Her life wracked with romance and revolution, this fateful Russian poet loved and lived tragically
Marina Tsvetaeva’s verse and diaries chronicle the bloody years of the 20th century
“Two and a half days — not a bite, not a swallow,” wrote the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva in October of 1917, as a train carried her from Crimea back to her native Moscow, to see what was left of it. Days prior, the Bolsheviks had led a revolt against the precarious Provisional Government in Russia, ushering in revolution. “Soldiers bring newspapers — printed on rose-colored paper. The Kremlin and all the monuments have been blown up,” she continued. “The building where the Cadets and officers refused to surrender has been blown up. 16,000 killed. By the next station it’s up to 25,000. I don’t speak. I smoke.”
Tsvetaeva couldn’t then have known that she was living through one of the most significant upheavals of her country’s history and of the 20th century. Like most of her countrymen, she knew little. The Russian Revolution exploded into Tsvetaeva’s life the way it did for many — especially those from aristocratic backgrounds — immediately rendering uncertain the state of her home, livelihood, and future. The remarkable breadth of the terror and destabilization wrought by the revolution is particularly evident in Tsvetaeva’s life, and she would go on to become one of the most prominent and passionate voices in Russian literature.
At the time, she’d been visiting her sister Anastasia, and feared she’d come back to Moscow to find her husband and two daughters — then four years old and 6 months old — injured or dead. They were fine, though all of their lives would be irrevocably altered by the event. Shortly after the Revolution, Tsvetaeva’s husband, already a military officer, joined the anti-Bolshevik White Army, who would go on to fight a bloody civil war against the Reds. Tsvetaeva did not see him again for four years, and had no word from him for the first three.
Suddenly, Tsvetaeva found herself destitute and alone in a frightening new reality with two young children, her family home “dismantled for firewood.” As an artist and a member of the aristocracy, she’d never had a day job, but now took up work at the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities (Narkomnats), where she grumpily encountered a perplexingly diverse cast of new Soviet citizens. The job didn’t last long. Tsvetaeva wrote frequently throughout this period, keeping notebooks and diaries in which she recorded the dizzying transformations of political and daily life taking place all around her. That writing is collected in the volume Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries 1917–1922, soon to be re-released by New York Review Books. Taken together, the entries are a powerful reminder that art can save you, or kill you, or both.
As translator Jamey Gambrell writes in the introduction to the collection, the diary offered Tsvetaeva both the freedom to work outside of any literary conventions or professional pressures, and the structure she needed to gird the utter chaos of post-revolutionary life. She includes in her diaries memories of her youth, bits of conversations with her children and her friends, musings on poetry, observations and critiques of the rapid changes to the Russian capital and the language, and evocative, staccato glimpses into the everyday that Gambrell argues are not just biographical substance but “are an extraordinary historical document in their own right.” One passage describing an apparent raid reads “Shouts, cries, the clinking of gold, the bareheaded old ladies, slashed featherbeds, bayonets…They ransack everything.” A few pages later: “The market. Skirts — piglets — pumpkins — roosters. The reconciling and enchanting beauty of women’s faces. All are dark-eyed and all are wearing necklaces.”
She writes searingly of her own loneliness and alienation. “I’m a pariah all round: to the boor’s wife I’m ‘poor’ (cheap stockings, no diamonds), to the boor ‘a bourgeoise,’ to the mother-in-law — a ‘former person,’ to the Red soldiers — a proud, short-haired young lady.” Of shopping she writes, “Grocery stores now resemble the windows of beauty salons: all the cheeses — aspics — cakes — not a whit more alive than wax dolls. That same, slight terror.” And of her own poverty, still a darkly stunning novelty: “I live and sleep in one and the same frightfully shrunken, brown flannel dress, sewn in Alexandrov in the spring of 1917 when I wasn’t there. It’s all covered with burn holes from falling coals and cigarettes. The sleeves, once gathered with elastic, are rolled up and fastened with a safety pin.”
She took tiny handouts from friends, piecemeal work where she could get it, and was paid a pittance here and there for reciting her work aloud. Eventually, she put her younger daughter, Irina, in a state-run orphanage, thinking she’d be better fed. The child soon died of starvation, spiraling Tsvetaeva deeper into turmoil and grief.
Tsvetaeva was born in 1892, the daughter of a University of Moscow art professor and a concert pianist. Before she was 20 years old, she had absorbed a great deal of the world. She was an avid and omnivorous reader, particularly interested in literature and history, and studied as a teenager in France and Switzerland. In her childhood, the family lived abroad, seeking fairer climes and sanitariums in which to treat Marina’s mother’s tuberculosis, which killed her in 1906.
Tsvetaeva’s parents’ union was a second marriage for her father, who went on to found what is now known as the Pushkin Museum, and for her mother, who’d been in a significant relationship beforehand. By most accounts, the two were haunted by their past loves, from which they’d never fully recovered. Tsvetaeva and her sister had two half-siblings who were the product of her father’s first marriage, with whom her mother never got along.
