October 8, 1892 – August 31, 1941 (48 years old)
4.4
Average rating: 4.4
Total ratings received: 7383.
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) is a famous Russian poet, prose writer, and translator, who with her work left a bright mark on the literature of the 20th century. Her poems clearly express musicality, since Tsvetaeva studied piano as a child.
The material was prepared jointly with a teacher of the highest category, Kuchmina Nadezhda Vladimirovna.
Experience as a teacher of Russian language and literature - 27 years.
early years
Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow on September 26 (October 8), 1892. Her father was a university professor, her mother a pianist. It is worth briefly noting that Tsvetaeva’s biography was replenished with her first poems at the age of six.
She received her first education in Moscow at a private girls' gymnasium, then studied in boarding schools in Switzerland, Germany, and France.
After the death of her mother, Marina and her brother and two sisters were raised by their father, who tried to give the children a good education.
The beginning of a creative journey
Tsvetaeva's first collection of poems was published in 1910 (“Evening Album”). Even then, famous people - Valery Bryusov, Maximilian Voloshin and Nikolai Gumilyov - drew attention to Tsvetaeva’s work. Their work and the works of Nikolai Nekrasov significantly influenced the early work of the poetess.
In 1912, she published her second collection of poems, The Magic Lantern. These two collections by Tsvetaeva also included poems for children: “So,” “In the classroom,” “On Saturday.” In 1913, the poetess’s third collection, entitled “From Two Books,” was published.
During the Civil War (1917–1922), for Tsvetaeva, poetry was a means of expressing sympathy. In addition to poetry, she writes plays.
Personal life
Marina Tsvetaeva had a rather stormy and tragic personal life. At the age of 18, in Koktebel, Marina met the writer Sergei Efron . He was 17 years old at that time. After Sergei turned 18, the couple got married on January 29, 1912 in Moscow.
With Sergei Efron
The couple had three children . Ariadne was born . During the Civil War (1917-1922), the couple had a second daughter, Irina . She lived only 3 years and died of starvation in the Kuntsevo orphanage. And in 1925, already in exile, a son, George, .
In 1914, Marina Tsvetaeva began an affair with the poetess and translator Sofia Yakovlevna Parnok , which lasted 2 years. Marina dedicated a series of poems to the girl. After breaking up with Parnok, the poetess returned to her husband.
Sofia Parnok
The poetess began another romance in the Czech Republic with K. Rodzevich . Efron expressed a desire to get a divorce, but the couple did not dare to do so.
Life in exile
In 1922, Tsvetaeva moved to Berlin, then to the Czech Republic and Paris. Tsvetaeva’s creativity of those years includes the works “Poem of the Mountain”, “Poem of the End”, “Poem of the Air”.
Tsvetaeva's poems from 1922–1925 were published in the collection After Russia (1928). However, the poems did not bring her popularity abroad. It was during the period of emigration that prose received great recognition in the biography of Marina Tsvetaeva.
Tsvetaeva writes a series of works dedicated to famous and significant people:
- in 1930, the poetic cycle “To Mayakovsky” was written, in honor of the famous Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose suicide shocked the poetess;
- in 1933 - “Living about Living”, memories of Maximilian Voloshin;
- in 1934 - “Captured Spirit” in memory of Andrei Bely;
- in 1936 - “An Unearthly Evening” about Mikhail Kuzmin;
- in 1937 - “My Pushkin”, dedicated to Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin.
Marina Tsvetaeva: biography and creativity (details)
Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow on September 26, 1892 into a highly cultured, intelligent family. Her father, Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a philologist and art critic, was a professor at Moscow University, and later became the director of the Rumyantsev Museum and the founder of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her mother (the second wife of the widowed I.V. Tsvetaev, who already had a daughter and son from his first marriage), Maria Alexandrovna, nee Main, came from a Russified Polish-German family, was a romantic and artistically gifted person. She died of consumption in 1906 while still young, leaving her husband two daughters - Marina and Anastasia.
