?
«Два зарева! — нет, зеркала́ !» Марины Цветаевой и «Песочный человек» Э.Т.А. Гофмана: к метафоре глаз
Tsvetaeva’s poem «Two glows! − No, Mirrors!», dedicated to M. Kuzmin, was built not only as a «chain of metaphors, a chain of associations by similarity» (M. Gasparov), but also as a mystery. The solution is given in
the last line: the two mortal eyes are the metaphor of the inner essence of the addresse (compare: «eyes − and nothing else», also about Kuzmin − in «Nezdeshniy Vecher»). Thereby an element of demonic is superinduced into Kuzmin’s image. The latter, it seems, can refer to a well-known to Tsvetaeva German romantic tradition and to E. T. A Hoffmann: in this case one can see similar motives in the description of the eyes in the poem and in Hoffmann’s novella «The Sandman», plotted on the fear of loss of sight / eyes and eye (points of view) changings as an indicator of insanity.
The analysis of conceptual metaphors and their realizations (for example: «eyes – abyss»: «bottomless gaze», «blank look», «eyes – fire»: «burn with eyes», «fire in the eyes», «eyes – seraphim»: «unearthly glance»,
«unearthly eyes», «divine eyes») allows to come to the conclusion that in both texts, the eyes described by such oppositions as, but not limited to, top / bottom, heat / cold, light / darkness, living / dead, become a portal
between ours and another world (the motif of the mirror as the border between worlds refers to this). The sign of movement (rotation), especially underlined by Hoffmann, indicates a connection with a person, with the transmission (reflection) of his inner, mental state.
The pressure of «mysterious» (in the literal and figurative sense of the word), requiring the decipherment of conceptual metaphors in Tsvetaeva’s poem, creates, as it seems, the aura of a supernatural, «terrible» in the spirit of the German romantic tradition, that is, in this case, pointing to Hoffmann.