Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow. She was one of the most original of the Russian 20th-century poets, and at the forefront of both the Acmeist and Symbolist movements in Russia. Her work was not looked kindly upon by Stalin and the then Bolshevik régime, and her literary rehabilitation only really began in the 1960s. Tsvetaeva's poetry arose from her own deeply convoluted personality, her eccentricity and tightly disciplined use of language. Among her themes were female sexuality, and the tension in women's private emotions; she bridges the mutually contradictory schools of Acmeism and symbolism[?].

Biography

Much of Tsvetaeva's poetry has its roots in the depths of her displaced and disturbed childhood.

Her father was Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a professor of art history at the University of Moscow, who was later to found the Alexander III Museum, which is now known as the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.

Tsvetaeva's mother, Maria Alexandrovna Meyn, was Ivan's second wife, a highly literate woman. She was also volatile and a (frustrated) concert pianist, with some Polish ancestry on her mother's side. (This latter fact was to play on Marina's imagination, and to cause her to identify herself with the Polish aristocracy.)

Marina had two half-siblings, Valeria and Andrei, who were the children of Ivan's deceased first wife, Varvara Dmitrievna Ilovaisky (daughter of the historian Dmitri Ilovaisky). Her only full sister, Anastasia, was born in 1894.

She favoured Anastasia over Marina. Tsvetaeva's father was kind, but deeply wrapped up in his studies and distant from his family. He was also still deeply in love with his first wife; he would never get over her. She, for her part, had had a tragic love affair before her marriage, and had not forgotten it.

Maria Alexandrovna particularly disapproved of Marina's poetic inclination. She wished her daughter to become a pianist and thought her poetry was poor.

Quarrels between the children were frequent and occasionally violent. There was considerable tension between Tsvetaeva's mother and Varvara's children, and Tsvetaeva's father maintained close contact with Varvara's family.

In 1902 Tsvetaeva's mother contracted tuberculosis. Because it was believed that a change in climate could help cure the disease, the family travelled abroad until shortly before her death in 1906. They lived for a while by the sea at Nervi, near Genoa. Here, away from the rigid constraints of a bourgeois Muscovite life, Marina was able for the first time to run free, climb cliffs, and vent her imagination in childhood games. It should be noted that there were many Russian émigré revolutionaries resident at that time in Nervi, and undoubtedly these people would have had some influence on the impressionable Marina. The children began to run wild. This state of affairs was allowed to continue until June 1904 when Marina was despatched to school in Lausanne. Changes in the Tsvetaev residence led to several changes in school, and during the course of her travels she acquired Italian, French and German languages.

In 1908, Tsvetaeva studied literary history at the Sorbonne.

During this time, a major revolutionary change was occurring within Russian poetry: the flowering of the Russian Symbolist movement[?], and this movement was to colour most of her later work. It was not the theory which was to attract her but the poetry and the immense gravity which writers such as Andrey Bely[?] and Aleksandr Blok[?] were capable of generating. Her own first collection of poems, Evening Album, was published in 1910. It attracted the attention of the poet and critic Maximilian Voloshin[?], whom Tsvetaeva described after his death in 'A Living Word About a Living Man.' Voloshin came to see Tsvetaeva and soon became her friend and mentor.

She began spending time at Voloshin's home in the Black Sea resort of Koktebel (trans. "Blue Height"), which was a well-known haven for writers, poets and artists. There she became friends with Andrey Bely[?], whom she described in the essay 'A Captive Spirit.' She also became enamoured of the work of Aleksandr Blok[?] and Anna Akhmatova, although she never met Blok and did not meet Akhmatova until the 1940s. Describing the Koktebel community, the émigré Viktoria Schweitzer[?] wrote: "Here inspiration was born."

At Koktebel, Tsvetaeva also met the ill-starred Sergei (Seryozha) Yakovlevich Efron, a cadet in the Officers' Academy. She was 19, he 18: they fell in love instantly and were married in 1912, the same year as her father's project, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts was ceremonially opened, attended by the czar, Nicholas II.

Tsvetaeva's love for Efron was intense, however, this did not however preclude her from having affairs, including one with Osip Mandelstam, which she celebrated in a collection of poems called Mileposts.

At around the same time, she also conducted an affair with the lesbian poet Sofia Parnok[?], who was 9 years older than Tsvetaeva. She deals with the ambivalent and tempestuous nature of this relationship in a cycle of poems which at times she called 'The Friend,' and at other times 'The Mistake.'

