Abstract
The present paper discusses Marina Tsvetaeva’s essay about Maksimilian Voloshin The Living about the Living (1932) in the light of Tsvetaeva’s views on the legacy of the Silver Age in the early 1930s and her responses to the emergence of Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union. The essay demonstrates that Tsvetaeva presents herself as a strong advocate of modernist aesthetic principles that enable the reader both to experience the sense of estrangement and to reinvent classical themes in new contexts, so the notions of reading and transgression become entwined. It juxtaposes Tsvetaeva’s views on the use of myth in literature to several important trends related to the revival of ancient ritual and folk performance that occured in the 1910s-20s in Europe and in Russia (discussed in the works of Viacheslav Ivanov, Voloshin, Jane Harrison and Walter Benjamin).
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