coal as fuel, boards, stones, faucets, and spiral backstairs.

Tsvetaeva’s hatred of objects and object accumulation (of which she wrote to Pasternak) informs the poet’s diatribe in Poem of the Stairs against the conspicuous consumers who love them:

Man’s first deception, the Original Craft, so to speak, against the living thing came about one day in paradise when a tree innocently offered man an apple, and man cut the tree down, and mountains showed man their ores and man blew the mountains up. But things learned their lesson and have, ever after, “fought breakage with breakage.” The poet offers as proof a number of common mishaps that people take for accidents, but, the poet knows, are willful acts of sabotage by the original things still alive at the core of people’s possessions and furnishings. For example, a man walking down-stairs, leans on the banister, which suddenly gives way. This is not a case of accidental death, but of a thing’s revenge. Another, Bulgakov-style accident: a stone unpredictably falling on a passerby’s head, doesn’t just happen, the poet argues, because “stones demand heads” in revenge for man’s destruction of cliffs.

In order to protect their property and themselves against such “accidents,” affluent people buy insurance; they try to insure everything, the poet mocks, “down to tin colanders.” This proves how alienated rich people are from nature and the true, divine nature of things, for they don’t see the irony in trying to insure one’s “house from Hephaestus,” one’s “yacht from Poseidon,” or all of one’s possessions together in an umbrella policy against Zeus. Rich people are so alienated from the divine core of real things that they don’t realize the one kind of insurance they need is not for their things, but against them: “Boat-bays, yachts, stock options, jackets – / they lack but one insurance package: / contra-property with no strings: / Fire, insuring one from things.”

Part four takes up the theme of “paupers’ things,” the only human belongings that are not, in the poet’s view, really possessions. Paupers’ things are the man-made things closest to their natural prototypes; unlike rich people’s possessions, they are naturally unprepossessing. They are so old, so worn, so rickety and fragmentary that they belie the name of things. To apply the optical imagery that controls this part of the poem, paupers’ things are eyesores: “Poverty’s fractioned furnishings! / All – of what? – a quarter, a third. / Clearly long since, they interred-these-things! / Just to look at you makes me hurt!”

The poet opines that a rich woman, eyeing paupers’ things, would simply arch her brow in horror that such things can even exist, let alone be someone’s possessions. When an eye looks in such horror, continues the poet, it, too, “is an object.” She avers that such a soulless human eye is so lacking spirit that by comparison “a basin is spirit, a tub of lye – soul.” The poet swears that she, and all poets, knows what the stare of such a spiritless eye feels like, an eye that sees poets as “lower than a soap-boiler.”

At the end of part four, the poet provides readers with a way of determining the purity of genuine paupers’ things: They are things that “cannot be checked as baggage,” for to check them would be like checking “a husband, or a son.” Finally, the most reliable test of paupers’ things is that “they burn cleanly and fast.”

As foreshadowed by the mention of “fire insurance against things” at the end of part three, and clean burning paupers’ things at the end of part four, Stairs concludes in a massive conflagration (in parts five and six) that consumes the poor people, their tenement, and their spiral backstairs, destroying “the living death” of their lives but rewarding them with “real life after death: “In exchange for living / death, a post-death livable!.” Such a fate, “paradise for a moment’s choking,” is not only, presumably, the envy of rich people without Tsvetaevan fire insurance, but expresses the poet’s essentially negative attitude to life as she articulates it in every one of her long poems, namely: the only salvation from living is death.

In mundane terms, the fire in the poem is started by unsupervised children playing with matches. But the real, poetic cause of the fire lies in language’s abhorrence of contradictions, as in the pairing of words that can’t be paired (e.g. “things” and “poverty”): “Paupers’ things – a fanciful span of / words. That match threatens to burst! / Things and poor – palpable scandal. / But the tongue will pair the absurd!” Something is logically needed to resolve the disparity created by speaking about poverty and possessions in the same breath. The needed equalizer turns out to be fire, or more properly, the word for fire, for, “to name a thing is to give it substance,” as Tsvetaeva wrote to Pasternak in a May 1926 letter. The fire (огонь) provides what is wanting in the lives of poor people in the poem, answering each of their urgent needs. Poor people are unclothed, their “nakedness seeks a covering,” and the flames provide a “cloak” for nakedness. Poor people live in cramped quarters, “crowdedness seeks space,” and fire collapses the ceilings of the attics where it starts, allowing stretch room for the cramped souls who hunkered beneath them. Politically and morally speaking, the righteous cause of the poor seeks a platform, even if it is a spontaneous auto de fe. Last, but not least, the pallid inhabitants of tenements seek a suntan.

