Marina Tsvetaeva, Her Life in Poems - Rolf Gross

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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 6
children. In “Mother and Music”, Marina would many years later write, “Mother, as it were, projected her hopes and dreams into her children.” She made Marina practice the piano several hours a day. Marina obliged dutifully, but sought escape in poetry, which, from very early on, she considered her true vocation. Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, an intellectual recluse, was the director of a large private endowment, which was to establish the first fine arts museum in Moscow: the “Emperor Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts”, which would in 1937 be incongruously renamed “Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts.” A generous and enlightened man he was consummately dedicated to this work and took only marginal interest in his children, whose general upbringing he left to the custody of Maria Alexandrovna and their Baltic-Germann governess Augusta. Yet he spared no money or effort in their education, tutors, travels to Europe, and several years of schooling in Switzerland, Germany, and France. Marina inherited her intelligence and irreverent skepticism from him. A precociously gifted, strong-willed and sensual child she was often driven to despair, which the adults saw as obstinacy. Marina, oppressed by this home, felt that her mother spent too little tangible affection on her. The lament, “I am alone - an orphan in this world...” runs through her poems like a river. At this point in her life this was obviously a product of her highly sensitive imagination, but she seems to have had no friends with a similar intelligence and disposition. Her imagination soon helped her construct an imaginary world that was early on populated by devils and monsters and later became a highly transcendental fantasy haven of her very own. Asya (11) and Marina (13), 1905 7
Page 1 and 2: Marina Tsvetaeva A Life in Poems No
Page 3 and 4: poetic power like distress and - lo
Page 5: Childhood Moscow 8 Tryokhprudny Per
Page 9 and 10: seventeen Marina began to smoke, a
Page 11 and 12: Koktebel Maximilian Voloshin's Have
Page 13 and 14: The motley crowd of greater and les
Page 15 and 16: did not concern her. My poems, writ
Page 17 and 18: Sofia Parnok Koktebel and Moscow 19
Page 19 and 20: She writes and a few days later des
Page 21 and 22: And I'll tell you: - All the same -
Page 23 and 24: orderly. Eventually he was drafted
Page 25 and 26: In December 1915 Marina was invited
Page 27 and 28: To Osip Mandelstam A strange anxiet
Page 29 and 30: Marina escaped on flights to the ot
Page 31 and 32: Love! Love! Even in convulsions, ev
Page 33 and 34: - Alya had these frequent attacks.
Page 35 and 36: ... Dead - and risen! Just enough f
Page 37 and 38: Berlin - Prague Ilya Ehrenburg Serg
Page 39 and 40: her and writes that “he had been
Page 41 and 42: etween her insatiable need for free
Page 43 and 44: Moscow. I don't want to write about
Page 45 and 46: Swan-like... - But what happened Li
Page 47 and 48: toe of the heart, not yet touched b
Page 49 and 50: France 1925 - 1939 The Summer of 19
Page 51 and 52: German and Russian! In a postscript
Page 53 and 54: thus alien after all!) One more thi
Page 55 and 56: affirmation around a spring. Around
Page 57 and 58:
horseman. Your penciled notation (i
Page 59 and 60:
Boulevard de Crancy, 3 (not far fro
Page 61 and 62:
in 1924 and 1925), hence my long so
Page 63 and 64:
You are alive, I want to see you. A
Page 65 and 66:
trug uns ein blinder Befehl durch d
Page 67 and 68:
to feign halves. We, confined to ci
Page 69 and 70:
German is deeper than French, fulle
Page 71 and 72:
eflection when it appears in the wa
Page 73 and 74:
asleep, fast asleep. I sound quite
Page 75 and 76:
winter!... "You don't need to answe
Page 77 and 78:
This letter became the last in thei
Page 79 and 80:
France 1925 - 1939 The Lure of the
Page 81 and 82:
Mur and Marina, 1936 Photo dommuseu
Page 83 and 84:
In your family album! Children! You
Page 85 and 86:
People are all the same to me, And
Page 87 and 88:
go. But there was, of course, no ch
Page 89 and 90:
Marina Tsvetaeva, Golitsyno 1939 No
Page 91 and 92:
The idea of suicide is disturbing t
Page 93 and 94:
Marina Tsetaeva (1892 - 1941) Chron
Page 95 and 96:
August 1, move to Prague, where the
Page 97 and 98:
August 17, Marina and Mur evacuated
Page 99 and 100:
Marina Zwtajewa, “Mutter und die
show all

Marina Tsvetaeva, Her Life in Poems - Rolf Gross

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?