Additional Reading
Michael Almereyda (ed.), Night Wraps the Sky (2008), combines writings about Mayakovsky drawn from memoirs, critical essays, and other sources with translations into English of Mayakovsky's poetry. Edward J. Brown, Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution (1973, reprinted 1988), is a critical biography. Studies of Mayakovsky's work include Bengt Jangfeldt, Majakovskij and Futurism 1917–1921 (1976); Vahan D. Barooshian, Brik and Mayakovsky (1978); Juliette R. Stapanian, Mayakovsky's Cubo-Futurist Vision (1986).
Tsvetayeva, Marina Ivanovna
▪ Russian poet
married name Marina Ivanovna Efron
born Sept. 26 [Oct. 8, New Style], 1892, Moscow, Russia
died Aug. 31, 1941, Yelabuga
Russian poet whose verse is distinctive for its staccato rhythms, originality, and directness and who, though little known outside Russia, is considered one of the finest 20th-century poets in the Russian language.
Tsvetayeva spent her youth predominantly in Moscow, where her father was a professor at the university and director of a museum and her mother was a talented pianist. The family traveled abroad extensively, and at the age of 16 she began studies at the Sorbonne. Her first collection of poetry, Vecherny albom (“Evening Album”), appeared in 1910. Many of her best and most typical poetical qualities are displayed in the long verse fairy tale Tsar-devitsa (1922; “Tsar-Maiden”).
Tsvetayeva met the Russian Revolution with hostility (her husband, Sergei Efron, was an officer in the White counterrevolutionary army), and many of her verses written at this time glorify the anti-Bolshevik resistance. Among these is the remarkable cycle Lebediny stan (“The Swans' Camp,” composed 1917–21, but not published until 1957 in Munich), a moving lyrical chronicle of the Civil War viewed through the eyes and emotions of the wife of a White officer.
Tsvetayeva left the Soviet Union in 1922, going to Berlin and Prague, and finally, in 1925, settling in Paris. There she published several volumes of poetry, including Stikhi k Bloku (1922; “Verses to Blok”) and Posle Rossii (1928; “After Russia”), the last book of her poetry to be published during her lifetime. She also composed two poetical tragedies on classical themes, Ariadne (1924) and Phaedra (1927), several essays on the creative process, and works of literary criticism, including the monograph Moy Pushkin (1937; “My Pushkin”). Her last cycle of poems, Stikhi k Chekhii (1938–39; “Verses to the Czech Land”), was an impassioned reaction to Nazi Germany's occupation of Czechoslovakia.
In the 1930s Tsvetayeva's poetry increasingly reflected alienation from her émigré existence and a deepening nostalgia for Russia, as in the poems “Toska po rodine” (1935; “Homesick for the Motherland”) and “Rodina” (1936; “Motherland”). At the end of the '30s her husband—who had begun to cooperate with the communists—returned to the Soviet Union, taking their daughter with him (both of them were later to become victims of Joseph Stalin's terror). In 1939 Tsvetayeva followed them, settling in Moscow, where she worked on poetic translations. The evacuation of Moscow during World War II sent her to a remote town where she had no friends or support. She committed suicide in 1941.
Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich
▪ Russian author
born Feb. 10 [Jan. 29, Old Style], 1890, Moscow, Russia
died May 30, 1960, Peredelkino, near Moscow
Russian poet whose novel Doctor Zhivago helped win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 but aroused so much opposition in the Soviet Union that he declined the honour. An epic of wandering, spiritual isolation, and love amid the harshness of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the novel became an international best-seller but circulated only in secrecy and translation in his own land.
Pasternak grew up in a cultured Jewish household. His father, Leonid, was an art professor and a portraitist of novelist Leo Tolstoy, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and composer Sergey Rachmaninoff, all frequent guests at his home, and of Lenin. His mother was the pianist Rosa Kaufman.
Young Pasternak himself planned a musical career, though he was a precocious poet. He studied musical theory and composition for six years, then abruptly switched to philosophy courses at Moscow University and the University of Marburg (Germany). Physically disqualified for military service, he worked in a chemical factory in the Urals during World War I. After the Revolution he worked in the library of the Soviet commissariat of education.
His first volume of poetry was published in 1913. In 1917 he brought out a striking second volume, Poverkh baryerov (“Over the Barriers”), and with the publication of Sestra moya zhizn (1922; “My Sister Life”) he was recognized as a major new lyrical voice. His poems of that period reflected Symbolist influences. Though avant-garde and esoteric by Russian standards, they were successful. From 1933 to 1943, however, the gap between his work and the official modes (such as Socialist Realism) was too wide to permit him to publish, and he feared for his safety during the purges of the late 1930s. One theory is that Stalin spared him because Pasternak had translated poets of Stalin's native Georgia. His translations, which were his main livelihood, included renderings of William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, English Romantic poets, Paul Verlaine, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Although Pasternak hoped for the best when he submitted Doctor Zhivago to a leading Moscow monthly in 1956, it was rejected with the accusation that “it represented in a libelous manner the October Revolution, the people who made it, and social construction in the Soviet Union.” The book reached the West in 1957 through an Italian publishing house that had bought rights to it from Pasternak and refused to return it “for revisions.” By 1958, the year of its English edition, the book had been translated into 18 languages.
In the Soviet Union, the Nobel Prize brought a campaign of abuse. Pasternak was ejected from the Union of Soviet Writers (Writers' Union of the U.S.S.R.) and thus deprived of his livelihood. Public meetings called for his deportation; he wrote Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, “Leaving the motherland will equal death for me.” Suffering from cancer and heart trouble, he spent his last years in his home at Peredelkino.
Pasternak's works in English translation include short stories, the autobiographical Okhrannaya gramota (1931; Safe Conduct), and the full range of his poetic output, which ended on a note of gravity and quiet inwardness.
In 1987 the Union of Soviet Writers posthumously reinstated Pasternak, a move that gave his works a legitimacy they had lacked in the Soviet Union since his expulsion from the writers' union in 1958 and that finally made possible the publication of Doctor Zhivago in the Soviet Union. In addition to effecting Pasternak's rehabilitation, the review commission, headed by poet Andrey Voznesensky, recommended that Pasternak's home in Peredelkino be made a museum.
Additional Reading
Works of mainly biographical interest include Olga Ivinskaya, A Captive of Time (1978; originally published in Russian, 1978); Guy de Mallac, Boris Pasternak: His Life and Work (1981); Ronald Hingley, Pasternak (1983); Christopher Barnes, Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography (1989– ); and Lazar Fleishman, Boris Pasternak: The Poet and His Politics (1990). Criticism is represented by Olga R. Hughes, The Poetic World of Boris Pasternak (1974); Henry Gifford, Pasternak: A Critical Study (1977); and Victor Erlich (ed.), Pasternak: A Collection of Critical Essays (1978). Munir Sendich, Boris Pasternak: A Reference Guide (1994), an annotated bibliography of works by and about Pasternak, 1913–90, includes an essay on the critical reception Pasternak's writings received.