Tsvetaeva and her husband lived in the Crimea until the revolution, and had two daughters: Ariadna, or Alya (born 1912) and Irina (born 1917). Then, in 1914, Efron volunteered for the front; by 1917 he was an officer stationed in Moscow with the 56th Reserve.

Tsetsaeva was to witness the Russian Revolution at first hand. On trains, she came into contact with ordinary Russian people and was shocked by the mood of anger and violence. She wrote in her journal: "In the air of the compartment hung only three axe-like words: bourgeois, Junkers, leeches".

After the 1917 Revolution, Efron joined the White Army, and Marina returned to Moscow hoping to be reunited with her husband. She was trapped in Moscow for five years. During the famine one of her daughters died of starvation.

She wrote six plays in verse and narrative poems, including The Tsar's Maiden (1920), and her epic about the Civil War, The Swans Encampment, which glorified those who fought against the communists. The cycle of poems in the style of a diary or journal begins on the day of Tsar Nicholas II's abdication 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 was fighting as an officer.

The Moscow famine was to exact a terrible toll on Tsvetavea. Starvation and worry were to erode her looks. With no immediate family to turn to, she had no way to support herself or her daughters. In 1919, she placed Irina in a state orphanage, mistakenly believing that she would be better fed there. Tragically, she was mistaken, and Irina died of starvation in 1920. The child's death caused Tsvetaeva great grief and regret. In one letter, she said, 'God punished me.'

During these years, Tsvetaeva maintained a close and intense friendship with the actress Sofia Gollidey, for whom she wrote a number of plays.

In May 1922, Tsvetaeva and Alya left the Soviet Union and were reunited with Efron in Berlin. In Berlin, she published the collections Separation, Poems to Blok and The Tsar Maiden.

In August 1922 the family moved to Prague. Unable to afford living accommodation in Prague itself, with Efron studying politics and sociology at the Charles University in Prague and living in hostels, Tsvetsaeva and Ariadna found rooms in a village outside the city.

In Prague, Tsvetaeva had a passionate affair with Konstantin Boeslavovich Rozdevitch, a former military officer. This affair became widely known throughout emigré circles, and even to Efron himself. Efron was devastated by the affair (this is well-documented and supported particularly by a letter which he wrote to Voloshin on the matter), despite having philandered on multiple occasions himself. It was bound to end disastrously and it did.

Her break-up with Rozdevitch in 1923 was almost certainly the inspiration for her great 'The Poem of the End[?]', perhaps the single most brilliant and tragic poem of the 20th century. This relationship was also the inspiration for "The Poem of the Mountain".

At about the same time, a more important relationship began: Tsvetaeva's correspondence with Boris Pasternak, who had stayed in the Soviet Union. The two were not to meet for nearly twenty years. But for a time they were in love, and they maintained an intimate friendship until Tsvetaeva's return to Russia.

In summer 1924 Efron and Tsvetaeva left Prague for the suburbs, living for a while in Jiloviste, before moving on to Vsenory, where Tsvetaeva completed "The Poem of the End", and was to conceive their son Georgy.

At about this time Efron contracted tuberculosis, adding to the family's difficulties. Tsvetaeva received a meagre stipend from the Czech government, which gave financial support to artists and writers who had lived in Czechoslovakia. In addition, she tried to make whatever she could from readings and sales of her work. She turned more and more to writing prose because she found it made more money than poetry.

In 1925 the family settled in Paris, where they would live for the next 14 years, and where Georgy was born, whom she was to later nickname 'Mur'. Tsvetaeva wanted to name him Boris (after Pasternak); Efron would have none of it and insisted on Georgy. He was to be a most difficult and demanding child.

Nevertheless, Tsetaeva loved him as only she knew how, obsessively. Alya was relegated immediately to the role of mother's helper and confidante, and was consequently robbed of much of her childhood. However, the child did not reciprocate. The older he grew, the more difficult and obstreperous he became.

Tsvetaeva did not feel at all at home in Paris's predominantly ex-bourgeois circle of Russian émigré writers. Although she had written passionately pro-White poems during the Revolution, her fellow émigrés thought that she was insufficiently anti-Soviet, and that her criticism of the Soviet régime was altogether too nebuluous.

She was particularly criticised for writing an admiring letter to the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. In the wake of this letter, the émigré paper The Latest News, to which Tsvetaeva had been a frequent contributor, refused point blank to publish any more of her work. She found solace in her correspondence with other writers, including Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, the Czech poet Anna Teskova[?], and the critics D. S. Mirsky[?] and Aleksandr Bakhrakh[?].