The poem ends with the poet imagining and making real, if only for a moment, all the positive changes effected by the fire: the tenement’s eternally dirty floors are licked clean by flames; all filth is incinerated; the honor of real things is saved; enslavement of the poor to the rich ended; the poor go directly to paradise, and they finally get a reliable heating system. The clouds of foul air that persistently hung over the courtyard, dissipate; the laundry finally dries; the courtyard itself is transformed into a water-meadow, an aspen tree comes back to life, fields of rye and flax are magically resurrected from crusts of bread and laundry lines. Most significantly, rainbows can be seen like the angels in Jacob’s dream ascending and descending the former backstairs which have straightened up into a dream-way connecting earth and heaven; the poem has been written and as the next day begins in mundane reality, it sleeps, the only lasting real thing to emerge from the poet’s fantasy.

As we noted in chapter one of this study, Tsvetaeva typically constructs or creates the world of her long poems from the four Aristotelian elements, and Stairs is no exception. It derives mainly from fire and water, and its presiding deities are Hephaestus and Poseidon, who are both named in part three, whereby the poet gives substance to them and their mythic powers. Hephaestus is perhaps the more dominant of the two in the world of Stairs, and may even be asserted as a divine model for the poet herself.

Poem of the Stairs clearly privileges nature and natural things over art and manmade things. In fact, the poet goes so far as to include herself in the “we,” whose arts, crafts and factories have ruined paradise and tortured god-given things: “We with our trades, we with our factories, / what did we do with the Eden He fashioned for / us?” she queries, speaking of human beings in general; or, “We with our crafts, arts and artisans! / Having stretched the thing on a Procrustean / bed…” she comments, focusing on the sins against nature of craftspeople and artists, in particular. But because human beings and their arts and crafts are guilty of destroying God’s gift to the planet, they are true children of Hephaestus, the lame son of Zeus, lord of the arts associated with fire, ruler of smiths, workers in precious metals, and most pertinently, the divine craftsman who abuses his creative powers in order to acquire power over his creations and those who use them. Like the Tsvetaevan poet-craftsman, Hephaestus had the power to control the motion, and therefore, the “life” of things.

In her correspondence with Pasternak and Rilke, Tsvetaeva often writes about the connection she feels between words and things. To Pasternak she exclaims in her previously-cited May 1926 letter: “How marvelously the word reveals the thing!” In August 1926, she comments to Rilke: “That’s how I write, from the word to the thing, recreating the words poetically.” If one applies this to the writing of Poem of the Stairs, the Hephaestean nature of the poet’s creativity becomes clear. In the poem, Tsvetaeva uses the power of words to create, or forge a material poetic reality, which enables her to give back the essence, or soul, to things and thereby control them and the users of them. She wrote of her poet’s goal to Pasternak, in a 1927 letter: “The word is the background of the thing in us. The word is the path to the thing, and not the other way around. (If it was the other way around, we would need words, not things, and the ultimate goal – is the thing.)”

A further link between Tsvetaeva as poet-creator of Stairs, and Hephaestus as god of the lost art of being, involves the latter’s status as a Greek mythological model for the biblical Jacob, with whom the Greek god shares the source and nature of his physical deformity. Hephaestus paid for his knowledge (sight) of god with his limp, which he acquired from a bout with Zeus. Jacob suffered a similar fate after wrestling with the Lord. In Poem of the Stairs, the poet longs for Jacob, not as a wrestler with God, but as a dreamer of stairs, the vertical path to divinity. As a poet, Tsvetaeva represents herself, like Jacob, as a human being of liminal experience. At the end of Stairs she crosses the border from the mundane reality of her Paris apartment, as remote from Jacob’s dream as can be imagined, into the exalted reality of that very dream.