This is perhaps one reason that Tsvetaeva remained throughout her life an almost fanatical devotee of love in its many forms. As Oksana Mamsymchuk and Max Rosochinsky write in the Los Angeles Review of Books, in spite of a life full of tragedy, Tsvetaeva “maintained a childlike capacity for love,” and wrote in her poem Letter to the Amazon, “love itself is childhood.”
She plunged passionately into what her husband Sergei Efron called in a letter to a friend “her hurricanes,” carrying on unconsummated epistolary romances and full-blown erotic affairs. “The important thing is not what but how,” Efron continued. “Not the essence or the source but the rhythm, the insane rhythm. Today — despair; tomorrow — ecstasy, love, complete self-abandonment; and the following day — despair once again.”
She’d met Sergei Efron at Koktebel, a kind of seaside artists’ colony in Crimea in 1911. Efron, also a poet, had the tragic quality to which Tsvetaeva seems to have been drawn. He was the sixth of nine children. His father, who worked as an insurance agent, died when he was a teenager. A year later, one of his brothers took his own life. His mother, on hearing the news of her son’s death, killed herself the following day.
Tsvetaeva and Efron quickly fell in love and married the following year (both were still teenagers), though Tsvetaeva continued to carry on affairs, most notably with the poet Osip Mandelstam, about whom she wrote “Milestones,” the cycle of poems often regarded as her best. The love that Tsvetaeva loved — the one that is at times akin to childhood and at times turbulent and anguished — is perhaps best exemplified in another one of her significant affairs, with the poet Sophia Parnok. Tsvetaeva wrote the poem cycle “The Girlfriend” about Parnok (presenting it to her as a gift), her tone alternating between playful, taunting, and cruel. Parnok, for her part, wrote poems predicting the couple’s demise. As Russian literature scholar Diana Lewis Burgin put it, theirs “seems to have been one of those passions fueled by an attraction to its own doom.”
In 1922, Tsvetaeva departed the USSR with her surviving daughter and reunited with Efron in Berlin. The family then moved to Prague. She gave birth to a son, Georgiy, in 1925. In the summer of 1926, Tsvetaeva corresponded — urgently, feverishly — with two titans of European literature, Boris Pasternak and Rainer Maria Rilke. This brief, vivid relationship (Rilke died in 1926; Tsvetaeva and Pasternak continued to write one another) contains the same irrepressible and tormented spark, the same obsession with obsession, that characterizes much of Tsvetaeva’s biography and poetry.
She spent the 1930s mostly in Paris, exhibiting what Russian writer Nina Berberova calls that “special brand of sordidness among Parisian artists and poets between the two wars.” She contracted tuberculosis, and lived off a small artist’s stipend from the Czech government and whatever she could make selling her work. She wrote to Pasternak of her alienation, saying “They don’t like poetry and what am I apart from that, not poetry but that from which it is made. [I am] an inhospitable hostess. A young woman in an old dress.”
Except in history books, revolutions are not neatly summed up. Rather, they ripple outward in countless ways. In spite of living abroad, Tsvetaeva’s family went on to face the full battery of Soviet horrors. Efron and the couple’s surviving daughter Ariadna longed for the USSR and eventually returned in 1937. Efron was by then working for the NKVD (the pre-KGB Soviet security forces), as was Ariadna’s fiancé, who was spying on the family. Accused of espionage at the height of Stalin’s terror, both were arrested. Efron was executed in 1941. Ariadna was sentenced to eight years in a prison camp. She went on to spend close to another decade in prisons and in exile in Siberia. Tsvetaeva’s sister Anastasia was also imprisoned; she lived, but the two never saw each other again.
“TRUTH IS A TURNCOAT,” Tsvetaeva had written years earlier in a letter to a friend.
In 1939, Tsvetaeva also returned to her native city of Moscow, only to be relocated to Yelabuga, a small town in Tatarstan, to avoid the advancing German army. Writer Nina Berberova recalls seeing Tsvetaeva just before she left for Moscow in 1939, at the Paris funeral of another poet. Of the encounter she writes, “She had gray hair, her eyes were gray, her face was gray. Her large hands, coarse and rough, a scrubwoman’s hands, were folded on her stomach and she had a strange toothless smile. And I, like everyone else, passed by without greeting her.”
Two years later, still in Yelabuga, Tsvetaeva took her own life. She left a letter to her 16-year-old son (who was conscripted into the army and killed in combat within a few years), which read, “Forgive me, but it would have only gotten worse. I am seriously ill, this is no longer me. I love you madly. Understand that I couldn’t live anymore. Tell Papa and Alya, if you see them, that I loved them to the last minute, and explain that I had reached a dead end.” She was buried in an unmarked grave.
