My Tsvetaeva
Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow on October 8, 1892 to an intellectual family, her mother a pianist, and her father an art history professor. She began writing poetry at the age of six and produced her first book of poems, Evening Album, at the young age of eighteen. Noticed by several important literary figures in Russia, she became part of the literary scene. She met Sergey Efron, a poet at the time, and married and had two children. She had many loves during her lifetime. When life became very difficult (she lost one of her daughters in the post-revolutionary famine), and perhaps for political reasons (her husband, Sergey Efron, had fought against the Bolsheviks and emigrated to Berlin at the end of the 1917 revolution), Marina and her surviving daughter left for Europe in 1922 to join Sergey another child was born. Years later, the family returned to Russia and each of them to tragic fates. Marina took her own life in 1941.
I am glad she lived and wrote, as are many others. My life is richer because of Tsvetaeva. Reading and translating her work has given me such pleasure. I could say I learned Russian because of her. Meditating on her poetry, her lines, her wordplay, and her prose, bring me to another place. Rambling on in her conversational manner, she let herself go in writing. So inspiring! I went to her home on Borisoglebsky pereulok in Moscow several times, in 1992 and 1993, when supporters were just setting things up, but I saw and felt her more in her poetry, in her writing, and in details of her life.
With her mischievous eyes and brown hair turned up at the ends, Marina, who let herself love women and question gender roles, was encouraged in her passion and originality in her youth in Russia. Her connection with and interest in women emerged early in her life. In 1911 she fell in love with Asya Turgeneva, a friend of her youth, and described her with an eye on gender variance—a leopard skin on her shoulder, “her male businesslike air.” But ”she is going away, you see, and I will lose her, lose her affection. And there was a nobler, deeper feeling: a longing for the whole race, the lament of the Amazons for the one who was going away, going over onto that other shore, for the sister departing—to them.”
The wild artist Maximilian Voloshin, whose mother was a cross-dresser, invited Marina to join his circle (kruzhok) of artists in Sudak in the Crimea, overlooking the Black Sea, and she fit in well. There she met her husband Sergey, poets Adelaida Gertsyk, Osip Mandelshtam, and many others. She even brought her lover, poet Sophia Parnok, to Voloshin’s dacha in 1915. In reviewing Marina’s first book of poetry, dedicated to the artist Maria Bashkirtseva, Voloshin wrote “Tsvetaeva does not think, she lives in her verse.” And she herself captured her own approach to poetry as follows: “The poem writes itself through me.”
Marina’s independence and radical spirit were powerful. As Nadezhda Mandelshtam, the wife of the great Russian Jewish poet Osip (with whom Marina had a brief affair), described her: “she was absolutely natural and fantastically self-willed. I have a vivid recollection of her cropped hair, loose-limbed gait—like a boy’s—and speech remarkably like her verse.” Marina liked to shock people, quite attracted to the image of the Amazon, and at times displaying a certain masculinity in her appearance.
On the other hand, Marina’s daughter Ariadna described her mother in emigration as deeply isolated. Many people visited her and thought highly of her writing, but in general Marina distanced herself from the rumormongering and backbiting rampant in the Russian émigré community. In addition, she was poor during her years in Europe. She took translating jobs that paid little but helped make ends meet. Valentin Bulgakov, the last secretary of the great novelist Leo Tolstoy, came to visit her in Prague; he worked with her and wrote a piece about her (quoted in Ariadna’s book):
I never saw her crying or even despondent. At times she could be sad, complain of her fate—for example, of her separation from Russia, of being overburdened with housework and household affairs that distract her from her literary work—but those (on the whole, rare) complaints and discontents of hers never sounded regretful or pitiful; on the contrary, they were always proud, I would even say defiant: defiant of fate and of people. In the not just poor but literally destitute setting of her apartment, Marina Ivanovna moved like a queen: calm and with confidence.
Her marriage, neither ideal or typical, survived even though Marina and Sergey spent many years apart. They had three children together: Ariadna (Alya), Irina, and later a son, Mur. Alone during the years of War Communism in Russia, when food, money, and work were scarce, she put her daughters in a state orphanage out of desperation, thinking they would be better taken care of, but little Irina died of malnutrition in 1920.
During that period of famine in Soviet Russia, Marina was close to the actress Sonechka Golidey but their relationship broke off. Years later, she wrote the novella Story About Sonechka, about the gay theater world in Moscow. When Marina and Ariadna emigrated to Europe in 1922, Sergey was very involved in White Russian (anti-Bolshevik) political work and later began spying for the Soviets. He personally participated in the murder of Trotsky’s son in Paris. Upon his return to the USSR in 1937 under orders from the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB), he was sent to the gulag. Meanwhile, Marina was not happy or easy to be with, but she continued writing and having affairs, moving from Berlin to Prague, to city and to countryside, and finally settling in Paris.
Writing in 1938, at the beginning of the war and the holocaust in Europe, she reflected the political situation in her poems: