Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922

by Marina Tsvetaeva, Jamey Gambrell (Editor)

These autobiographical writings, rich sources of information on Tsvetaeva and her literary contemporaries, are also significant for the insights they provide into the sources and methodology of her difficult poetic language. In addition, they supply a unique eyewitness account of a dramatic period in Russian history, told by a gifted and outspoken poet.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Russia, Diary, Memoir, Russian Literature, Essays

192 pages, Hardcover

First published October 11, 2002

About the author

Марина Цветаева
Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow. Her father, Ivan Tsvetaev, was a professor of art history and the founder of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her mother Mariya, née Meyn, was a talented concert pianist. The family travelled a great deal and Tsvetaeva attended schools in Switzerland, Germany, and at the Sorbonne, Paris. Tsvetaeva started to write verse in her early childhood. She made her debut as a poet at the age of 18 with the collection Evening Album, a tribute to her childhood.

In 1912 Tsvetaeva married Sergei Efron, they had two daughters and one son. Magic Lantern showed her technical mastery and was followed in 1913 by a selection of poems from her first collections. Tsvetaeva's affair with the poet and opera librettist Sofiia Parnok inspired her cycle of poems called Girlfriend. Parnok's career stopped in the late 1920s when she was no longer allowed to publish. The poems composed between 1917 and 1921 appeared in 1957 under the title The Demesne of the Swans. Inspired by her relationship with Konstantin Rodzevich, an ex-Red Army officer she wrote Poem of the Mountain and Poem of the End.

After 1917 Revolution Tsvetaeva was trapped in Moscow for five years. During the famine one of her own daughters died of starvation. Tsvetaeva's poetry reveals her growing interest in folk song and the techniques of the major symbolist and poets, such as Aleksander Blok and Anna Akhmatova. In 1922 Tsvetaeva emigrated with her family to Berlin, where she rejoined her husband, and then to Prague. This was a highly productive period in her life - she published five collections of verse and a number of narrative poems, plays, and essays.

During her years in Paris Tsvetaeva wrote two parts of the planned dramatic trilogy. The last collection published during her lifetime, After Russia, appeared in 1928. Its print, 100 numbered copies, were sold by special subscription. In Paris the family lived in poverty, the income came almost entirely from Tsvetaeva's writings. When her husband started to work for the Soviet security service, the Russian community of Paris turned against Tsvetaeva. Her limited publishing ways for poetry were blocked and she turned to prose. In 1937 appeared MOY PUSHKIN, one of Tsvetaeva's best prose works. To earn extra income, she also produced short stories, memoirs and critical articles.

In exile Tsvetaeva felt more and more isolated. Friendless and almost destitute she returned to the Soviet Union in 1938, where her son and husband already lived. Next year her husband was executed and her daughter was sent to a labor camp. Tsvetaeva was officially ostracized and unable to publish. After the USSR was invaded by German Army in 1941, Tsvetaeva was evacuated to the small provincial town of Elabuga with her son. In despair, she hanged herself ten days later on August 31, 1941.

source: http://www.poemhunter.com/marina-ivan...

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have previously loved three books of Tsvetaeva's poetry and a book of essays on poetry, so it was a no-brainer to read the Moscow Diaries, and it simply didn't disappoint.

A few quotes below -

"I must learn to approach a person's loving present the same as his loving past, that is—with complete aloofness and passion of creativity"

"I'm not a romantic heroine, I'll never merge with a lover, always—with love"

"To love—is to see a person as God intended him and his parents failed to make him.
To not love—is to see a person as his parents made him.
To fall out of love: is to see, instead of him, a table, a chair"

"The snow drifts haven't been cleared, so I'm standing on Sapunov's grave, a little tormented by the fact that this, well, is very un-Stakhovichian. I remember a lady in mourning dress. Large blue eyes, glassy with tears. As the coffin is lowered, she follows its trajectory with small, frequent crosses. Later I find out—she's an actress whose mother and sister were killed in Kiev not long ago"

"I listen, listen, listen. My head sinks lower and lower. I understand the fatal mistake of this winter, every word is a knife, the knife goes in deeper and deeper, I don't allow myself to feel it fully—oh, it doesn't matter—after all, I too will die!"

