Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (, ; 31 August 1941) was a Russian poet. Her work is some of the best known in twentieth-century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote about the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent Moscow famine.

Marina attempted to save her daughter Irina from starvation by placing her in a state orphanage in 1919, where Irina died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and their daughter Ariadna (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941, when her husband was executed.

Tsvetaeva hanged herself in 1941. A lyrical poet of passion and daring linguistic experimentation, she chronicled her times and the depths of the human condition.

Early years

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow, the daughter of Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a professor of Fine Art at the University of Moscow, Tsvetaeva later came to identify herself with the Polish aristocracy.

Tsvetaeva's two half-siblings, Valeria and Andrei, were the children of Ivan's deceased first wife, Varvara Dmitrievna Ilovaiskaya, daughter of the historian Dmitry Ilovaisky. Tsvetaeva's only full sister, Anastasia, was born in 1894. The children quarrelled frequently and occasionally violently. There was considerable tension between Tsvetaeva's mother and Varvara's children, and Tsvetaeva's father maintained close contact with Varvara's family. Tsvetaeva's father was kind, but deeply wrapped up in his studies and distant from his family. He was also still deeply in love with his first wife; he would never get over her. Likewise, Tsvetaeva's mother Maria had never recovered from a love affair she'd had before her marriage. Maria disapproved of Marina's poetic inclination; holding the opinion that Marina's poetry was poor, Maria wanted her daughter to become a pianist.

In 1902, Maria contracted tuberculosis. A change in climate was recommended to help cure the disease, and so the family travelled abroad until shortly before her death in 1906, when Tsvetaeva was 14.

In June 1904, Tsvetaeva was sent to school in Lausanne. Changes in the Tsvetaev residence led to several changes in school, and during the course of her travels she acquired the Italian, French, and German languages. She gave up the strict musical studies that her mother had imposed and turned to poetry. She wrote "With a mother like her, I had only one choice: to become a poet". Tsvetaeva and her husband spent summers in the Crimea until the revolution, and had two daughters: Ariadna, or Alya (born 1912), and Irina (born 1917).

In 1914, Efron volunteered for the front and by 1917 he was an officer stationed in Moscow with the 56th Reserve.

Tsvetaeva was a close witness of the Russian Revolution, which she rejected. There she published the collections Separation, Poems to Blok, and the poem The Tsar Maiden. Much of her poetry was published in Moscow and Berlin, consolidating her reputation. In August 1922, the family moved to Prague. Living in unremitting poverty, unable to afford living accommodation in Prague itself, with Efron studying politics and sociology at the Charles University and living in hostels, Tsvetaeva and Ariadna found rooms in a village outside the city. She wrote: "We are devoured by coal, gas, the milkman, the baker... the only meat we eat is horsemeat." When offered an opportunity to earn money by reading her poetry, she had to beg a simple dress from a friend to replace the one she had been living in.

Tsvetaeva began a passionate affair with , a former military officer, a liaison which became widely known throughout émigré circles. Efron was devastated. Her break-up with Rodziewicz in 1923 was almost certainly the inspiration for her The Poem of the End and "The Poem of the Mountain". She found solace in her correspondence with other writers, including Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, the Czech poet Anna Tesková, the critics D. S. Mirsky and Aleksandr Bakhrakh, and the Georgian émigré princess Salomea Andronikova, who became her main source of financial support. Her poetry and critical prose of the time, including her autobiographical prose works of 1934–7, is of lasting literary importance. She left a note for her son Georgy ("Mur"): "Forgive me, but to go on would be worse. I am gravely ill, this is not me anymore. I love you passionately. Do understand that I could not live anymore. Tell Papa and Alya, if you ever see them, that I loved them to the last moment and explain to them that I found myself in a trap."

According to the book The Death of a Poet: The Last Days of Marina Tsvetaeva, the local NKVD department tried to force Tsvetaeva to start working as their informant, which left her no choice other than to kill herself.

Tsvetaeva was buried in Yelabuga cemetery on 2 September 1941, but the exact location of her grave remains unknown.

Her son Georgy volunteered for the Eastern Front of World War II and died in battle in 1944. Her daughter Ariadna spent 16 years in Soviet prison camps and exile and was released in 1955. Ariadna wrote a memoir of her family; an English-language edition was published in 2009. She died in 1975.

In the town of Yelabuga, the Tsvetaeva house is now a museum; there is a monument to her. The apartment in Moscow where she lived from 1914 to 1922 is now a museum as well. Much of her poetry was republished in the Soviet Union after 1961, and her passionate, articulate and precise work, with its daring linguistic experimentation, brought her increasing recognition as a major Russian poet.

