Marina Tsvetaeva, Her Life in Poems - Rolf Gross

Conspirators: miles, expanses. . .
Not deranged—lost.
Into the slums on this vast earth
They disarranged us like orphans.
Which, oh, well when – March!
They shuffled us - like a deck of cards!
24 March 1925
Reading in Russian by A. Antokolsky:
http://web.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/texts/distances.html
Fascinated by Tsvetaeva's reductive use of Russian, I spent several weeks translating
the above stanzas, discussing every word with my friend by mail. - The above English
version is the result of this co-operative exercise. This was in 1994. Professional and
personal events interfered, and only now am I able to return to a close examination of
Tsvetaeva's poetry – and life.
Early on I learned that one cannot understand her poetry separate from her biography:
Tsvetaeva wrote from her full “Быть и Бытие - Life and Being”, baring her soul and
emotions without restraint. A biographical essay woven around her poems appeared
indispensable: Describing the often tragic events in her life, it takes up the larger part of
this essay.
Born 1892 into an highly educated, bourgeois family, she loses her mother to
tuberculosis when she was 14, publishes her first book of poems three years later, marries
Sergey Efron at 20, and gives birth to their first child, Alya in 1913. The first World War
passes almost unnoticed, but then history begins to accelerate and rapidly overtakes her.
Sergey disappears during the Revolution. She and Alya barely survive the Famine Years. A
second daughter dies from starvation. In 1921 her husband resurfaces in Prague. Marina
escapes with Alya to Berlin. Supported by a Czech grant they spend 3 years in
Czechoslovakia. Restlessness and the hope of making a living from her writing persuade
them to move to Paris, the center of Russian émigré life. There she gets caught in the
internecine fighting and intrigues between the pro- and anti-Soviet factions – and Sergey
Efron turns into a willing pawn of the NKVD. When in 1937 the French police takes notice,
he is spirited away to the Soviet Union. Alya had already left for Moscow. Marina with their
third child, Murg follows Sergey and returns to the “Motherland” in 1938, during the worst
Stalin years. Alya and Sergey are arrested in 1939. In desperation Marina hangs herself in
1941. Efron is executed in the same year, Mur dies in the second World War – only Alya is
released alive from the Gulag and “rehabilitated” after Stalin's death.
A cruel fate, however, not that different from what many Russian emigrants suffered,
but Tsvetaeva lived her life to the last bitter truths in her poetry... Nothing drives her
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