Poseidon, the terrifying god of stormy seas, oceans, and earthquakes, can also be linked to the poet of Stairs. She, like Poseidon, a chthonian force, expresses the creative powers of the underworld, the elemental forces of a nascent Nature in quest of solid and enduring shape. Such an underworld on the verge of eruption is continuously present in Stairs, where it is variously represented as Hades, the cellar of the building, and the constant threat of explosion, both political and metaphysical, in phrases like: “The time of gas explosion,” “The time reeks of a bomb, “(which is why we, the buried, detonate!)”, “Man blew them up,” “Did the gas explode?” and “That’s a match threatening to explode.” The political and social forces about to explode in the poem are the suppressed “lows” who the “highs” have ruthlessly exploited. The chthonian forces on the verge of rebellion are the inner essences of things that man has denigrated and deformed with his factories, lathes, and crafts. The poet has a special awareness of both potentially eruptive and rebellious underworlds. As she exclaimed to Pasternak in her May 1926 letter: “If only you knew how vividly I see Hades! Evidently, I stand on a very low step of the stairs to immortality!”

Finally, a few words should be said about the symbolic significance of the two types of stairs that appear in Poem of the Stairs: 1) the ideal, straight up and down stairs of Jacob’s dream; and 2) the mundane spiral backstairs of the Parisian tenement where the poet lives. The symbolism Tsvetaeva invests in the stairs of her poem and the lost being (or thing) she fashions from the word, “stairs,” demonstrate that word’s status as another of what I have argued to constitute verbal fetishes, which mark her poems as hers (other of Tsvetaeva’s verbal fetishes, some of which occur in Stairs, include "island," "mountain," "Yid," "desk," "lacquer," "elbow," and "sieve." “Stairs” is a Tsvetaevan essential thing, a thing both mutable and absolute, “with itself an identity” and larger than its self, i.e. a thing divine.

To begin with the ideal of stairs: The stair-ramp, or ziggurat, ascending from earth to heaven in Jacob’s dream, traditionally symbolizes “the straight line of intellectual and moral rectitude,” or “any striving towards spiritual realization.” (Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, p. 610) In Poem of the Stairs, Jacob’s dream, i.e. the vertical stairs he saw in his dream, also represents the primal, original stairs, by contrast with which the spiral backstairs are a mundane deformation. Perhaps, the spirality of the backstairs represents for Tsvetaeva, as the spiral does in traditional symbolism, “the repetitive rhythm of [everyday] life,” and “the permanence of mundane being beneath the flux of movement.” (Ibid., p. 907) At the same time, Tsvetaeva’s spiral stairs possess a living soul which makes them a candidate for transformation, via the magic of poetry, into their original, divine incarnation, perceivable by humans only in a dream.

In general, stairways symbolize the ascent to knowledge and transfiguration. A spiral staircase, specifically, “focuses attention upon … the newel post of axial evolution, which may be God, a principle, love, or art” (Ibid., p. 924). Finally, the stairs of Tsvetaeva’s poem, like stairs in traditional symbolic representations, possess the positive and negative aspects of ascent (to heaven) and descent (to Hades). From cellar to roof, from earth to heaven, from mundanity to divinity, Tsvetaeva’s stairs run the gamut of the vertical as well as the latter’s horizontal spiral deviations that fan out from a central axis. In the context of the five hard pieces the symbolic suggestiveness of “stairs” makes it possible to link the Poem of the Stairs both with Mountain Poem and with At/tempting Room. Like mountains, stairs reify the vertical and like corridors they are conduits between the world below (earth) and the upper reaches (heaven).

To grasp the primal significance of the word stairs in Poem of the Stairs, one has to go back to the poet’s first word, which, she claims in Mother and Music, was gamma (scale) (V/10). She later believed that with its utterance, she initiated a long struggle with her mother over who she would become, a musician or a poet. In looking back, Tsvetaeva apparently wanted to believe that her mother had perceived her first word as a sign that her first-born daughter was meant to be a pianist, and by submitting to her apparently narcissistic mother’s ambitions for her, Marina took her first lessons in the kind of duel of wills that would characterize many of her personal relationships in later life, and that expressed itself in the poet’s lifelong desire to swim against the current. Marina’s childhood became, as she later concluded, a struggle between her (mother’s) music and her own poetry, what she perceived as her false and true selves. The adult poet sums up the vaunted “inevitability” of her chosen calling by commenting, “After a mother like that, only one thing remained for me: to become a poet.” (V/14)

