Poems by Marina Tsvetaeva

One of the giants of Russian and world poetry, Tsvetayeva was endowed with brilliant poetic gifts that were dealt the crudest, harshest fate. Her father, the son of a rural priest, was a Moscow University professor and founder of the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts. Her mother, of German and Polish extraction, was a pianist who studied under Anton Rubinstein. During her gymnasium years she often traveled in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. Her first collection of poems, Vechernii al'bom (Evening Album), was published in 1910.

If Anna Akhmatova is the custodian of classical traditions, then Tsvetayeva is the innovator, equaled in explosive power, perhaps, only by Vladimir Mayakovsky. Her poetry is a mighty Niagara of passion, pain, metaphor, and music. It contains elements of the incantations and lamentations of Russian antiquity; it has the muscularity of a wrestler. The semantic enjambements and unexpected rhythmic leaps are Tsvetayeva’s lightning-shaped signature. Even her intimate lyrics are imbued with a ferocious symphonic quality that exceeds the chamber music bounds one usually associates with such poetry. Her genius is apparent also in her prose, her articles, her correspondence, and her personal conduct.

In 1919 Tsvetayeva produced in three months a long (150-page) narrative in verse called Tsar-devitsa (Maiden-Tsar) based on a well-known Russian folk tale; her remarkable artistic power made her in fact the real Maiden-Tsar of Russian literature. She followed her husband, Sergey Efron, in emigration to Paris in 1922. Her pride would not allow her to accommodate herself to emigre circles, and she found no understanding in Russia after she and her family returned in 1937 in the midst of the Great Terror. Her husband was arrested and shot; her sister was arrested and imprisoned; her daughter was arrested, fated to spend nineteen years in labor camps. Tsvetayeva was evacuated during World War II to Yelabuga on the Kama River near Kazan, and she hanged herself there in a moment of despair and loneliness. Tsvetayeva has had an enormous influence on the poetry of both men and women. Her poetry now is published widely in her homeland.