Meanwhile, Tsvetaeva's husband was rapidly developing Soviet sympathies and was homesick for Russia. He was, however, afraid because of his past as a White soldier. Eventually, either out of idealism or to garner acceptance from the Communists, he began spying for the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. Alya shared his views, and increasingly turned against her mother. In 1937, she returned to the Soviet Union.

Later that year, Efron too had to return to Russia. The French police had implicated him in the murder of the former Soviet defector Ignaty Reyss[?] in September 1937, on a country lane near Lausanne.

After Efron's escape, the police interrogated Tsvetaeva, but she seemed confused by their questions and ended up reading them some French translations of her poetry. The police concluded that she was deranged and knew nothing of the murder. (Later it was learned that Efron had also taken part in the assassination of Trotsky's son in 1936).

Tsvetaeva does not seem to have known that her husband was a spy, nor the extent to which he was compromised. However, she was held responsible for his actions and was ostracised in Paris because of the implication that he was involved with the NKDV. World War II had made Europe as unsafe and hostile as Russia. Tsvetaeva felt that she no longer had a choice. In 1939 she and her son returned to the Soviet Union.

She could not have foreseen the horrors which were in store for her. In Stalin's Russia, anyone who had lived abroad was suspect, as was anyone who had been among the intelligentsia before the Revolution. Tsvetaeva's sister had been arrested before Tsvetaeva's return; although Anastasia survived the Stalin years, the sisters never saw each other again.

Tsvetaeva found that all doors had closed to her. Boris Pasternak found her bits of work translating poetry, but otherwise the established Soviet writers refused to help her, and chose to ignore her plight; Asayev, whom she had hoped would assist shyed away, fearful for his life and position.

Efron and Alya were arrested for espionage. Alya's fiancé, it turned out, was actually an NKVD agent who had been assigned to spy on the family. Efron was shot in 1941; Alya served over eight years in prison. Both were exonerated after Stalin's death.

In 1941, Tsvetaeva and her son were either evacuated or exiled to Yelabuga, in the Tartar Autonomous Republic. They had no means of support. Georgy blamed his mother for their plight, and constantly nagged her for more money and better clothes, and begged her to leave; she had no way of complying with his demands, but she applied to move to Chistopol. On 31 August, 1941 Tsvetaeva hanged herself. The exact location of her grave remains unknown.

Her Work

From a poem she wrote in 1913, in which she displays her propensity for prophecy:

 Scattered in bookstores, greyed by dust and time,   
 Unseen, unsought, unopened, and unsold,   
 My poems will be savored as are rarest wines -    
 When they are old.

Conversely, her poetry was much admired by poets such as Valery Bryusov[?], Maksimilian Voloshin[?], Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Anna Akhmatova. Today, that recognition is sustained by the poet Joseph Brodsky[?], pre-eminent among Tsvetaeva's champions. Tsvetaeva is primarily a poet-lyricist, since her lyrical voice remains clearly audible in her narrative poetry.

Her lyric poems fill ten collections; the uncollected lyrics would add at least another volume. Her first two collections indicate their subject matter in their titles: Evening Album (Vechernii al'bom, 1910) and The Magic Lantern (Volshebnyi fonar', 1912). The poems are vignettes of a tranquil childhood and youth in a professorial, middle-class home in Moscow, and display considerable grasp of the formal elements of style.

The full range of Tsvetaeva's talent developed quickly, and was undoubtedly influenced by the contacts which she had made at Koktebel, and was made evident in two new collections: Mileposts (Versty, 1921) and Mileposts: Book One (Versty, Vypusk I, 1922).

Three elements of Tsvetaeva's mature style emerge in the Mileposts collections. First, Tsvetaeva dates her poems and publishes them chronologically. The poems in Mileposts: Book One, for example, were written in 1916 and resolve themselves as a versified journal. Secondly, there are cycles of poems which fall into a regular chronological sequence among the single poems, evidence that certain themes demanded further expression and development. One cycle announces the theme of Mileposts: Book I as a whole: the "Poems of Moscow." Two other cycles are dedicated to poets, the "Poems to Akhmatova" and the "Poems to Blok", which again reappear in a separate volume, Poems to Blok (Stikhi k Bloku, 1922). Thirdly, the Mileposts collections demonstrate the dramatic quality of Tsvetaeva's work, and her ability to assume the guise of multiple dramatis personae within them.