The implications this statement holds for Tsvetaeva’s idea of poetry, or more specifically lyrical poetry, are interestingly part of the role Poetry (and the Poet) plays in articulating the main aesthetic credo of many of Tsvetaeva’s long pieces, notably the five I am examining in the present study. To put it simply, for Tsvetaeva poetry (lyricism) is a form of music and the poet is a musician, both the traditional “singer” or “bard,” and a more specifically Tsvetaevan instrumentalist, perhaps even a pianist of rather idiosyncratic technical skill, who not only vocalizes text but plays words (in the sense of making them sound and performing them according to a score, or piece of music.) Tsvetaeva’s notion of the Poet as an instrumental player takes one to the heart of the somewhat hidden “meaning” of Stairs, as I hope to demonstrate in the remainder of this chapter. In Stairs, at any rate, music and musical imagery is an obvious theme of the narrative, as the large number of musical words and references in the poem demonstrates: e.g. “fiddle,” “notes in a jumble,” “scale,” “Stravinsky,” “sing-along,” “basses,” “voice-a-thon,” “re, mi, fa, sol, si,” “sing,” “droning saws,” “a dance for domestic help,” etc. In other of the five hard pieces, music is relegated to a distant background role, or even an implied structural or compositional one, as I demonstrated in the fugal writing of At/tempting Room. One way or another, music is always playing in the lyrico-narrative poems that Tsvetaeva wrote. The autobiographical subtext of Stairs suggests one reason why this is so.

At the beginning of Mother and Music, Tsvetaeva describes learning her first scale (do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si-do) from her mother at the piano. As her mother repeated and played the notes, two at a time, Tsvetaeva recalls how she understood the unfamiliar syllables in her own child’s imagination. Do-re, she thought, referred to the French artist, Gustave Doré, whose illustrations she knew, while re-mi was the French boy’s name, Remy, the hero of the story, “Sans Famille,” whom Tsvetaeva describes as “a happy boy whom the cripple, Père Barberin, turns into an unhappy one, first by not permitting the pancakes to become pancakes, and the next day, by selling Remy himself to the wandering musician, Vitalis … and his monkey …, a terrible drunkard, who later dies … from tuberculosis … That was re-mi” (V/10). The motifs of food, a musician who magically transforms things, and lung disease in this chain of Tsvetaeva’s associations with the notes re mi, as well as the solfège scale itself, suggest a possible autobiographical subtext for Tsvetaeva’s extensive scale imagery in part one of Poem of the Stairs. Adopting the poet’s own rhetoric in the poem as illustrated by her questions (in part three), “What did we do with the Eden He fashioned for / us?” and “What did we do, having made a first step?”, I would argue that in part one of Stairs, Tsvetaeva seems to be writing on her favorite theme, the genesis of her poetic identity, as if asking herself, ‘What did I do with the scale Mother gave me?’ and ‘What did I do, having learned my first scale?’

Stairs, in fact, allows readers to take a look at what she did. In a thirteen-stanza section of part one (lines 89-137), the poet introduces, one after another, eight metaphoric versions of her first musical scale, superimposing one scale metaphor on another to create a kind of eight-tiered (or storied), moving passage. This passage both advances the poetic narrative while deepening its implied meanings, i.e., like the spiral stairs it moves simultaneously back and forth (horizontally) and up and down (vertically):

The eight scale metaphors in this passage are introduced in groups of four: the first four have to do with expectoration (people coughing and spitting on the run); and the second four – with alimentation (people eating and gorging on the run). Scale number one is composed of the people themselves rushing up and downstairs from cellar to roof, and back. Scale number two is those people’s “scale of coughing fits,” one cough per floor, ranging from low chest coughs to high wheezes. The third scale is of voices in a choir from basses to sopranos with the choir’s implied Marxist socio-economic scale that goes from lows to highs. Coughs, voices, and the highs’ oppression of the lows originate in the fourth scale, of lungs in various stages of disintegration or patches from disease. So, from tattered lungs to a choir of voices which rumble and shout class war, from people running the gamut of the stairs, sounds the latter’s music, “a Marxist sermon in Stravinsky’s cast.”

