Marina Tsvetaeva, Her Life in Poems - Rolf Gross

Marina and Seryozha flew onto each other. She had found the beautiful prince of the
fairy tales, who would deliver her from the shadows of her childhood. He was a year
younger than she, barely eighteen. Their meeting gave Marina what her heart had longed
for: romance, heroism, exalted feelings. Seryozha was not only beautiful, young, and
innocent but so powerfully drawn to her, as if she alone could bind him to his life. They
rushed into each others arms to overcome their loneliness by merging into each other. He
called her his “enchantress”. For the first and only time in her life her sarcastic and her
ecstatic aspects were at peace, her soul at rest in her love for Seyozha. For two years she
was so filled with happiness that she wrote very few consequential poems.
Veins filled with sun - not blood -
In my Hand, brown already.
I am one with my great love
To my own soul.
I am watching grasshoppers, counting to hundred,
Chewing a stalk's spine...
- It is strangly feeling, so strongly and so simply
The fleetingless of all that life - and his.
Koktebel, May 15, 1913
Seryozha had a compromised family background. His mother came from the
aristocratic Durnovo family, his father was Jewish. Both parents were active members of
the “Black Repartition”, a revolutionary group suspected of espousing terrorist ideas. His
mother had been imprisoned during the 1905 uprising. Seryozha, the youngest of six
children, was too young to have been part of his mother's revolutionary activities. His
father had died in 1909 in France and his mother had hanged herself a year later. Marina
and he had one thing in common, both had been orphaned at an early age.
In January 1912 she and Seryozha got married. They spent their honeymoon floating
through Italy, France, and Germany. In September 1912 Marina gave birth to their first
child, Alya-Ariadne, the carefully chosen name of the Greek goddess. From the very
beginning Marina indulged “in her little shadow”. Like her mother she projected herself into
the child whole heartedly - a heavy burden for Alya.
...The beauty of two huge eyes,
- They are a threat - their risk -
Inaccessibility - pride - passion
For the first time ...
Theodosia, November 13, 1913
In 1913 Marina and Sergey founded their own publishing company "Ole Lukoe " and
printed a second volume of “youthful” poems: From Two Books. The disenchanted critics
tore it to pieces: it contained the same kind of lyrics as Evening Album. They had expected
her to exceed herself. Marina fell back to her nearsighted hauteur. The opinion of the world
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