"I take as I give: blindly, as indifferent to the giving of a hand as to my own, receiving"

"A relationship is not a value judgement. I am tired of repeating this. From your giving me bread, I have perhaps become kinder, but you have not become more sublime"

"I won't leave you" Only God can say this—or a man with milk in Moscow, winter 1918"

"Death is frightening only to the body. The soul can't conceive of it. Therefore, in suicide, the body—is the only hero"

"At present everything is running out, because nothing is repaired: things as well as people, and people, as well as love"

"Strange. Here you have epitome of happiness, there the epitome of unhappiness, and from both books an identical sadness— as though Goethe had also been exiled to Weimar!"

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so ambivalent about this book--Tsvetaeva was one of Russia's finest poets, a volcanic personality in life and on the page. Her poems really do require knowing something about her, and the more the better--with apologies to those proponents of a criticism that only searches within the poem for the meaning of the poem, as most poets would like us to do. But her world was far from ours, and her personality even farther from most of ours--I need to learn as much as I can both about her personality and her poetics to understand what's going on in her work. But to read the Moscow diaries and really understand what kind of a person she was--I think I would have idealized her as a young person. But as a woman of a certain age, the sentence that tells me she used to tie her youngest child to a chair (at two or three) when she and her older child went out, haunted me so much I couldn't bear to read much more. Writers are often such monsters--and the greats more than any. Does it negate the work? It colors it... and this one in particular.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take a very talented and spirited poet, and place her in Moscow between the years 1917 and 1922. What you have is Marina Tsvetaeva is Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922. Although the people of Moscow during this period suffered from near famine (Marina's youngest daughter was placed in a state orphanage to guarantee she god fed, and she died there of starvation), Marina herself and her older daughter managed to hang on for dear life -- and even managed to live with a certain élan.

Although I have not read much of Tsvetaeva's poetry, her prose was so interesting that I am determined to find a good selection of her poetry as well.

This is easily one of the best diaries I have ever read, with a high literary quality throughout, not to mention an unquenchable spirit.

[James Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got little from this book because I know little about Tsvetaeva herself. The samples of her poetry included in these diary entries are the only poems of hers I've read. And added to that is the fact I'm unfamiliar with most of the Russian literary figures of the Revolutionary period and the Civil War she writes about. Boris Pasternak is here without being prominent. Mandelstam and Akhmatova are only mentioned. I was unable to relate to other writers important to Tsvetaeva.

What does come through is the hardship of those turbulent years. Her struggle to feed herself and 2 young children with no income makes a harrowing read. Her eyewitness accounts of the people encountered on trains, in markets, digging for potatoes, and struggling with the new Soviet bureaucracy make for more interesting reading than the accounts of her contacts with other writers. The final sketch describing a poetry reading by 9 poetesses arranged by the stuffy Soviets is viewed with just the right amount of Tsvetaeva's barbed satire to finish these grim diaries on a warm note.

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 4 out of 5]

The most valuable thing in poems and in life — is what didn’t work out.

The prose pieces, both multifarious and varied, composed by the great poetess during those years of ordeal following the October Revolution, are a living testament to the triumph of the creative spirit in the face of adversity and disarray. When Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922, she carried with her hundreds of verses composed during the harrowing but poetically fruitful years since the Revolution. She also brought with her to the West the numerous diaries and poetic notebooks she had kept religiously since the fall of 1917. She had then immediately proposed a book based on them to Abram Vishniak, editor of the émigré publishing house Helicon, which had earlier accepted some of her poetry. In a letter to a fellow Russian émigré writer, she describes its broad outlines:

“It’s a book of notes (everyday life, thoughts, conversations, dreams, rev[olutionary] Moscow — a sort of psychic chronicle), 2) unified by years (from 1917 to the end of 1918) and my essence: everything boils down to a common denominator, 3) between 4–5 signatures (at the standard 40,000 letters per signature), but the book itself will come out longer, for there are a lot of short notes, I often start with a new line break. All in all, a certain latitude with paper is required.”

