The response to Tsvetaeva’s work has taken on in the past two decades an epiphanic quality, an immense and unexpected revelation. During the years of War Communism, during the time of famine, chaos, uncertainty, alone in a chaotic Moscow, when Sergei Efron was away, a conscript in the Tsarist regular army and then the White Army of General Wrangel, little Ariadna was her mother’s closest friend, her confidante. At times, Marina became a little girl, and her daughter transformed into a rare phenomenon that surprised everyone; she read what her mother read, spoke as she spoke, recited Rilke and Homer; Tsvetaeva’s friends were left speechless in her presence. She was the first person to whom her mother read her poems, her prose, her letters to her family, colleagues, friends. And the little girl commented as if they were peers on the rhythm, or the effectiveness of this or that effect that could perfect her writing. A decade later, in Czechoslovakia, when Georgy was born, called Mur from birth in honor of Hoffmann’s fictional cat, Ariadna was pushed aside and placed for a time in a boarding school for Russian children in the Czech countryside. Upon returning home, the child prodigy who handled rhetoric with unimaginable virtuosity had become a girl on the brink of adolescence, who had become almost normal. She grows distant from her mother, for whom Mur is everything, and increasingly closer to her father, that melancholy being, always in delicate health, tossed aside by everyone, powerless before life, whom she chose to view this way. Thereafter, she lived in his shadow, and adopted his ideas. For Efron, the years in the White Army were a nightmare; they left him traumatized. On his father’s side, he was Jewish; his mother, an aristocrat, a runaway from a very young age, a militant in terrorist societies, spent various periods of time behind bars, and ended up committing suicide, just as her eldest son had, at the end of a trial in which she would surely have been convicted. Anti-Semitism was endemic in the reactionary sectors of the country; in Crimea, in Ukrainian Galicia, pogroms were the order of the day. Cutting off the beards of Jews, destroying their businesses, beating them were everyday occurrences, an amusing sport, regardless of whether the victims were old men, women, or children. If one died from the beating, it would not anger Our Lord; on the contrary, it might even mean an indulgence to forgive the batterer’s sins. To be a part of and live for years among those people who hated someone like him as if it were totally natural, a Jew, sickly, a literato, not leaving sooner was one of the greatest mistakes of this story. Of course, there were many others.
For seven years it seems that they saw each other only once clandestinely, or he took advantage of some other way to give Marina news of his life and announce that once the Tsar’s army was defeated he would join the White Army in the Crimea. Marina’s extremely harried life in Moscow at this time is well known, recorded in magnificent autobiographical essays. She endured hunger and extreme poverty, although it seemed to go reasonably unnoticed because almost everyone lived in the same conditions. With the help of an acquaintance, after the death of her second child due to a lack of money, she obtained a credential necessary to receive a modest living allowance and food vouchers. She wrote several books that helped affirm her literary presence. She had numerous affairs, hurried, intense, frenzied, and unhappy at the same time. She wrote a book with no hope of being published that she considered the best she had written to date: The Demesne of the Swans, civil and epic poetry, a salute to the best, the Whites, the warriors against the revolutionary hydra of a thousand heads, the knights of good among whom was her beloved Sergei. After having not seen him for so many years, she had transformed him into an epic figure — he was Siegfried, he was Parsifal — and very rarely the poor and sickly Sergei, that beautiful and docile creature whom she had married in her adolescence, whom she didn’t even know was still alive, fighting against evil and for the sake of Russia or buried in the south in an unmarked grave. When they finally reunited in Berlin, she introduced him immediately to Andrei Bely, the great Russian Symbolist, anticipating that they would become good friends. Tsvetaeva wrote the scene: “I remember Bely’s special, intensified attentiveness to him [Sergei Efron], attention directed to each word, attention for each word, that special avidity of the poet for the world of action, avidity with even a glimmer of envy…(Let us not forget, that all the poets of the world have loved military men.)”6 For Efron, the opposite was true, nothing seemed more repellent to him than his recent military past; he could not forget the humiliations he had endured during those years, the cruelties with which he had lived. Marina found it difficult to understand, much less hear him say, that the political movement that was unfolding in Russia was very complex and very difficult to understand from Europe, which is why the educated Russians, like they themselves and their friends, could not understand it; they were all educated as Europeans, she insisted. Russia is only half European; the other half of its spirit is Asian. When he arrived in Berlin, he read his wife’s dithyrambic poems to the swans whose elegant plumage alone was enough to defeat the Bolsheviks. He told her that none of it made sense, either aesthetically or ethically. To publish that book would be a moral error. Her reputation would be tarnished. It would be an affront to the Jews murdered by the Cossacks, and to the Russian peasants dispossessed by the Whites, “it would be an affront to your intelligence and poetry,” he said. “The best you can do,” he insisted, “is destroy, burn those papers, and forget about them. They are not swans, Marina, they are vultures, believe me.” Marina was very distressed; she stopped defending her work in public because Sergei demanded it. She loved his military tone, it was an order; but she did not destroy the poems.
During his years of absence, she had invented a husband. Afterwards, she did not know how to take him. Her love for him was not constant — it waxed and waned. It would always be this way. In 1915, she wrote to her sister-in-law: “I love Seriozha for life, he is my very own and I will never leave him for anyone. I write him at least every other day, he knows all about my life, though I try to write less about what is most sad [the death of Irina, their second daughter]. There is a burden in my heart always. I go to sleep with it and I wake up with it.”7
And yet, during those very days she was carrying on a tumultuous affair and for all to see, with a second-rate poet named Sophia Parnok.
The reunion in Berlin was difficult. Time had changed them. They had become different people and continued to be until the end. Sergei discovered that during the short time that Marina spent in Germany waiting for him, she had had a romantic relationship with someone else. He confided it in a letter to a mutual friend, the poet Voloshin, in whose house in Yalta the couple had met. In the letter, he said he had discovered that Marina had a lover; to be offended by it made no sense, seven years had passed without seeing each other, and in all that time she had been free as they had agreed when they married. He was writing to him about something more serious, to announce that he had thought about dissolving their marriage, that he had decided to leave Marina. Her stupid affairs made him ill, and the last lover, about whom she claimed to be more passionate than ever, was a despicable man, a second-rate Casanova; that his youthful passion for her had disappeared, that he had planned to leave her, but on later reflection decided to sacrifice himself, because Marina was weak and would not survive such a bad experience without his help. At the same time, Marina wrote to a friend that living with Sergei was impossible, that “his very presence gnawed at her soul.” But she knew that without her he would not be able to survive, “after all, I came abroad to join Sergei. Without me he would perish — from the simple inability to manage his life.”8 They both convinced themselves that they had each sacrificed for the other to save their marriage. For Marina the crisis was intense, serious, it left her shattered in body and spirit, but as everyone knew, each of these disasters invariably increased her creative powers. Thereafter, the marriage took on another character. Efron lost face with his friends in Prague; his closeness to Marina’s lover turned out to be extremely awkward for him, they had been friends since youth, they were both officers in the White Army, and studied together in Prague in the Faculty of Philology. From then on, the intimacy between father and daughter begins. A tacit pact of solidarity for life.