Odoevtseva, the daughter of a lawyer, charmed everyone with her talented verses. After the Revolution she became a favorite student of Nikolay Gumilev, who dedicated poetry to her. She published her first poetry in 1921 and her faultless first collection, Dvor chudes (Court of Miracles), in 1922. The half-starved bohemia of revolutionary Petrograd knew her poems “Tolchenoe steklo” (Ground Glass) and “Izvozchik” (Cabby) by heart.
In 1922 Odoevtseva emigrated to Paris with her husband, Georgy Ivanov, and turned away from poetry to publish several novels with considerable success: Angel smerti (Angel of Death) (1927), Izol'da (Isolde) (1931), and Zerkalo (The Mirror) (1939). After the Second World War she published three new collections of poetry but drew more attention by her two volumes of memoirs: On the Shore of the Neva (1967) and On the Shore of the Seine (1978). Two years before her death she returned to the Soviet Union; her memoirs were published there in an edition of two hundred thousand copies.