M. Tsvetaeva’s short, cloudless childhood took place in a cozy mansion in Trekhprudny Lane and the Kaluga town of Tarusa, where the family spent the summer. With the onset of the illness, the mother and daughters mostly lived abroad: the mother was treated at resorts in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, the girls studied in private boarding schools there. My father was torn between Moscow and abroad. The beauty of the surrounding places and the atmosphere of half-orphanhood, the lack of strong friendships, affections and the abundance of strangers around - all this forced Marina to withdraw into her inner world, forming the nature of the poet - romantic, independent in judgment and actions, always lonely and nurturing his loneliness.
Already at the age of six, M. Tsvetaeva began writing poetry in Russian, French, and German. While studying in Moscow private gymnasiums (three in five years - due to her uncooperative, conflictual nature), she immersed herself in books and the fictional lives of their heroes. She met the Moscow Symbolists and, drawn by the desire to enter the alluring literary world, in 1910, using her own funds, she published her first collection, “Evening Album,” a confession of the soul over the past two years; I boldly sent it to V. Bryusov and M. Voloshin. I liked the book with its spontaneity and primordial impressions of half-childhood: Bryusov, however, somewhat scolded for the “homey” nature of the subject matter - too personal, narrow family motives, but Voloshin even visited young Tsvetaeva at her home and thus marked the beginning of their long-term friendship: Tsvetaeva subsequently visited her four times Voloshin, who blessed her on the path of poetry in Koktebel, Crimea.
There she met Sergei Yakovlevich Efron and married him in January 1912. In 1912, daughter Ariadne was born. During these five or six years, Tsvetaeva’s life was unusually happy: she had a family, material well-being, interesting communication, and elation. At their own expense, two more collections of poems, “The Magic Lantern” (1912) and “From Two Books” (1913), were published, where the main themes of Tsvetaeva’s entire work were already fully outlined: love, Russia and the “holy craft” of the poet, imbued with moods of loneliness, isolation from the environment and at the same time aspiration for life, living people, nature, happiness.
In literature and poetry, Tsvetaeva found herself “on her own,” outside of any groupings. And at the beginning of the century, the “older” (symbolists) competed with the “younger” (Acmeists) in the literary field; the futurists noisily declared themselves. Tsvetaeva was unlike anyone else: although the fashionable theme of death slipped into her early poems, she, unlike the Symbolists, did not call to abstract “other worlds”; Tsvetaev's acceptance of life as passionate burning contrasted with the programmatic and pathetic cheerfulness of the Acmeists; the formalistic innovation of the futurists was deeply alien to her.
Tsvetaeva was “self-sufficient”: she drew inspiration, theme and music of poetry from her own soul and did not need a bohemian environment, theoretical debates and aesthetic manifestos. Already in 1913, she began to understand her worth and foresaw her “finest hour”:
Scattered in the dust around the shops
(Where no one took them and no one takes them!),
My poems are like precious wines,
Your turn will come.
And in the poems of 1916, in the cycles “Poems about Moscow”, “Poems to Blok”, “Akhmatova”, she realized her place in Russian poetry as a Moscow poet competing on an equal footing with her Petrograd relatives in the craft - Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam. Her praises and admiration for Blok and Akhmatova were sincere, pure admiration, devoid of any envy or self-interest, but they were also an expression of the great brotherhood of poets - equal with equals. Tsvetaeva walked in the world of poetry next to her brothers and in splendid isolation.
This independence and isolation permeated her entire life. “I’ll tell you the truth,” she later wrote in one of her letters, “that I’ve been a stranger in every circle, all my life.” Her life motto became: “one - of all - for all - against all.”
Such isolation stemmed from moral maximalism, the unwavering demand both for life and for people to conform to the ideal, the absolute. But the required absolute - the intensity of feelings, the severity of experiences, a burning thirst for life, following the truth of one’s nature - was found only in one’s soul - and external life, with all its historical events and dramas, slid by, unnoticed. Tsvetaeva the poet focused on herself: “My whole life is an affair with my own soul”; “I don’t need anything except my soul!” In real life, poetic egocentrism turned into complete inadequacy and entailed heavy blows of fate.
