Marina Tzvetaeva’s Perception of Light and Darkness

Abstract

The paper attempts to discover peculiarities in perception of the "light"-"darkness" concepts analyzing the usage of these two lexemes ("light" and "darkness") and to determine the place and importance of these concepts in Marina Tsvetaeva’s worldview. Tsvetaeva redefines these concepts moving away from a traditional interpretation typical of Russian culture. Tsvetaeva’s judgments expose complexity contained not only in the opposition of concepts alone, by which an average man builds his worldview, but also the complexity of the concepts itself. Light and darkness, being the equivalent of the good and the evil, coexist in a certain balance: light has no meaning without darkness, as darkness cannot be conceived without light. Man cannot judge of the darkness, neither can he judge of the light. Darkness can be as necessary as the light, because the darkness and the light from the point of view of the poet, who is equal to the world and for that equality is looking at the world from aside, are parts of one whole.