Marina Ivanova Tsvetaeva Biography and List of Works

One of the most original Russian poets of the 20th-century, whose literary rehabilitation began in the 1960s. Tsvetaeva's disciplined poetry arose from her own contradictory personality, eccentricities and highly controlled use of language. Among her innumerable themes were female sexuality and the tension between women's private emotions and their public roles. Mentally she lived in the 1920s and 1930s because of her political views.

"I am nowhere.
I've vanished in no land.
Nobody catches up with me.
Nothing will bring me back."

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow. Her father was a university professor and the founder of the Museum of Fine Arts and her mother a talented concert pianist. The family travelled a great deal and Tsvetaeva attended schools in Switzerland, Germany, and at the Sorbonne, Paris. In 1912 she married Sergei Efron, they had two daughters and one son.

As a poet Tsevaeva made her debut at the age of 18 with the collection Evening Album, a tribute to her childhood. The book was dedicated to the narcissist diarist Bashkiartseff (1858-1884). For Russian writers Bashkiartseff became the ideal of the female artist, and her prose were also dealt with by Simone de Beauvoir in her study The Second Sex.

Tsvetaevna's affair with the poet and opera librettist Sofiia Párnok (1885-1933) inspired her cycle of poems called 'Girlfriend'. Párnok's career stopped in the late 1920s when she was no longer allowed to publish. The poems composed between 1917 and 1921 appeared in 1957 under the title The Demesne of the Swans.

Tsvetaevna had another affair with Konstantin Rodzevich (1895-1988), an ex-Red Army officer. 'Poem of the Mountain' and 'Poem of the End' were inspired by this relationship. The White Army captured Rodzevich and he fled to Prague, where he graduated as a lawyer. He was an active member of pro-communist organizations who during World War II joined the French resistance and spent two years in captivity in Germany. In 1960 he sent his Tsvetaeva archive to Moscow, and argued that Tsvetaeva created a 'myth' out of their affair.

After the 1917 Revolution Tsvetaeva was trapped in Moscow for five years. During the famine one of her daughters died of starvation. She wrote six plays in verse and several narrative poems, including The Tsar's Maiden (1920), and her response to the Civil War, The Desmene of the Swans, which glorifies those who fought against the communists. The diary-like cycle of poems begins on the day of Tsar Nicholas II's abdiction in March 1917, and ends late in 1920, when the anti-communist White Army was finally defeated. The 'swans' of the title refers to the volunteers in the White Army, in which her husband Sergei Efron fought as an officer.

In 1922 Tsvetaeva emigrated with her family to Berlin and then to Prague. In 1925 the family settled in Paris. Tsvetaeva's collection Craft was published in Berlin in 1923. In Prague she wrote 'The Poem of the Mountain' and 'The Poem of the End', both in 1924.

During her years in Paris Tsvetaeva wrote two parts of the planned dramatic trilogy. The last collection published during her lifetime, After Russia, appeared in 1928. In Paris the family lived in poverty, and their income came almost entirely from Tsvetaeva's writings. When her husband started to work for the Soviet security service NKVD, the Russian community of Paris turned against Tsvetaeva. Her limited publishing outlets for poetry were blocked and she turned to prose. In 1937 MOY PUSHKIN was published, one of Tsvetaeva's best prose works. To earn extra income, she also produced short stories, memoirs and critical articles.

In exile Tsvetaeva felt more and more isolated. Friendless and almost destitute she returned to the Soviet Union in 1938, where her son and husband already lived. The following year her husband was executed and her daughter sent to a labour camp. Tsvetaeva was officially ostracized and unable to publish. After the German Army invaded the USSR in 1941, Tsvetaeva was evacuated to the small provincial town of Elabuga with her son. In despair, she hanged herself ten days later on August 31, 1941. According to Boris Pasternak, her suicide might have been prevented if the literary bureaucrats had not behaved with such appalling heartlessness towards her.

Tsvetaeva left behind a great body of work that broke new ground for women poets. In her poems Tsvetaeva uses characters from the Bible, heroines of classical mythology, Russian folklore and history. She experimented with many styles, and her collection Razluka (1922, separation) impressed the poet Andrey Bely so much that he wrote one of his collections in Tsvetaeva's style. Boris Pasternak also admired her work and later wrote: "The greatest recognition and re-evaluation of all awaits Tsvetaeva, the outstanding poet of the twentieth century."

For further reading: Marina Cvetaeva: Her Life and Art by Simon Karlinsky (1966); Nightingale Fever by Ronald Hingley (1982); Vospominaniia by Anastasia Tsvetaeva (1983); Marina Tsvetaeva by Simon Karlinsky (1985); A Captive Lion by Elaine Feinstein (1987); A Life Through Poetry by Jane A. Taubman (1989); Marina Tsvetaeva by Michael Makin (1993); Marina Tsvetaeva by Lily Feiler (1994); The Song of the Mocking Bird by Alexandra Smith (1995); Tsvetaeva's Orphic Journeys to the Worlds of the Word by Olga Peters Hasty (1996)

VECHERNII AL'BOM, (1910)