The world war passed by, February 1917 passed by without touching the strings of the soul. But it was not possible to isolate ourselves from time, from history: everyday life invaded the poet’s timeless existence - historical events that broke the previous prosperous way of life and henceforth doomed Tsvetaeva to endless everyday disorder. In April 1917, the second daughter, Irina, was born. Overwhelmed by many creative plans, Tsvetaeva hoped that life would somehow work out. The husband was in military service: first as a brother of mercy on an ambulance train, then as an ensign of a reserve infantry regiment in Moscow; and after October, S. Ya. Efron went to the Don to join the Volunteer Army of L. G. Kornilov. Deprivation and hunger set in; to serve in a government agency, in the People's Commissariat of Nationalities, Tsvetaeva did not find the strength in herself - and in the fall of 1919 she sent her daughters to the Kuntsevo orphanage near Moscow. In February 1920, when she took the sick Ariadne from the orphanage and nursed her, little Irina died in the orphanage from hunger:
Snatching the eldest from the darkness -
She didn’t save the youngest.
During these years, Tsvetaeva continued to live in literature and only for literature. Her poetic energy became stronger the more overwhelming her external, everyday existence became. In 1917-1920 More than three hundred poems, six romantic plays, and the fairy tale poem “The Tsar Maiden” were written. State Publishing House published two books by Tsvetaeva: “The Tsar Maiden” and the collection “Marches”. During these years, she was alienated from the noisy Moscow literary environment, communicated only with a few close friends, and rarely performed at poetry evenings.
“Russian” epic poems became a unique response to the revolution: after “The Tsar Maiden” - “Egorushka”, “Lane Streets”, “Well done” - written in folk song language, with genuine folk intonations, overheard, as Tsvetaeva admitted, in queues . The response to the element of revolution, no matter how the poet treated it, was inevitable: “Recognize, pass by, reject the Revolution - anyway, it is already in you,” Tsvetaeva wrote in 1932 in the article “The Poet and Time.” She herself, perhaps, was in some opposition to the revolution, but not a political, but a romantic opposition.
Under the influence of personal circumstances, complete uncertainty about the fate of her husband after the defeat of the “white movement”, the cycle “Swan Camp” (not published during Tsvetaeva’s lifetime) was created, in which the romanticization of the White Guard officers - the “swan camp” takes on a tragic connotation:
White Guard, your path is high:
Black barrel - chest and temple.
But this was not a political front, it was only romantic pathos, glorification of the doomed, longing for the defeated and defeated. The poet here follows the formula: “I’m right, I’m offended.”
A special rise in creative forces was manifested in poems about love (“Like the right and left hand...”, “Who said to all passions - forgive...”, “Do not repair the court hastily...”, the cycle “Nailed...”, etc.), in which love appears as a confrontation between flesh and soul and in which the heroine is always stronger and morally superior to her chosen one. And in the 1921 cycles “Apprentice”, “Marina”, “Separation”, “Praise to Aphrodite” Tsvetaeva’s poetry reaches its peak, acquiring features of high tragedy.
In July 1921, Tsvetaeva received news about her husband, whom I. G. Erenburg had found abroad at her request: After the defeat of the White Army, Efron lived in Prague and studied at the University of Prague, receiving, like some other white emigrant officers, a small stipend from the Czechoslovak government at the expense of gold reserves exported from Russia during the Civil War. She immediately began to work for permission to go with her daughter to her husband. Meanwhile, in Soviet Russia, Blok died and Gumilev was shot. All this, as well as the upcoming separation from his homeland, was echoed in the intense verses bursting from the poet’s soul.
In May 1922, Tsvetaeva was already in Berlin, where literary life was in full swing, there were many Russian publishing houses, where Soviet writers came quite easily - relations between Germany and Soviet Russia, the defeated power and the power that did not win the world war, after the Treaty of Rapallo (1922 ) the most friendly ones were established. Tsvetaeva did not love Berlin, did not accept it, for her it was a world - “after Russia - Prussian, after revolutionary Moscow - bourgeois, not accepted by either the eyes or the soul: unacceptable,” as her daughter A. S. Efron later wrote in her memoirs. But two collections of poems “Psyche” (1923) and “Craft” (1923) were published in Berlin, here Tsvetaeva warmly met with a little acquaintance earlier A. Bely, fleetingly with S. Yesenin and in absentia, in letters, with B. Pasternak. The last “meeting” grew into a passionate friendship and an entire epistolary novel.
