Eros in Space. A.I. Solzhenitsyn's and M.I. Tsvetaeva's Moscow Heroines and Their Trial by Separation

The article deals with the topos of separation as a component of the Russian Eros, in the context of the Russian national catastrophe of the twentieth century: the revolution of 1917 and the phenomenon of the gulag. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's epic "The Red Wheel" and his novel "In the First Circle," and Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry of 1916-1922 feature a common conception of Eros, one that is artistically mediated as a spiritual-sensual principle. Its manifestations in the lives of Solzhenitsyn's female characters and Tsvetaeva's lyrical "I" are framed by the spatial realities of Moscow, in which a woman's private and intimate experience of love is fused with her experience, or premonition of, the tragic events of history. Separation from the loved one strengthens the spiritual side of the relationship, which according to the traditional view of the Russian Eros prevails over desires of the flesh. In this sense, Solzhenitsyn's and Tsvetaeva's artistic universes form a single semantic, valoric, and fabulatory whole.