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Biography
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow on 9 October (26 September old style; she preferred the old calendar all her life), 1892. Her father, Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, was a professor of art history at the University of Moscow. Late in life he founded the Alexander III Museum, which is now known as the Pushkin Museum. Tsvetaeva's mother, Maria Alexandrovna Meyn, was Ivan's second wife. She had musical talent but had been frustrated in her dream of becoming a great concert pianist. Marina had two half-siblings, Valeria and Andrei, who were the children of Ivan's deceased first wife, Varvara Dmitrievna Ilovaisky (daughter of the historian Dmitri Ilovaisky). She also had a full sister, Anastasia, who was born in 1894.
In her autobiographical essays, Tsvetaeva gives us a powerful description of a bittersweet childhood. Her mother had longed for a musically talented son; instead, she had a daughter with a gift for writing. She vented her frustration by mocking, and sometimes destroying, Marina's early poems. She apparently favoured Anastasia over Marina, though this did not affect the sisters' relationship as much as one might expect. Tsvetaeva's father was kind, but was absorbed in his studies and distant from his family. He was also still in love with his first wife, and his second wife knew it. She, for her part, had had a tragic love affair before her marriage, and had not forgotten it. There was considerable tension between Tsvetaeva's mother and Varvara's children, and Tsvetaeva's father maintained close contact with Varvara's family, whose story--both tragic and pathetic--is told in Tsvetaeva's prose masterpiece, 'The House at Old Pimen.' Yet Marina found happiness in her love of literature and language, as she recounts in her essay 'My Pushkin.'
In 1903 Tsvetaeva's mother contracted tuberculosis. Because it was believed that a change in climate could help cure the disease, the family travelled abroad until shortly before her death in 1906. Marina and Anastasia attended schools in Italy, Switzerland and Germany.
After her mother's death, Tsvetaeva gave up the music lessons she hated and concentrated on poetry. Her first major work was a translation of Edmond Rostand's L'Aiglon; it has not been preserved. Tsvetaeva studied by herself in Paris in 1909, and then attended a series of gymnasiums in Russia, without academic success; by now her sole, consuming interest was in poetry.
Her first collection of poems, Evening Album, was published in 1910. It attracted the attention of the poet and critic Maximilian Voloshin, whom Tsvetaeva would describe after his death in 'A Living Word About a Living Man.' Voloshin came to see Tsvetaeva and soon became her friend and mentor. She began spending time at Voloshin's home in Koktebel, which was a well-known haven for writers (today it is known more for its nude beach). There she became friends with Andrei Bely, whom she described in the essay 'A Captive Spirit.' She also became enamoured of Blok and Akhmatova, although she never met Blok and would not meet Akhmatova until the 1940s.
At Koktebel Tsvetaeva also met Sergei Yakovlevich Efron, a cadet in the Officers' Academy. They were married in 1912.
Like all the loves of her adult life, Tsvetaeva's love for Efron was extremely intense -- nearly obsessive. Yet it did not prevent 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 also had an affair with the lesbian poet Sofia Parnok, whom she addressed in a cycle of poems which at times she called 'The Friend,' and at other times 'The Mistake.'
Tsvetaeva and her husband lived in the Crimea until the revolution, and they had two daughters: Ariadna, or Alya (born 1912) and Irina (born 1917).
When the Revolution began, Efron joined the Tsar's White Army, and Marina returned to Moscow in the hope of meeting him there. However, it would be five years before they were reunited; after the Bolsheviks took Moscow, Efron left for the Crimea. During their separation, Tsvetaeva wrote a series of pro-White poems that was published as The Demesne of the Swans, or Swans' Encampment. These poems would be her most overtly political work.
Tsvetaeva suffered terribly in the Moscow famine. Her father had died in 1913, her sister had remained in the Crimea, and she had no way to support herself or her daughters. In 1919, she placed Irina in a state orphanage, believing that she would be better fed there. Tragically, she was mistaken, and Irina died of starvation in 1920.
There are rumours that Tsvetaeva abused her younger daughter. At least one friend reported that Tsvetaeva used to tie Irina to a chair while she and Alya went out. In her biography of Tsvetaeva, Lily Feiler suggests that Irina may have had a genetic defect; at age two, she was barely able to walk and talk. Or perhaps the circumstances of her birth -- with her country in turmoil and her father far away -- caused Tsvetaeva to resent her. Whatever the reason, Tsvetaeva certainly seems to have been indifferent to her, especially when you consider her affection toward Alya. The child's death, however, caused Tsvetaeva great grief and regret. In one letter, she said, 'God punished me.'
During these years, Tsvetaeva was sustained emotionally by a passionate friendship (biographers differ on whether it was anything more) with the actress Sofia Gollidey. She wrote several plays for her friend, including 'Knave of Hearts,' 'Snowstorm,' 'Adventure,' 'Fortune,' 'Stone Angel' and 'Phoenix.' Years later, upon learning of Gollidey's death, she would remember her in the essay 'Sonyechka's Story.'