From August 1922, Tsvetaeva settled in the Czech Republic for three years. Living in the capital was beyond their means, and the family, in search of squalid, cheap housing, wandered around the suburbs of Prague - nearby villages. Poverty and the impractical disorganization of everyday life did not interfere with the concentrated inner life of the poet. Tsvetaeva fell in love with the Czech Republic, its nature, mountains, forests with all her soul, and fell in love with Prague, which inspired her. The most cherished theme of her poetry at that time was love - the absolute of human feelings. Love was perceived as a bottomless category: everything that is not indifference, not enmity, not hatred, is love. Love is a thousand-fold, and the poet, the “man of a thousand people,” as Tsvetaeva wrote, experiences its most varied shades, falls in love with everything around him. But at the same time, other motives creep into the poems: longing for the Motherland, which appears in an ideal image, everyday life and the wretchedness of everyday life, embodied in the words: “Life is a place where you cannot live.” Much of what was written in 1922-1925. included in the last book published during his lifetime, “After Russia” (Paris, 1928).
Gradually, in Tsvetaeva’s poetry, a large genre—poems—occupies an increasing place. “The Poem of the Mountain” (1924) and “The Poem of the End” (1924) were written at the time of Tsvetaeva’s passion for K. B. Rodzevich and addressed to him (the novel soon ended in a breakup and complete disappointment in the hero). In them, Tsvetaeva expressed her romantic view of feelings and passions as a high, spiritual principle - being, contrasting them with everyday life - even if this “everyday life” is home, family, relationships with loved ones. “Home” for Tsvetaeva was only her soul, the impulses of which, as a true poet, she always followed.
In the Czech Republic, the poem “The Pied Piper” was begun - Tsvetaev’s variation of the medieval legend about the flutist from Gammeln. Its main idea is that Poetry took revenge on Everyday Life: the burghers, the personification of Everyday Life, did not keep their promise to Poetry - they did not pay the virtuoso flute player who rid the city of rats. And then the flute player deprived the burghers of their future - with wondrous music he lured the children out of the city and drowned them - and granted them eternal bliss in the blue waters of the lake.
In the Czech Republic, in February 1925, Tsvetaeva also gave birth to a son, Georgy (Moore - that was his name in the family), on whom she poured out all the unspent reserves of maternal love. In Prague, she began a friendship with Anna Teskova, a writer and translator, which then continued in many years of correspondence. The Czech period, despite the troubles of everyday life, was the brightest time of Tsvetaeva’s seventeen years abroad.
In November 1925, Tsvetaeva moved to France. The first winter we lived in Paris with friends, the rest of the years in its suburbs (it was cheaper): in Bellevue, Meudon, Clamart, Vanves. During the summer months - not every year - they went to the sea, once Tsvetaeva went to London and several times to Brussels with literary readings. During her years of living in France, as Tsvetaeva recalled, she “did not like the French”: she did not find cordiality or spiritual responsiveness in them. But I didn’t find any closeness with the Russian emigration either: they immediately felt “not like me.” Tsvetaeva stubbornly remained outside of all politics, joining neither the right nor the left emigrant circles in their search for ways to “save” Russia. She did not seek to “diplomatically” establish contacts with the Russian literary diaspora, did not join any group, maintaining relations only with those writers who were humanly pleasant to her. “In France I feel so bad, lonely, I have no real friends,” she complains in a letter to Teskova.
The eternal opposition between life and being, which permeates Tsvetaeva’s poetic consciousness, was embodied in “The Poem of the Staircase” (1926) - a work about the “stepchildren of the big city” of Paris, to which Tsvetaeva included herself. The poet sympathizes with everyone humiliated and insulted by life, but he also curses and proclaims anathema to the unworthy of man - a wretched life that oppresses and kills the soul. The wealth and satiety of the soulless bourgeois cause her hatred:
I have two enemies in the world,
Two twins, inextricably fused:
Hunger for the hungry and satiety for the well-fed!