Scale number five, which initiates the alimentation quartet (that rhythmically and structurally repeats the expectoration quartet, stanza for stanza, line for line) focuses on the stair-runners as eaters, transforming them into greedy chickens pecking furiously at food scraps that litter the stairs from cellar to roof. Then, the poet transforms this whole eating soundtrack into a long kitchen table of the stairs, used for everything on the scale of life events from birth to death as it offers “a menu for all sorts of diets,” a virtual spa. The utter materiality of these scales of consumption fills the poet with longing for the spiritual and elevating scale “the ancients were lucky enough to dream.” Jacob’s ladder is scale number seven, the primal scale of the stairs, against which the distorted scales of modern daily life must be measured. Perhaps the most distorted of these is the “scale of cooking odors” that would surely disgust, rather than please, the nostrils of God, and people. Therefore, the poet warns, “Hold your noses!”

Interestingly enough, Tsvetaeva writes out the eighth scale of cooking odors in non-metaphoric solfège, the basic musical scale, her first scale, from which all the poet’s scale metaphors derive. One can actually play this scale of cooking odors on the piano, or sing it, and then one realizes that Tsvetaeva has turned the scale into a melody by altering the order of the notes. First, she separates the first note, do (C), from the rest of the scale notes, putting it at the end of line 131 as the preposition, “до” (up to), and creating thereby the kind of pun she was so fond of. Next, she skips an interval of a sixth, and writes the note la (A), partially vocalizing it in the stressed syllable, “r’a”, of the last word in line 132, “striapaiut” (they cook). Third, she writes in solfège the main, rising melodic line: re.mi.fa.sol.si (D, E, F, G, B), creating a neat pun on the culinary center of the scale (subdominant and dominant) that form the two-in-one word fa.sol’ (“legume” (fasol’), which has the word “salt” (sol’) within it). The melody of cooking odors – do,la,re,mi, fa, sol’ si (C, A, D, E, F, G, B), ending on the seventh tone, begs to be resolved, and perhaps it is resolved, in the la’s (A’s) of the phrase, “gamma zapakhov” (line 136). This, then, is the music of the stairs, a melody remembered from Marina Ivanovna’s earliest piano-playing childhood.

One of the things that Marina most liked about the piano was the keys themselves. The poet’s lengthy description in Mother and Music of why she liked the piano keys contains an unexpected association between piano keys and stairs, as if in recapturing what pretends to be an evocation of childhood, the adult poet recalls her own more recent creative reworking in Stairs of her mother’s music.

Just as piano keys come in two kinds, black and white, wide and narrow, and express two kinds of sadness, obvious and mysterious, so stairs can be black/back or front (there is an untranslatable pun on the Russian meanings of the word “black” – designating both the color and the notion of “back” stairs or door), broad and narrow, used by two classes of people, rich and poor, each with its own kind of “desperation.” The backstairs, moreover, are used by the “insulted and injured.” Just as the child Tsvetaeva liked the piano keys because they gave her physical and emotional movability while she remained still, so the adult poet, moving her hand across the page, writing her Stairs may have felt she was moving up and down them and being moved by them without leaving her desk. Writing, in other words, also gave the poet “a keyboard under her hands,” at her command. Writing, like reading, was a performance, the difference being that while the “reader has the power to realize or distort the notes,” the writer has the power to bring them into existence. As Tsvetaeva notes, “my whole un-musicality [at the piano] was on the whole, merely another music!” (V/28)

At the same time as the poet of Stairs can be said to be metaphorically, or “trans-professionally,” tickling the ivories, running the gamut of the stairs as she writes them, emotionally, she becomes those stairs, the instrument of her own music. This brings me to the fourth reason Tsvetaeva gives in Mother and Music for why she liked the piano keys as a child, namely, “for the chromatic scale,” which, she confesses: “I immediately preferred to the ordinary scale: the dull, fat one… […]. I’ll say more: the chromatic scale is my backbone, a living stairway, along which everything I have in me that can get carried away gets carried away.” (V/16)

The sort of binary opposition Tsvetaeva felt between the chromatic and non-chromatic scales is typical of her thinking in general, and resonates specifically in Stairs in the contrast she implies between the very present backstairs and the largely absent front ones. Furthermore, the backstairs, in relation to front stairs, can clearly be seen to analogize the chromatic scale, in relation to the ordinary one. In Mother and Music, the poet says the chromatic scale sounded to her “like a resonant cascade of mountain crystal.” In Poem of the Stairs, the backstairs are described as “a cascade to Hades along a path of cabbage leaves.” There seems to be an implied black/ slightly yellow-white, chromatic/ non-chromatic contrast in this simile of stairs pictured as apparently black bars of water cascading over glistening, yellowish white slabs.

