The image of Marina Mniszech in the historical representation of Dmitry Ilovaysky and the poetics of Marina Tsvetaeva: from historical studies to personal myth

This paper investigates the genealogical research by Marina Tsvetaeva. The focus is on how the works of her step-grandfather, the famous historian Dmitry Ivanovich Ilovaysky, contributed to Tsvetaeva’s image of Marina Mniszech. Tsvetayeva’s lyric poetry reveals her passion for her Polish genealogy, with an ekphrastic portrait of her Polish grandmother reflecting the Polish cultural stereotype: aristocratism and musicality, Polish pride, and a tendency to revolt. Studying the cultural background is essential for understanding Tsvetaeva’s historical texts, for example, her step-grandfather’s textbooks, which she claimed to learn history from. His image is embodied in the essay “The House at the Old Pimen” (1933). Tsvetaeva delegates many personal traits to “grandfather Ilovaysky”: freedom from parties and trends, radical individualism and idealism, and unrootedness in the physical world, up to and including transgression. The same essay points to an artifact, Ilovaysky’s book, which she keeps in her émigré library. The work by Ilovaysky depicts Marina Mniszech in the spirit of tendencies characteristic of the conservative historical narrative. When young, Tsvetaeva was far from the political views of her grandfather. However, it is his historical way of writing that becomes extremely attractive to her. The abundant causal constructions dramatically expanding the realm of fantasy and permissible and plenty of pictorial details and side plots in historical treatises by Ilovaysky fully correspond with the “verbal homerism” of Tsvetaeva herself.