This article discusses the demonic poetics that the Russian Modernist poet Marina Cvetaeva develops in a series of articles that she wrote in the 1930s, with particular focus on The Devil (1935) and Puškin and Pugačev (1936-1937). I examine the demonology as a means of treating the question of the nature of poetic language. I relate this question to the notion of a Poetry of Intent that Cvetaeva developed in 1924, and to the Romantic tradition as a ground for her Modernist poetics. The central question that governs Cvetaeva's demonic mythologizations is what it is that separates literature, conceived as poetry or romance, from other forms of speaking or imagining the world. I show that Cvetaeva gives more or less the same answer to this question in all these essays, and that is that literature in a secret and oblique way can speak of living life, that is, life in its living form, beyond the categories of representation.