More important, Tsvetaeva says in Mother and Music that the chromatic scale was the “living stairway” of her backbone, the seat of her most intense and volatile emotions. The image of backbone stairs brings to mind not only Tsvetaeva’s inner piano-playing child, but her collegial backbone flute-playing poet-brother, Vladimir Mayakovsky, with whom she shared the notion of poets as the living instruments of their own performance. Indeed, without detracting at all from the originality of Poem of the Stairs, I would argue it is the most Mayakovskian of Tsvetaeva’s compositions.

Perhaps the most curious of Tsvetaeva’s recalled early impressions of the piano keyboard in Mother and Music, and the one that holds the most radical implications for reading the notes of the Stairs correctly, is the child Marina’s confusion over the positioning of the treble and bass keys. This confusion resulted, apparently, from her using reading as a model for horizontal movement from left to right, start to finish; and from her belief that high sounds die out while low sounds continue into infinity, and logically, therefore, can not sound beginnings:

What strikes one as most remarkable in this passage, I think, is Tsvetaeva’s conviction that her idiosyncratic, even bizarre and un-pianistic child’s view of the keyboard, though confused, was in fact, correct and her implication that pianos should possibly be rebuilt to conform to the western system of writing. In view of all the links that appear to exist between the stairs in Poem of the Stairs and Tsvetaeva’s perceptions (whether early or later in life) of scales, piano keys, and the piano itself in Mother and Music, one wonders if the whole idea behind the words of Stairs is not, perhaps unconsciously, to reconfigure the piano, to refashion from its keyboard a true Tsvetaevan scale – and stairway.

The poet herself was fond of imagining reconfigurations of the piano, as demonstrated by this comment (among many others) at the end of Mother and Music: “If you stand a grand piano on end [she means, its tail end—DB], it will be a conductor [in concert tails].” (V/29) The idea of standing a piano up (though not, in this case on its tail end), i.e. simply of verticalizing it, makes one think of Salvador Dali’s Figure 1: Salvador Dali, Skull with Its Lyric Appendage Leaning on a Night Table Which Should Have the Exact Temperature of a Cardinal Bird’s Nest representation of a semi-vertical piano which stands on its right leg in “Skull with Its Lyric Appendage Leaning on a Night Table …,” painted in the same year, 1934, as Mother and Music was written. Dali’s verticalized “lyric appendage” (piano) is not a conductor, of course, but it is a stairway and a stairway that even conveys a spiral quality. Dali’s piano, however, retains the conventional, unTsvetaevan keyboard with treble keys at the top and bass keys at the bottom. (Dali, perhaps more conventionally than Tsvetaeva, sees the bass going into the skull and earth of death and the treble waving into the air of infinity.)

But if we dally with Dali, and stand the piano on its left leg, then, it will be a true Tsvetaevan stairway that corrects the horizontal, conventional, and un-writable piano keyboard by verticalizing it and by having the treble keys at the bottom, where, as “a soundless rattle,” they move off “into nothing,” and the bass keys at the top, from where their bass sound will echo “into infinity.” Such a surreal, but true Tsvetaevan scale-way offers readers for their performance of Stairs a scale of values that conforms to the Marxist ones affirmed by the poet in the text, a scale of values that contra-verses the scale of capitalist values that puts the highs at the top and the lows at the bottom and poets “lower than a soap-boiler.” But the poet takes revenge by upending the bourgeoisie’s scale: she and her cohorts, the entire left end of society, the underclass, inevitably explode, blow sky high, assume their rightful place at the zenith from where their “deep, bass” sound will echo on… and on… and on…