A philosophical sound also appears in the poem: against the unjust world order, against a civilization that denies the true, “natural” being, the very things made by human hands rebel and demand a return to their pristine natural state, a return to the beginnings of existence. In this context, the image of the staircase in the poem not only had a real meaning - the back staircase of a poor house of the poor, but became a kind of symbol of the dream of a “staircase” to heaven. At the end of the poem, all poverty and all evil are destroyed by fire - a symbol of cleansing fire, fiery ascension.
A striking contrast to everyday life - complete disorder, humiliating poverty in a foreign and spiritually alien country - was the high rise of feelings in the correspondence of three poets: Tsvetaeva, Pasternak and Rainer Maria Rilke. The epistolary “novel of three” in the summer of 1926 was for Tsvetaeva a romantic escape from prose and the poverty of life. The poem “From the Sea” was dedicated to Pasternak, and the poem “Attempt of a Room” was dedicated to Pasternak and Rilke. Tsvetaeva responded to Rilke’s death, which shocked her on the eve of 1927, with a requiem poem “New Year’s Eve” and philosophical and poetic reflections and insights in “Poem of the Air.”
Tsvetaeva always cultivated in herself a sense of closeness, spiritual brotherhood with fellow practitioners of the “holy craft of Poetry,” wherever they were. In 1925, she wrote an article on the death of Bryusov, conceived, but never carried out, the idea of a poem in memory of Yesenin; in 1928, not paying attention to the condemnation of emigrant literary circles and the troubles that followed for her personally with the publication of some poems, she welcomed the arrival of Mayakovsky in Paris. Mayakovsky knew little about Tsvetaeva’s work and, one might say, was not interested in it. But Tsvetaeva, despite the “non-reciprocity,” according to A.S. Efron, throughout her life, maintained “the highest loyalty of a brother” to him. In 1930, after Mayakovsky’s suicide, she dedicated a poetic requiem cycle to him. Tsvetaeva’s constant companion was “her Pushkin” - and in 1931, under the influence of reading P. N. Shchegolev’s book “The Duel and Death of Pushkin”, she created a short cycle “Poems to Pushkin” - “terribly harsh, terribly free, nothing in common with the canonized Pushkin who do not have, and everything who has is the opposite of the canon.”
Almost all of Tsvetaeva’s works created abroad were published in the Prague magazine “Will of Russia”, in the Parisian “Modern Notes” and in the Miliukov newspaper “Last News”. But the fees were modest; from time to time, charity evenings helped out, at which Tsvetaeva performed to earn money; for several years, wealthy compatriots even collected a small amount for her every month. Tsvetaeva’s husband, S. Ya. Efron, changed several occupations (actor-extra in films, journalist), was ill and could not provide for his family. From the late 1920s, he began to be inclined to think about returning to Russia, and from 1931 he became one of the active figures in the organized “Union of Returning to the Homeland.” The family fell into dire need: “The daughter of a knitted cap earns 5 francs a day,” Tsvetaeva wrote in a letter, “the four of us live on it... that is, we are just slowly dying of hunger.” The Prague magazine closed, few poems were published, and then, as Tsvetaeva wrote to V.N. Muromtseva-Bunina, “prose began.”
In the thirties, prose began to occupy the main place in Tsvetaeva’s work, but the reason for this was not only “everyday” circumstances (“Poems do not feed, prose feeds”), but also a change in her state of mind - her heart was cooling down, her soul was tired. Like many other writers of the Russian diaspora, she turned to autobiographical prose, to childhood memories that she wanted to preserve from oblivion. This is how the memoir-essays “Father and His Museum”, “Mother and Music”, “House at Old Pimen”, etc. were born. Sad events - the deaths of contemporaries - gave rise to the requiem essays "Living about the Living" (Voloshin), "Captive Spirit" (Andrey Bely), “Unearthly Evening” (M. Kuzmin). Prose—the essays “My Pushkin” and “Pushkin and Pugachev”—was added to Tsvetaev’s “Pushkiniana.” Literary critical articles “Poet and Time”, “Art in the Light of Conscience”, “Epic and Lyrics of Modern Russia”, etc. were created. Finally, excerpts and essays from Tsvetaeva’s diaries were published, and an epistolary novel “Florentine Nights” was written in French.