The collection entitled Separation (Razluka, 1922) was to contain Tsvetaeva's first long verse narrative, "On a Red Steed" (Na krasnom kone). The poem is a prologue to three more verse-narratives written between 1920 and 1922. All four narrative poems draw on folkloric plots. Tsvetaeva acknowledges her sources in the titles of the very long works, The Maiden-Tsar: A Fairy-tale Poem (Tsar'-devitsa: Poema-skazka, 1922) and "The Swain", subtitled "A Fairytale" (Molodets: skazka, 1924). The fourth folklore-style poem is entitled "Byways" (Pereulochki, published in 1923 in the collection Remeslo), and it is the first poem which may be deemed incomprehensible in that it is fundamentally a soundscape of language.

The collection Psyche (Psikheya, 1923) contains one of Tsvetaeva's best-known cycles "Insomnia" (Bessonnitsa) and the poem The Swans' Encampment (Lebedinyi stan, Stikhi 1917-1921, published in 1957) which celebrates the White Army[?].

Subsequently, as an emigré, Tsvetaeva's last two collections of lyrics were published by emigré presses, Craft (Remeslo, 1923) in Berlin and After Russia (Posle Rossii, 1928) in Paris.

There then followed the twenty-three lyrical "Berlin" poems, the pantheistic "Trees" (Derev'ya), "Wires" (Provoda) and "Pairs" (Dvoe), and the tragic "Poets" (Poety). "After Russia" contains the poem "In Praise of the Rich", in which Tsvetaeva's oppositional tone is merged with her proclivity for ruthless satire.

In 1924, Tsvetaeva wrote "Poem of the End", which details a walk around Prague and across its bridges; the walk is about the final walk she will take with her lover Konstantin Rodzevitch. In it everything is foretold: in the first few lines (translated by Elaine Feinstein) the future is already written:

 A single post, a point of rusting    
     tin in the sky   
 marks the fated place we   
     move to, he and I   

Again, further poems foretell future developments. Principal among these is the voice of the classically-oriented Tsvetaeva heard in cycles "The Sibyl," "Phaedra," and "Ariadne." Tsvetaeva's beloved, ill-starred heroines recur in two verse plays, Theseus-Ariadne (Tezei-Ariadna, 1927) and Phaedra (Fedra, 1928). These plays form the first two parts of an incomplete trilogy entitled Aphrodite's Rage.

The satirist in Tsvetaeva plays second fiddle only to the poet-lyricist. Several satirical poems, moreover, are among Tsvetaeva's best-known works: "The Train of Life" (Poezd zhizni) and "The Floorcleaners' Song" (Poloterskaya), both included in After Russia, and The Rat-catcher (Krysolov, 1925-1926), a long, folkloric narrative.

The target of Tsvetaeva's satire is everything petty and petty bourgeois. Unleashed against such dull creature comforts is the vengeful, unearthly energy of workers both manual and creative. In her notebook, Tsvetaeva writes of "The Floorcleaners' Song": "Overall movement: the floorcleaners ferret out a house's hidden things, they scrub a fire into the door... What do they flush out? Coziness, warmth, tidiness, order... Smells: incense, piety. Bygones. Yesterday... The growing force of their threat is far stronger than the climax."

The poem which Tsvetaeva describes as liricheskaia satira, The Rat-Catcher, is loosely based on the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The Rat-Catcher, which is also known as The Pied Piper, is considered by some to be the finest of Tsvetaeva's work. It was also partially an act of hommage to Heinrich Heine's poem Die Wanderatten.

The Rat-Catcher appeared initially, in serial format, in the emigré journal Volia Rossii in 1925-1926 whilst still being written. It was not to appear in the Soviet Union until after the death of Stalin in 1956. Its hero is the Pied Piper of Hamelin who saves a town from hordes of rats and then leads the town's children away too, in retribution for the citizens' ingratitude. As in the other folkloric narratives, The Ratcatcher's story line emerges indirectly through numerous speaking voices which shift from invective, to extended lyrical flights, to bathos.

Tsvetaeva's last ten years of exile, from 1928 when "After Russia" appeared until her return in 1939 to the Soviet Union, were principally a "prose decade", though this would almost certainly be by dint of economic necessity rather than one of choice.

Translators

Translators of Tsvetaeva's work into English include Elaine Feinstein[?] and David McDuff[?].

Sources

• "Marina Tsvetaeva, Selected Poems" translated by Elaine Feinstein
• "Tsvetaeva", Viktoria Schweitzer, London 1993
• "Hope Against Hope", Nadezdha Mandelstam
• "Hope Abandoned", Nadezdha Mandelstam
• "An Essay in Autobiography", Boris Pasternak