The pink dress in Marina Tsvetayeva's 1919 poem and the wish to be loved
In 1919 Marina Tsvetaeva wrote the poem "To You, a Hundred Years Hence", addressed to an admirer from the distant future. Piercing and lyrical at once, sad yet spirited. "Friend! Do not look for me! Another fashion! Not even the old folk remember me." In this unusual poem-address Tsvetaeva, as it were, puts into the mouth of a man destined to be born many years after her a reproach and contempt for other women, all save herself. Near the end come these words: "They all praised! A pink dress / No one gave me!"
And who was supposed to give Tsvetaeva a pink dress? She is a person of the end of the nineteenth century, when certain rules still existed. And one wonders who did the praising, who exactly these friends were. It is hardly a matter of women who admired her verse. Besides, "friends" would seem to point to persons of the male sex.
In another poem she has an "apron full of roses". The symbolism of the rose is very simple, and it is tedious even to discuss it. It turns out that the men who admired her poems were expected to give her a "pink dress". And the rose by no means symbolised marriage. It is also evident that she has no wish to receive a masterpiece of the tailor's art as a gift.
They all praised, but what did they praise? The verse, the talent. But no one offered what? Love, let us say. Everyone admires, but no one is willing to consummate his love with the gesture of a rose.
She does not expect anyone to present her with a pink dress; she is waiting for something else. In essence, what is raised here is the question of the relation between talent and intellect on the one hand and the wish to be with men in, shall we say, the old-fashioned way on the other. And Tsvetaeva, for all that a touch of the fin de siècle, wants to be loved. And this "dress" is now connected with nothing else, neither with the replenishing of a wardrobe nor with the presentation of respectful gifts, but only with the desire to be loved, even a hundred years after her death.
