Marina Tsvetaeva, Her Life in Poems - Rolf Gross

Love! Love! Even in convulsions, even in my grave
I'll be attentive - charmed - confused - torn.
O my dear! Not in a deadly snowdrift,
Not in the clouds will we part without forgiving.
And not on my pair of beautiful wings
Is my heart willing, to carry your weight.
Swaddled, eyeless and voiceless
I will not multiply the villagers miserable fortune.
No, I'll free my hands, and then my strong body
With a single sweep of your sheets,
Death, in a single blow! - For a thousand miles
The snow will melt and the forest of bedrooms burn.
And even if – restraining my shoulders, wings, knees,
Gritting my teeth – I'll let you take me to the graveyard,
I'll be laughing over the ashes,
And rise again as a poem or a blossom of roses!
November 28, 1920
Zavadsky was followed by a line-up of other “romantic” passions, actors and
actresses, poets, writers. They were spurious infatuations, but they appeared reflected in
her poems, which embued Marina with the odor of a “ravenous, bi-sexual adulteress”.
Occasionally she is still being censured for her amorous affairs by the philistines among
her detractors. She was lonely and 27, at the peak of her female powers.- Besides,
writing poetry is a complex and mysterious process. It requires a high-power engine –
and few emotions are as potent as a volatile libido. Whether the poet has an actual
physical, erotic experience is almost irrelevant. But her working among the inspired
crowd of young actors and playwrights at Vakhtangov's studio - moreover working on
entirely unreal plays - kept her worries about Seryozha, about finding food for her
children, her concern for sickly Irina, and above all her own loneliness at bay.
In a letter in July 1918 to Liliya Efron, Seyozha's older sister, Marina begged her to
take the children, especially Irina, she could no longer afford bread and milk for them.
“We must make Irina eat potatoes, I cannot find cereal for her.” Nothing came of this
arrangement, Liliya was morally at odds with her.
As the winter of 1918-1919 approached, and the food shortage became a famine,
Marina and the children retreated into her small room to share a primitive wood stove.
Armed with an axe she would descend into the basement and “deconstruct” (her words)
all kinds of wooden partitions for firewood. In the mornings the temperature in their
room was often 5 deg C (39 F). - Prince Sergey Volkonsky, the former director of the
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