The poet is visible in all of Tsvetaeva’s prose: her memories are distinguished by lyrical subjectivity and do not always correspond to reality; essays about contemporary writers and literary critical articles are imbued with a purely Tsvetaevsky perception of people and creativity, maximalism of moral and aesthetic assessments; diary and epistolary prose is filled with thoughts and images drawn from poetry. If Tsvetaeva’s poems were the image of her soul, then the prose was a picture of the world, but a deeply personal and subjective picture. This was Tsvetaeva’s truth about the world.
A particularly difficult period in Tsvetaeva’s emigrant life was 1937–1939. In March 1937, her daughter, A. S. Efron, left for the USSR, working with her father in the “return movement” and helping to illegally transport internationalist volunteers to the civil war in Spain. In September 1937, S. Ya. Efron hastily left for the USSR: he (together with Rodzevich, a colleague in the Eurasian Club) was involved in the murder in Lausanne of the old revolutionary I. Reiss (Poretsky), who refused further work for the NKVD, and the kidnapping the head of the EMRO (“Russian All-Military Union” - an organization of former White Guard officers) General E. K. Miller. In articles published in connection with these events in Sovremennye Zapiski and Latest News (here the article was called “Yezhov’s Agents Abroad”), Efron’s name appeared.
The Russian emigration turned its back on Tsvetaeva, and because of the hostile attitude of the French, they had to move out of the apartment and settle in a hotel. Only the help of a few best friends saved me from outright poverty: Mark Slonim and N.A. Berdyaev showed touching care. Life in complete isolation was unbearable, leaving for the USSR was thus a foregone conclusion.
For more than six months, Tsvetaeva did not write anything, she lived unsettledly while waiting for a visa, she sorted out and prepared her archive for sending. The silence ended in the fall of 1938. In September 1938, the Sudetenland was torn away from Czechoslovakia and divided between Germany, Hungary and Poland, and in March 1939, Germany occupied Czechoslovakia. These events deeply shocked Tsvetaeva. She wrote her cycle “Poems for the Czech Republic” (of two parts - “September” and “March”) - a “swan song” in a foreign land. These poems are filled with a high civil sense of anger and bitterness for trampled justice.
In June 1939, Tsvetaeva and her son arrived in the USSR. The whole family lived in the village of Bolshevo near Moscow. But in August, the daughter, who worked for M.E. Koltsov, who had been arrested even earlier, was arrested; in October, her husband was arrested (shot, according to I.V. Kudrova, on October 16, 1941). Tsvetaeva wandered around strange corners, earned little money only by transfers, and carried parcels for her daughter and husband. In January 1940, there was talk about publishing a book of poetry by Goslitizdat based on previous collections, but the book prepared by Tsvetaeva was “ruined” by the critic K. Zelinsky. Tsvetaeva was worried about Moore’s health (five illnesses in one winter), struggled with everyday life, and received some crumbs from the trade union committee of writers at Goslitizdat. The outbreak of war broke her will to live...
In August 1941, Tsvetaeva and Moore were evacuated to the city of Elabuga on the Kama and were settled in someone else’s hut. After unsuccessful attempts to get a job, on August 31, Sunday, when everyone had left home, Tsvetaeva hanged herself. Back in 1938, with the greatest passion, Tsvetaeva expressed the idea that a person is kept on earth by his need for another:
What is a rainbow to the eye,
Grain - black soil -
A person needs
The person in it.
But nothing tied her to this existence anymore; she turned out to be of no use to anyone and believed that she was only making life more difficult even for her son. Perhaps the decision to die was not caused by despair and hopelessness only of those difficult days. Tsvetaeva herself believed that a person goes a long way to such decisions: speaking about Mayakovsky’s suicide, she wrote that suicide “is not where it is seen, but it lasts not until the trigger is pulled...”
