Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (Russian: Марина Ивановна Цветаева, IPA: [mɐˈrʲinə ɪˈvanəvnə tsvʲɪˈta(j)ɪvə]; 8 October [O.S. 26 September] 1892 – 31 August 1941) was a Russian poet. Her work is some of the best known in twentieth-century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote about the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent Moscow famine.
Marina attempted to save her daughter Irina from starvation by placing her in a state orphanage in 1919, where Irina died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and their daughter Ariadna (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941, when her husband was executed.
Tsvetaeva hanged herself in 1941. A lyrical poet of passion and daring linguistic experimentation, she chronicled her times and the depths of the human condition.
Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow, the daughter of Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a professor of Fine Art at the University of Moscow, who later founded the Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts (known from 1937 as the Pushkin Museum). Tsvetaeva's mother, Maria Alexandrovna Mein, Ivan's second wife, was a concert pianist, highly literate, with German and Polish ancestry. Growing up in considerable material comfort, Tsvetaeva later came to identify herself with the Polish aristocracy.
Tsvetaeva's two half-siblings, Valeria and Andrei, were the children of Ivan's deceased first wife, Varvara Dmitrievna Ilovaiskaya, daughter of the historian Dmitry Ilovaisky. Tsvetaeva's only full sister, Anastasia, was born in 1894. The children quarrelled frequently and occasionally violently. There was considerable tension between Tsvetaeva's mother and Varvara's children, and Tsvetaeva's father maintained close contact with Varvara's family. Tsvetaeva's father was kind, but deeply wrapped up in his studies and distant from his family. He was also still deeply in love with his first wife; he would never get over her. Likewise, Tsvetaeva's mother Maria had never recovered from a love affair she'd had before her marriage. Maria disapproved of Marina's poetic inclination; holding the opinion that Marina's poetry was poor, Maria wanted her daughter to become a pianist.
In 1902, Maria contracted tuberculosis. A change in climate was recommended to help cure the disease, and so the family travelled abroad until shortly before her death in 1906, when Tsvetaeva was 14. They lived for a while by the sea at Nervi, near Genoa. There, away from the rigid constraints of a bourgeois Muscovite life, Tsvetaeva was able for the first time to run free, climb cliffs, and vent her imagination in childhood games. There were many Russian émigré revolutionaries residing at that time in Nervi, who may have had some influence on the young Tsvetaeva.
In June 1904, Tsvetaeva was sent to school in Lausanne. Changes in the Tsvetaev residence led to several changes in school, and during the course of her travels she acquired the Italian, French, and German languages. She gave up the strict musical studies that her mother had imposed and turned to poetry. She wrote "With a mother like her, I had only one choice: to become a poet".
In 1908, aged 16, Tsvetaeva studied literary history at the Sorbonne. During this time, a major revolutionary change was occurring within Russian poetry: the flowering of the Russian symbolist movement, and this movement was to colour most of her later work. It was not the theory that attracted her, but the poetry and the gravity that writers such as Andrei Bely and Alexander Blok were capable of generating. Her own first collection of poems, Vecherny Albom (Evening Album), self-published in 1910, promoted her considerable reputation as a poet. It was well received, although her early poetry was held to be insipid compared to her later work. It attracted the attention of the poet and critic Maximilian Voloshin, whom Tsvetaeva described after his death in A Living Word About a Living Man. Voloshin came to see Tsvetaeva and soon became her friend and mentor.
Tsvetaeva began spending time at Voloshin's home in the Black Sea resort of Koktebel ("Blue Height"), which was a well-known haven for writers, poets and artists. She became enamoured of the work of Alexander Blok and Anna Akhmatova, although she never met Blok and did not meet Akhmatova until the 1940s. Describing the Koktebel community, the émigré Viktoria Schweitzer wrote: "Here inspiration was born." At Koktebel, Tsvetaeva met Sergei Yakovlevich Efron, a cadet in the Officers' Academy. She was 19, he 18; they fell in love and were married in 1912, the same year as her father's project, the Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts, was ceremonially opened, an event attended by Tsar Nicholas II. Tsvetaeva's love for Efron was intense, but this did not preclude her from having affairs, including one with Osip Mandelstam, which she celebrated in a collection of poems called Mileposts. At around the same time, she became involved in an affair with the poet Sophia Parnok, who was 7 years older than Tsvetaeva, an affair that caused her husband great grief. The two women fell deeply in love, and the relationship profoundly affected both women's writings. She deals with the ambiguous and tempestuous nature of this relationship in a cycle of poems which at times she called The Girlfriend, and at other times The Mistake. Tsvetaeva and her husband spent summers in the Crimea until the revolution, and had two daughters: Ariadna, or Alya (born 1912), and Irina (born 1917).
In 1914, Efron volunteered for the front and by 1917 he was an officer stationed in Moscow with the 56th Reserve.
Tsvetaeva was a close witness of the Russian Revolution, which she rejected. On trains, she came into contact with ordinary Russian people and was shocked by the mood of anger and violence. She wrote in her journal: "In the air of the compartment hung only three axe-like words: bourgeois, Junkers, leeches." After the 1917 Revolution, Efron joined the White Army, and Marina returned to Moscow hoping to be reunited with her husband. She was trapped in Moscow for five years, where there was a terrible famine.
She wrote six plays in verse and narrative poems. Between 1917 and 1922 she wrote the epic verse cycle Lebedinyi stan (The Encampment of the Swans) about the civil war, glorifying those who fought against the communists. The cycle of poems in the style of a diary or journal begins on the day of Tsar Nicholas II's abdication in March 1917, and ends late in 1920, when the anti-communist White Army was finally defeated. The 'swans' of the title refer to the volunteers in the White Army, in which her husband was fighting as an officer. In 1922, she published a long pro-imperial verse fairy tale, Tsar-devitsa ("Tsar-Maiden").
The Moscow famine exacted a toll on Tsvetaeva. With no immediate family to turn to, she had no way to support herself or her daughters. In 1919, she placed both her daughters in a state orphanage, mistakenly believing that they would be better fed there. Alya became ill, and Tsvetaeva removed her, but Irina died there of starvation in 1920. The child's death caused Tsvetaeva great grief and regret. In one letter, she wrote, "God punished me."
During these years, Tsvetaeva maintained a close and intense friendship with the actress Sofia Evgenievna Holliday, for whom she wrote a number of plays. Many years later, she would write the novella "Povest o Sonechke" about her relationship with Holliday.
In May 1922, Tsvetaeva and Ariadna left Soviet Russia and were reunited in Berlin with Efron, who she had thought had been killed by the Bolsheviks. There she published the collections Separation, Poems to Blok, and the poem The Tsar Maiden. Much of her poetry was published in Moscow and Berlin, consolidating her reputation. In August 1922, the family moved to Prague. Living in unremitting poverty, unable to afford living accommodation in Prague itself, with Efron studying politics and sociology at the Charles University and living in hostels, Tsvetaeva and Ariadna found rooms in a village outside the city. She wrote: "We are devoured by coal, gas, the milkman, the baker... the only meat we eat is horsemeat." When offered an opportunity to earn money by reading her poetry, she had to beg a simple dress from a friend to replace the one she had been living in.