The Life and the Death Instincts in Writing of Marina Tsvetaeva: a Psychoanalytic View

The master's thesis is devoted to an attempt to study the action of the mechanisms of the life and death instincts in the life and writings of one of the brightest poets of the 20th century - Marina Tsvetaeva. Her difficult life path was full of personal upheavals and tragedies that occurred against the backdrop of more global tragic events that took place in Russia and the world at the beginning of the 20th century and directly affected her and her immediate circle. Was Marina Tsvetaeva’s suicide a consequence not only of unbearable living conditions, but also stemmed from mental characteristics formed in childhood and adolescence? In other words, wasn’t it “predetermined” from the beginning, and how did the movements of the life drive and the death drive influence the tragic ending of her life? The theoretical part is a broad overview of authors studying the life instinct and the death instinct: Z. Freud, M. Klein, G. Rosenfeld, H. Segal, A. Green, B. Rosenberg, J. Laplanche and others. An empirical study of the concepts of “life drive” and “death drive” introduced by Sigmund Freud and expanded by his followers allows us to see and trace the simultaneous action of these drives in the psyche of an individual. This study makes an attempt to examine them using the example of the creative and biographical heritage of the bright, controversial, talented personality Marina Tsvetaeva. Poetic creativity is capable of penetrating the deep aspects of the unconscious and reflecting them through the expressive means of language. We assume that this kind of research can help in identifying and defining subtle mental mechanisms and convincingly prove the legitimacy of Sigmund Freud’s identification of the second dualistic pair of drives.