Finally, there is a fourth mention of stairs in Mother and Music that enhances the significance of the word stairs in Tsvetaeva’s work. This time the stairs in question are the real stairs that led to the second floor in Tsvetaeva’s childhood home, which apparently became an escape route for her whenever she rebelled against her mother’s music by disobeying the latter’s strictures: First not to look through her half-sister’s Lyora’s popular-romance sheet music; and second, always to practice the piano with the metronome. Marina, naturally, was greatly attracted to Lyora’s forbidden music and greatly repulsed by the metronome. When she wanted to avoid her mother’s reproaches for her disobedience, she would take refuge in “the un-attainableness of the stairs.” At the halfway point, she would hum one of Lyora’s romances so that “streams of the most tactless [an untranslatable pun on the Russian word “takt” which means both “beat” and “tact”] lyricism flowed over” her. But sometimes, if caught red-handed, “I would simply – lie. […] ‘What are you up to, here?’ – ‘I’m looking at the metronome.’ – ‘What does that mean, looking at the metronome?’ I reply, with forced enthusiasm: ‘It’s so beautiful!’ […] Mother, already softened: ‘Metronomes are not for looking at, but listening to.’ I, already at the top of the saving stairs, torn between the desire for, and fear of being heard, in a loud undertone: ‘Mama, I was looking through Lyora’s music! And the metronome is ugly!’” (V/23)

Like all Tsvetaeva’s long poems, Stairs ultimately concerns transformation and salvation, and the agent of transformation is often enough, fire, the alchemists’ catalyst. Some of the transformations wrought by fire that the poet imagines at the end of Stairs uncannily resemble transformations of the piano that the child-Tsvetaeva’s magical imagination allegedly performed in Mother and Music. In that text, Tsvetaeva describes an “everyday-to-holiday” transformation of the piano that came about when she, by opening the “Pandora’s box” of the piano, raising its lid and looking at its secret insides, “its uncommon face,” saw it transformed “into the stringed fence of the Firebird, brought low by a storm or an epic hero” (V/29). Similarly, at the end of Poem of the Stairs, the poet fantasizes out of the burnt-out (blackened) shell of the tenement surrounded by water used to put the fire out, a serene and beautiful water meadow, and she creates this fantasy by raising/ razing the roof of the building, looking into its hidden insides, and unbinding the spell on twisted backstairs, allowing them to straighten into a Jacob’s ladder with rainbows ascending and descending it. And just as the coming of morning ends the nighttime magic and puts the poem to sleep in the last stanza of Stairs, so daylight always brought an end to the child Tsvetaeva’s fantasy piano, “of which in the morning, as of any nighttime marvel, not a trace remained!” (V/29)

The piano emerges from Mother and Music, like the stairs from Poem of the Stairs, as a kind of proto-thing which is distorted by how it is seen and used in the bourgeois world. “The piano, after all,” notes Tsvetaeva, “is unwieldy, excessively heavy, only when viewed close up. But move away into the distance, put between it and yourself all the space needed for it to sound, give it, like any large thing, the place to become itself, and the piano will emerge no less elegant than a dragonfly in flight.” (V/29) Similarly perhaps, the backstairs only appear filthy and twisted when you see them close up. But give them the vertical space to stretch out, and the backstairs will turn out to be no less ethereal and divinely straight than Jacob’s ladder.

And it is the Tsvetaevan poet, of course, who has the magic power to let things become equal to their very selves. The evidence of Mother and Music suggests that she acquired that power, however, not from practising the piano, but from playing on the piano stool, “a thing that had no equal, a magic thing”. Its magic came from its power to make her sit still while it spun around: “Pressing my hands down onto the seat and helping with my legs, fainting from the thought of the sweet nausea to come, I turned not once, not twice, but the whole spiral up and down – till it felt like my head tore off, whirling off my neck like the ball from a twirling stick.” (V/24)

The spiral gives the piano stool movement and life, and the poet’s fantasy spirals upward, giving verbal life to the spiral backstairs, invigorating them, moving them to dizzying heights. As the poem’s narrative develops, the newel post of the stairs (the poet herself) spins them higher and higher against the roof of the attic that deprives them of the night and the stars to which they originally led. They spin relentlessly until the roof that contains them tears off, a decapitated head (always an exultant image in Tsvetaeva!), spinning away from earth, answering the backstairs’ prayers for infinite stretching out, in total detachment from the manmade walls that people think confine them. So from the matrix of the piano and its practice is engendered Tsvetaeva’s exalted music of the stairs.