In Tsveataeva’s “Longing for the Motherland,”m the poet uses the physical manifestation of the female body to represent Russia. I think that this has fascinating implications, as the poem’s main character/speaker is yearning for maternal care and belonging from the past. The main character has been isolated from their “motherland” and wants to return home. Their native language is not understood by the people they encounter, increasing this sense of isolation of attempting to find their way back home. The attempt to journey back to the places of one’s “birth” represents an attempt to remember and keep history from being erased. I think the theme of motherhood has dual implications: a longing for the past, a childhood in which one receives maternal care and comfort, and also the physical aspect of a journey to return to one’s home and their place of birth. The poem carries an overt sense of nostalgia. Yet it is interesting that the apparent present is only characterized by this feeling of isolation and helplessness. This demonstrates, potentially, an inability to move on from the past and separate oneself from the comfort of the “mother” figure. This poem, along with many others we have analyzed, illustrate the transience of the time period they were written in. The nostalgia and longing for “Mother Russia” evoke this attempt to go back to the past and the comfort of familiarity. Yet I also think these themes express a sense of longing for a national identity and sense of belonging in a time of tumult and national unrest.
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Evy, you are so right that themes of nostalgia and the trauma of historical change are a constant in so many of the literary works (in both poetry and prose) that we have read from this period! Just a couple of quick clarifications here: first, as I mentioned in another comment I wrote in response to Liam’s post on Tsvetaeva below, Tsvetaeva emigrated to western Europe shortly after the Russian Revolution. She wrote this poem when she was living as an exile in Paris, just a few years before she had to return to the USSR… So the “longing for the homeland” in the poem is literal. Second, as you can see in my own translation of the title here, the concept of “mother” actually doesn’t come into this poem anywhere. The fact that you thought it did is an unfortunate result of the translator’s decision to use the word “motherland” in the first line instead of “homeland,” which would have been more accurate. The original Russian word (родина = rodina) denotes the place of someone’s BIRTH–that, not MOTHER, is the root of the word. 🙂