Poetry From the November/December 2003 issue: Post Social Realism: Literature From Russia

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Marina TsvetaevaMarina Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva is widely acknowledged by critics and by Russian readers as a leading Russian poet of the twentieth century. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to Tsvetaeva in 1926: "You, poet, do you sense how you have overwhelmed me . . . I'm writing like you and I descend like you the few steps down from the sentence into the mezzanine of parentheses . . ." (Pasternak, Tsvetayeva, Rilke: Letters, Summer 1926. Translated by Margaret Wettlin and Walter Arndt. New York, 1985).

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892. Her father was a founder of the Moscow Museum of the Fine Arts, her mother a pianist. Marina published her first book of poems, Evening Album, at seventeen. After the revolution, while her husband, Sergei Efron, was fighting in the White Army, Tsvetaeva and her two small daughters were reduced to terrible poverty. Her youngest daughter died of hunger. In 1921 Tsvetaeva emigrated, first to Berlin, then to Czechoslovakia, and then to Paris to join her husband. Her collection of poems Mileposts I was published in Moscow in 1922, the year she emigrated, and was greatly admired by Boris Pasternak. In Prague Tsvetaeva wrote some of her finest poems, published in Paris in her collection After Russia. Other books she published during her emigré period include Parting (Berlin, 1921), Poems to Blok (Berlin, 1923), and Psyche (Berlin, 1923). The poverty Tsvetaeva had endured in postrevolutionary Russia followed her in her emigré years. Loyalty to her husband drove Tsvetaeva back to the Soviet Union. Two months after Tsvetaeva's arrival in Moscow, her daughter Ariadna was arrested; a month later her husband was arrested as well. When the Germans attacked Russia, Tsvetaeva was evacuated to Elabuga in Central Asia. Unable to find work for herself or food for her son, she hanged herself on August 31, 1941.

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Translated from RussianRussian by Nina KossmanNina Kossman

Nina Kossman, born in Moscow, is the author of two collections of poetry in Russian and English. She has translated two volumes of Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry, In the Inmost Hour of the Soul and Poem of the End. Her translations of Russian poetry have been included in Norton's World Poetry and in anthologies from Doubleday, Harcourt Brace, and Oxford University Press. Behind the Border, a collection of short stories about her Moscow childhood, was published by William Morrow & Co. in 1994 and translated into Japanese (Tokyo, 1994). Her prose was broadcast on the BBC World Service Short Story Programme, and her poems and short stories have appeared in Russian, American, British, and Dutch periodicals. She has edited Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths, an anthology published by Oxford Unversity Press in 2001. Two of her plays have been performed in New York, and her one-act Miracles is included in Women Playwrights: Best Plays of 2000.

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