In 1989, in Gdynia, Poland, a special-purpose ship was built for the Russian Academy of Sciences and named Marina Tsvetaeva in her honor. From 2007, the ship served as a tourist vessel to the polar regions for Aurora Expeditions. In 2011, she was renamed and is currently operated by Oceanwide Expeditions as a tourist vessel in the polar regions.

Work

Tsvetaeva's poetry was admired by poets such as Valery Bryusov, Maximilian Voloshin, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Anna Akhmatova. Later, that recognition was also expressed by the poet Joseph Brodsky, pre-eminent among Tsvetaeva's champions. Tsvetaeva was primarily a lyrical poet, and her lyrical voice remains clearly audible in her narrative poetry. Brodsky said of her work: "Represented on a graph, Tsvetaeva's work would exhibit a curve – or rather, a straight line – rising at almost a right angle because of her constant effort to raise the pitch a note higher, an idea higher (or, more precisely, an octave and a faith higher.) She always carried everything she has to say to its conceivable and expressible end. In both her poetry and her prose, nothing remains hanging or leaves a feeling of ambivalence. Tsvetaeva is the unique case in which the paramount spiritual experience of an epoch (for us, the sense of ambivalence, of contradictoriness in the nature of human existence) served not as the object of expression but as its means, by which it was transformed into the material of art." Critic Annie Finch describes the engaging, heart-felt nature of the work. "Tsvetaeva is such a warm poet, so unbridled in her passion, so completely vulnerable in her love poetry, whether to her female lover Sofie Parnak, to Boris Pasternak. [...] Tsvetaeva throws her poetic brilliance on the altar of her heart’s experience with the faith of a true romantic, a priestess of lived emotion. And she stayed true to that faith to the tragic end of her life.

Tsvetaeva's lyric poems fill ten collections; the uncollected lyrics would add at least another volume. Her first two collections indicate their subject matter in their titles: Evening Album (Vecherniy albom, 1910) and The Magic Lantern (Volshebnyi fonar, 1912). The poems are vignettes of a tranquil childhood and youth in a professorial, middle-class home in Moscow, and display considerable grasp of the formal elements of style. The full range of Tsvetaeva's talent developed quickly, and was undoubtedly influenced by the contacts she had made at Koktebel, and was made evident in two new collections: Mileposts (Versty, 1921) and Mileposts: Book One (Versty, Vypusk I, 1922).

Three elements of Tsvetaeva's mature style emerge in the Mileposts collections. First, Tsvetaeva dates her poems and publishes them chronologically. The poems in Mileposts: Book One, for example, were written in 1916 and resolve themselves as a versified journal. Secondly, there are cycles of poems which fall into a regular chronological sequence among the single poems, evidence that certain themes demanded further expression and development. One cycle announces the theme of Mileposts: Book One as a whole: the "Poems of Moscow." Two other cycles are dedicated to poets, the "Poems to Akhmatova" and the "Poems to Blok", which again reappear in a separate volume, Poems to Blok (Stikhi k Bloku, 1922). Thirdly, the Mileposts collections demonstrate the dramatic quality of Tsvetaeva's work, and her ability to assume the guise of multiple dramatis personae within them.

The collection Separation (Razluka, 1922) was to contain Tsvetaeva's first long verse narrative, "On a Red Steed" ("Na krasnom kone"). The poem is a prologue to three more verse-narratives written between 1920 and 1922. All four narrative poems draw on folkloric plots. Tsvetaeva acknowledges her sources in the titles of the very long works, The Maiden Tsar: A Fairy-tale Poem (Tsar-devitsa: Poema-skazka, 1922) and "The Swain", subtitled "A Fairytale" ("Molodets: skazka", 1924). The fourth folklore-style poem is "Byways" ("Pereulochki", published in 1923 in the collection Remeslo), and it is the first poem which may be deemed incomprehensible in that it is fundamentally a soundscape of language. The collection Psyche (Psikheya, 1923) contains one of Tsvetaeva's best-known cycles "Insomnia" (Bessonnitsa) and the poem The Swans' Encampment (Lebedinyi stan, Stikhi 1917–1921, published in 1957) which celebrates the White Army.