The grave of Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was lost. The son, Georgy Sergeevich Efron, died at the front in 1944. The daughter, Ariadna Sergeevna Efron, returned from imprisonment and exile in 1955 and for six years fought for the publication of Tsvetaeva’s book of poems and all the subsequent years allotted to her (until 1975) - for restoring the memory of her mother, for her poems “ it's time." This book was finally published in 1961, twenty years after the poet’s death. And from that moment on, the slow but steady return of M. I. Tsvetaeva’s poetry to the reader began.
Source: Russian literature of the 20th century: A manual for high school students, applicants and students / Ed. T.N. Nagaitseva. - St. Petersburg: “Neva”, 1998
Return to homeland and death
Having lived the 1930s in poverty, in 1939 Tsvetaeva returned to the USSR. Her daughter and husband are arrested. Sergei will be shot in 1941, and his daughter will be rehabilitated 15 years later.
During this period of her life, Tsvetaeva almost did not write poetry, but only did translations.
On August 31, 1941, Tsvetaeva committed suicide. The great poetess was buried in the city of Elabuga at the Peter and Paul Cemetery.
The Tsvetaeva Museum is located on Sretenka Street in Moscow, also in Bolshevo, Aleksandrov, Vladimir Region, Feodosia, Bashkortostan. The monument to the poetess was erected on the banks of the Oka River in the city of Tarusa, as well as in Odessa.
Interesting Facts
- Marina Tsvetaeva began writing her first poems as a child. And she did this not only in Russian, but also in French and German. She knew languages very well, because her family often lived abroad.
- She met her husband by chance while relaxing by the sea. Marina always believed that she would fall in love with the person who gave her the stone she liked. Her future husband, without knowing it, gave Tsvetaeva a carnelian he found on the beach on the very first day they met.
- During the Second World War, Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Yelabuga (Tatarstan). While helping Marina pack her suitcase, her friend, Boris Pasternak, joked about the rope he had taken to tie up the suitcase (that it was strong, even if you hang yourself). It was on this ill-fated rope that the poetess hanged herself.
All interesting facts from Tsvetaeva’s life
Personal life of Tsvetaeva
Tsvetaeva met her husband Sergei Efron in Crimea in 1911. The couple soon got married, after which their daughter Ariadne was born.
Sergei Efron and Tsvetaeva before the wedding
However, Marina could not be called a woman of one man. For example, she had a long-term romantic relationship with Boris Pasternak.
Once in the capital of the Czech Republic, the girl began an affair with Konstantin Rodzevich, who worked as a sculptor and lawyer. However, their relationship soon ended on the initiative of Tsvetaeva herself.
An interesting fact is that in addition to men, she also showed sympathy for women. Even before the revolution, in 1914, she met the Russian poetess Sofia Parno, with whom she quickly became close.
Tsvetaeva and Parnok
Marina dedicated many of her poems to her, after which their relationship became known to everyone. Tsvetaeva’s husband knew about this connection and was furiously jealous.
Constant quarrels began in the family, which turned into serious scandals. Ultimately, Marina decides to leave her husband for Sofia.
However, already in 1916 she realized the mistake and returned to Sergei again. Tsvetaeva later described her relationship with Parnok as “the first disaster in her life.”
In 1921 she writes:
Also, regarding her feelings for Sophia, she wrote one of the most famous poems of this cycle - “Under the caress of a plush blanket.”
In 1917, Tsvetaeva gave birth to her second daughter, Irina.
After this, a series of misfortunes began in Tsvetaeva’s biography: Civil War, her husband’s escape abroad, financial difficulties, famine.
At the same time, Ariadne becomes seriously ill, as a result of which the mother sends both children to a special shelter.
After some time, Ariadne fully recovered, but 3-year-old Irina suddenly falls ill and dies.
In the Czech Republic, in 1925, Tsvetaeva gave birth to George, who had been in poor health since childhood. With the outbreak of World War II, he was sent to the front, where he was killed in 1944.
Tsvetaeva’s biography developed in such a way that none of her children managed to give her grandchildren, so she has no direct descendants.
