Marina Tsvetaeva, Her Life in Poems - Rolf Gross

The house in the very center of Moscow where Marina Tsvetaevea was born on 26
October 1882, and where she spend the first twenty years of her childhood, is gone, but
Tryokhprudny pereulok, Three-Ponds Lane still exists and has retained its name. Valeria
Tsvetaeva, her half-sister from the first marriage of her father, described the grand
bourgeois property:
The house has eleven rooms. Behind it is a grassy yard with poplars and acacias, an
outbuilding with seven rooms, a coach house, two cellars, and a shed for horses and
the cow. Besides the poplars and the acacias there was a white lilac bush by the
outbuilding and a snowball-tree by the back door. The best rooms in the house were
the large, high-ceiling, white hall with five large windows and a large drawing room
painted dark red.
The outbuilding was rented to a family with a shop on Tverskaya Street. They kept a
cow. Their Tartar herdsman blew his horn every morning when he drove the cow to
Petrovsky Park. There was a hundred-year old silver poplar by the gate, its heavy
branches hung out over the streetV [VS p.20]
Mother Maria Alexandrovna
Meyn, 1903
Father Ivan Vladimirovich
Tsvetaev, 1895
Marina's mother, Maria Alexandrovna Meyn, the second wife of Ivan Tsvetaev, had
sacrificed her ambition of becoming a pianist to her marriage. A stern and serious woman
of Baltic-German extraction, she was the opposite of her husband's cheerful first wife. With
iron will power she fought her recurring attacks of tuberculosis. There were few joys in her
house, little laughter, no festivities, a spartan regimen. She never won the love of her step
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