Biography

MARINA TSVETAEVA was born in Moscow on September 26, 1892, where she lived through the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Her husband, Sergei Efron, fought against the Bolsheviks, while she tried to survive with their daughters in the Soviet capital. The younger of the two, Irina, died of malnutrition. The older, Ariadna, accompanied her mother when she joined Efron in exile in 1922. That exile, first in Prague (where her son Georgy was born in 1925), then in Paris (after 1925), lasted until 1939 when she followed her daughter and husband back to Moscow.

Efron, from 1935, a NKVD spy, had been forced to leave Paris after a murder in Lausanne in which he was implicated. Ariadna was arrested in August, and Efron in September 1939 by the NKVD — Ariadna survived Stalin; Efron was shot. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Tsvetaeva was evacuated with her son from Moscow to Elabuga in the Tatar Republic where she hanged herself on August 31, 1941.

Joseph Brodsky says that Tsvetaeva is “the sincerest Russian poet,” and that “this sincerity is, above all, a sincerity of sound.” In many ways Tsvetaeva achieved in her poetry (both in the lyrics and the remarkable long poems) a radical force of which her Futurist contemporaries could only theorize. Her poem for Akhmatova (as part of an 11-part sequence) was published in the 1922 volume Milestones (Versty).

TONY BRINKLEY teaches at the University of Maine and is a member of the Flat Bay Collective. His poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Another Chicago Magazine, The New Review of Literature, and Stalin’s Eyes (Puckerbrush Press, 2002).