Emigrant

Subsequently, as an émigré, Tsvetaeva's last two collections of lyrics were published by émigré presses, Craft (Remeslo, 1923) in Berlin and After Russia (Posle Rossii, 1928) in Paris. There then followed the twenty-three lyrical "Berlin" poems, the pantheistic "Trees" ("Derev'ya"), "Wires" ("Provoda") and "Pairs" ("Dvoe"), and the tragic "Poets" ("Poety"). "After Russia" contains the poem "In Praise of the Rich", in which Tsvetaeva's oppositional tone is merged with her proclivity for ruthless satire.

thumb|right|200px| USSR stamp featuring Tsvetaeva (1991)

Satire

Satire is a secondary element after lyricism in Tsvetaeva's poetry. Several satirical poems, moreover, are among Tsvetaeva's best-known works: "The Train of Life" ("Poezd zhizni") and "The Floorcleaners' Song" ("Poloterskaya"), both included in After Russia, and The Ratcatcher (Krysolov, 1925–1926), a long, folkloric narrative. The target of Tsvetaeva's satire is everything petty and petty bourgeois. Unleashed against such dull creature comforts is the vengeful, unearthly energy of workers both manual and creative. In her notebook, Tsvetaeva writes of "The Floorcleaners' Song": "Overall movement: the floorcleaners ferret out a house's hidden things, they scrub a fire into the door... What do they flush out? Coziness, warmth, tidiness, order... Smells: incense, piety. Bygones. Yesterday... The growing force of their threat is far stronger than the climax." The Ratcatcher poem, which Tsvetaeva describes as a lyrical satire, is loosely based on the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The Ratcatcher, which is also known as The Pied Piper, is considered by some to be the finest of Tsvetaeva's work. It was also partially an act of homage to Heinrich Heine's poem Die Wanderratten. The Ratcatcher appeared initially, in serial format, in the émigré journal ' in 1925–1926 whilst still being written. It was not to appear in the Soviet Union until after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1956. Its hero is the Pied Piper of Hamelin who saves a town from hordes of rats and then leads the town's children away too, in retribution for the citizens' ingratitude. As in the other folkloric narratives, The Ratcatcher's story line emerges indirectly through numerous speaking voices which shift from invective, to extended lyrical flights, to pathos.

thumb|200px| The poem "For my poems" by Tsvetaeva on a wall of the building at Nieuwsteeg 1, [[Leiden, Netherlands]]

Tsvetaeva's last ten years of exile, from 1928 when "After Russia" appeared until her return in 1939 to the Soviet Union, were principally a "prose decade", though this would almost certainly be by dint of economic necessity rather than one of choice.

Translators

Translators of Tsvetaeva's work into English include Elaine Feinstein and David McDuff. Nina Kossman translated many of Tsvetaeva's long (narrative) poems, as well as her lyrical poems; they are collected in three books, Poem of the End (bilingual edition published by Ardis in 1998, by Overlook in 2004, and by Shearsman Books in 2021), In the Inmost Hour of the Soul (Humana Press, 1989), and Other Shepherds (Poets & Traitors Press, 2020). Robin Kemball translated the cycle The Demesne of the Swans, published as a separate (bilingual) book by Ardis in 1980. J. Marin King translated a great deal of Tsvetaeva's prose into English, compiled in a book called A Captive Spirit. Tsvetaeva scholar Angela Livingstone has translated a number of Tsvetaeva's essays on art and writing, compiled in a book called Art in the Light of Conscience. Livingstone's translation of Tsvetaeva's "The Ratcatcher" was published as a separate book. Mary Jane White has translated the early cycle "Miles" in a book called "Starry Sky to Starry Sky", as well as Tsvetaeva's elegy for Rilke, "New Year's", (Adastra Press 16 Reservation Road, Easthampton, MA 01027 USA) and "Poem of the End" (The Hudson Review, Winter 2009; and in the anthology Poets Translate Poets, Syracuse U. Press 2013) and "Poem of the Hill", (New England Review, Summer 2008) and Tsvetaeva's 1914–1915 cycle of love poems to Sophia Parnok. In 2002, Yale University Press published Jamey Gambrell's translation of post-revolutionary prose, entitled Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922, with notes on poetic and linguistic aspects of Tsvetaeva's prose, and endnotes for the text itself.

Cultural influence

2017: Zerkalo ("Mirror"), American magazine in MN for the Russian-speaking readers. It was a special publication to the 125th Anniversary of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, where the article "Marina Tsvetaeva in America" was written by Dr. Uli Zislin, the founder and director of the Washington Museum of Russian Poetry and Music, Sep/Oct 2017.