In 1921, after three years of silence, Tsvetaeva finally received word from her husband. He was alive and in Germany. In May 1922, Tsvetaeva and Alya left the Soviet Union and were reunited with Efron in Berlin. While still living in Moscow, Tsvetaeva had published work in the Paris émigré journal Contemporary Notes. In Berlin, she published the collections Separation, Poems to Blok and The Tsar Maiden.
In August 1922 the family moved to Prague, where Tsvetaeva had a passionate affair with Konstantin Rozdevitch, a former military officer. Her break-up with Rozdevitch in 1923 may have been the inspiration for her great 'Poem of the End.'
At about the same time, a more important relationship began: Tsvetaeva's correspondence with Boris Pasternak, who had stayed in the Soviet Union. The two had never met, and would not meet for nearly twenty years; in fact, Tsvetaeva would pass up several chances to meet Pasternak in Europe. But for a time they were in love, and they maintained an intimate friendship until Tsvetaeva's return to Russia.
The last poem Tsvetaeva wrote in Prague was the lyrical satire The Rat-Catcher, which was based on the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. In 1925 the family settled in Paris, where they would live for the next 14 years. In the same year, their son Georgy, or Moor, was born. He was Tsvetaeva's favourite child; she loved him obsessively, as she loved most of the men in her life. (Alya, for her part, was expected to be her mother's helper and confidante, and had been robbed of much of her childhood.) However, the child did not return her love. By most accounts, he was a spoiled brat. The older he grew, the more he resented his mother.
In exile, as in Moscow, Tsvetaeva lived in poverty. Her husband was perpetually a student and was never able to hold a job. He also contracted tuberculosis, adding to the family's difficulties. Tsvetaeva received a meagre stipend from the Czech government, which gave financial support to artists and writers who had lived in Czechoslovakia. In addition, she tried to make whatever she could from readings and sales of her work. She turned more and more to writing prose because she found it made more money than poetry.
Tsvetaeva did not feel at home in Paris's circle of Russian émigré writers. Although she had written passionately pro-White poems during the Revolution, her fellow émigrés thought that she was not sufficiently anti-Soviet. She was severely criticized for writing an admiring open letter to the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. After the letter appeared, the émigré paper The Latest News, to which Tsvetaeva had been a frequent contributor, refused to publish any more of her work.
Tsvetaeva found solace in her correspondence with other writers, including Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke (upon whose death she composed 'New Year Letter'), the critics D.S. Mirsky and Aleksandr Bakhrakh, and the Czech poet Anna Teskova.
Meanwhile, Tsvetaeva's husband really was developing Soviet sympathies. Homesick for Russia, he joined a movement called the Eurasians, which supported the repatriation of émigrés. He dreamed of returning to the U.S.S.R., but was afraid because of his past as a White soldier. Eventually -- whether out of idealism or to gain acceptance from the Communists -- he began spying for the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB. Alya shared his views, and increasingly turned against her mother. In 1937, she returned to the Soviet Union.
Later that year, Efron too was forced to return. The French police had implicated him in the murder of the former Soviet agent Ignaty Reyss. After his escape, the police interrogated Tsvetaeva, but she seemed confused by their questions and ended up reading them some French translations of her poetry. The police thought that she might be mad, and concluded that she knew nothing of the murder.
Tsvetaeva does not seem to have known that her husband was a spy. However, she was held responsible for his actions and was ostracised in Paris. With the advent of World War II, Europe must have seemed no safer a place than Russia. Tsvetaeva's last major work, 'Poems to Chekia,' was written in response to the German invasion of Czechoslovakia.
By now, Tsvetaeva felt that she no longer had a choice. In 1939 she and her son returned to the Soviet Union.
Tsvetaeva could not have known what horrors were in store for her. In Stalin's Russia, anyone who had lived abroad was suspect, as was anyone who had been among the intelligentsia before the Revolution. Tsvetaeva's sister had been arrested before Tsvetaeva's return; although Anastasia survived the Stalin years, the sisters never saw each other again.
Tsvetaeva found that almost all doors were closed to her. Pasternak found her occasional work translating poetry, but otherwise the established Soviet writers refused to help her.
Soon after Tsvetaeva's return, Efron and Alya were arrested for espionage. Alya's fiancé, it turned out, was actually an NKVD agent who had been assigned to spy on the family. Efron was shot in 1941; Alya served eight years in prison. Both were exonerated after Stalin's death, owing to 'lack of corpus delicti.'
In 1941, Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Yelabuga, in the Tartar Autonomous Republic. They had no means of support. Georgy blamed his mother for their plight, and constantly nagged her for more money and better clothes.
By 31 August 1941, they had enough money left for one loaf of bread. On that day, Tsvetaeva hanged herself. The exact location of her grave is unknown.