Music and songs

In 1973, Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich set six of Tsvetaeva's poems in his Six Poems by Marina Tsvetayeva. Later the Russian-Tatar composer Sofia Gubaidulina wrote an Hommage à Marina Tsvetayeva featuring her poems. Her poem "Mne Nravitsya..." ("I like that..."), was performed by Alla Pugacheva in the film The Irony of Fate. In 2003, the opera Marina: A Captive Spirit, based on Tsvetaeva's life and work, premiered from American Opera Projects in New York with music by Deborah Drattell and libretto by poet Annie Finch. The production was directed by Anne Bogart and the part of Tsvetaeva was sung by Lauren Flanigan. The poetry by Tsvetaeva was set to music and frequently performed as songs by Elena Frolova, Larisa Novoseltseva, Zlata Razdolina and other Russian bards. In 2019, American composer Mark Abel wrote Four Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, the first classical song cycle of the poet in an English translation. Soprano Hila Plitmann recorded the piece for Abel’s album The Cave of Wondrous Voice.

Tribute

On 8 October 2015, Google Doodle commemorated her 123rd birthday.

Translations into English

Selected Poems, trans. Elaine Feinstein. (Oxford University Press, 1971; 2nd ed., 1981; 3rd ed., 1986; 4th ed., 1993; 5th ed., 1999; 6th ed. 2009 as Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems)
The Demesne of the Swans, trans. Robin Kemball (bilingual edition, Ardis, 1980) ISBN 978-0882334936
Marina Tsvetayeva: Selected Poems, trans. David McDuff. (Bloodaxe Books, 1987)
"Starry Sky to Starry Sky (Miles)", trans. Mary Jane White. (Holy Cow! Press, 1988), (paper) and (cloth)
In the Inmost Hour of the Soul: Poems by Marina Tsvetayeva , trans. Nina Kossman (Humana Press, 1989)
Black Earth, trans. Elaine Feinstein (The Delos Press and The Menard Press, 1992) ISBN I-874320-00-4 and ISBN I-874320-05-5 (signed ed.)
"After Russia", trans. Michael Nayden (Ardis, 1992).
A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose, trans. J. Marin King (Vintage Books, 1994)
Poem of the End: Selected Narrative and Lyrical Poems , trans. Nina Kossman (Ardis / Overlook, 1998, 2004) ; Poem of the End: Six Narrative Poems, trans. Nina Kossman (Shearsman Books, 2021) ISBN 978-1-84861-778-0)
The Ratcatcher: A Lyrical Satire, trans. Angela Livingstone (Northwestern University, 2000)
Letters: Summer 1926 (Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, Rainer Maria Rilke) (New York Review Books, 2001)
Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922, ed. & trans. Jamey Gambrell (Yale University Press, 2002)
Phaedra: a drama in verse; with New Year's Letter and other long poems, trans. Angela Livingstone (Angel Classics, 2012)
"To You – in 10 Decades", trans. by Alexander Givental and Elysee Wilson-Egolf (Sumizdat 2012)
Moscow in the Plague Year, translated by Christopher Whyte (180 poems written between November 1918 and May 1920) (Archipelago Press, New York, 2014), 268pp,
Milestones (1922), translated by Christopher Whyte (Bristol, Shearsman Books, 2015), 122p,
After Russia: The First Notebook, translated by Christopher Whyte (Bristol, Shearsman Books, 2017), 141 pp,
After Russia: The Second Notebook, translated by Christopher Whyte (Bristol, Shearsman Books, 2018) 121 pp,
"Poem of the End" in "From A Terrace in Prague, A Prague Poetry Anthology", trans. Mary Jane White, ed. Stephan Delbos (Univerzita Karlova v Praze, 2011)
Youthful Verses, translated by Christopher Whyte (Bristol, Shearsman Books, 2021), 114 pp, ISBN 9781848617315
Head on a Gleaming Plate: Poems 1917-1918, translated by Christopher Whyte (Bristol, Shearsman Books, 2022), 120 pp, ISBN 9781848618435
Poems, trans. Alyssa Gillespie (Columbia University Press, forthcoming)
Three by Tsvetaeva, trans. Andrew Davis (New York Review Books, 2024)

References

External links

Poetry Foundation profile
Poetry Academy profile
"Marina Tsvetaeva, Poet of the extreme" by Belinda Cooke from South magazine #31, April 2005. Republished online in the Poetry Library's Poetry Magazines site.
Heritage of Marina Tsvetayeva, a resource in English with a more extensive version in Russian.
The brief biography of Marina Tsvetaeva (in English).