So was the general outline of the book, to be called Earthly Signs, which later on the publisher asked her to leave out the political content, even though he was eager to publish the entire content. This was owing to the fact that the liberal elements of the book might create a storm in the newly formed Soviet Union, to which the publisher exported its books. She had then withdrawn her proposal. Later on, in 1924, after several unsuccessful attempts to publish these notebooks (which at one point she had envisioned as a much larger production), she began to break up the material into separate sketches that were published in émigré periodicals in Czechoslovakia, France, and elsewhere. The first such piece was “Excerpts from the Book Earthly Signs,” which appeared in 1924 in a Prague-based journal. Over the next three years, Tsvetaeva published another nine prose pieces originally intended as part of the proposed book Earthly Signs. This book includes all these nine pieces but in the approximate order of the events’ chronology rather than by the date of publication. In addition, the present volume contains her 1925 essay portrait of the poet Valery Briusov, titled A Hero of Labour. It was occasioned by Briusov’s death in October 1924 and describes the same period and clearly draws heavily on contemporary diaries.

In all, this book comprises eleven prose pieces, including "October on the Train" composed at the beginning of 1917, when she was returning back to Moscow from the Crimea after paying a visit to one of her contemporaries- the Russian poet Maximilian Voloshin- and where she met her future husband Sergei Efron (whom she married in 1912). The journey described here was a difficult, frightening experience, and gave her a first hand experience of what the Revolution would mean:

(And so it has remained with me, my first vision of the bourgeoisie in the Revolution: ears hiding in fur hats, souls hiding in fur coats, heads hiding in necks, eyes hiding in glass. A blinding — in the light of a striking match — vision of mercenary hides.)

"Attic Life" comprises one of her most significant prose pieces, written during some of the most difficult moments of her life especially comprising the years between 1919 and 1920. She had returned back to Moscow after another trip to the south with her husband who had joined the White Army. The subsequent plan was to move to Koktebel in Crimea with her first child to be closer to her husband. But, as luck would have it, travel was no longer possible by then, and Marina would have to eke out four years before she could meet him again, while spending three years in revolutionary Moscow without any word from him. Her first born Alya, who was only five during the time of the Revolution and was a precocious child, became her closest friend and confidante during these harrowing years. There she depicts her daily life during those trying times:

My day: I get up — the upper window is barely gray — cold — puddles — sawdust — buckets — pitchers — rags — children’s dresses and shirts everywhere. I split wood. Start the fire. In icy water I wash the potatoes, which I boil in the samovar. (For a long time I made soup in it, but once it got so clogged up with millet that for months I had to take the cover off and spoon water from the top — it’s an antique samovar, with an ornate spigot that wouldn’t unscrew, wouldn’t yield to knitting needles or nails. Finally, someone — somehow — blew it out.) I stoke the samovar with hot coals I take right from the stove. I live and sleep in one and the same frightfully shrunken, brown flannel dress, sewn in Alexandrov in the spring of 1917 when I wasn’t there. It’s all covered with burn holes from falling coals and cigarettes. The sleeves, once gathered with elastic, are rolled up and fastened with a safety pin......

.......At 10 o’clock the day is over. Sometimes I chop and saw wood for tomorrow. At 11 or 12 I am also in bed. Happy with the lamp right next to my pillow, the silence, a notebook, a cigarette, and sometimes — bread.
I write badly, in a hurry. I didn’t write down either the ascensions to the attic — there’s no staircase (we burned it) — pulling myself up on a rope — for firewood, nor the constant burns from coals, which (impatience? embitteredness?) I grab with my bare hands, nor the running about to secondhand stores (has it been sold?) and cooperatives (are they selling anything?).
I didn’t write down the most important thing: the gaiety, the keenness of thought, the bursts of joy at the slightest success, the passionate directedness of my entire being — all the walls are covered with lines of poems and NB! for notebooks. I didn’t write down the trips at night to the terrible icy depths — to Alya’s former playroom — for some book, which I suddenly have to have, I didn’t write down Alya’s and my abiding, guarded hope: wasn’t that a knock at the door? Yes, someone must be knocking! (The bell hasn’t worked since the beginning of the Revolution; instead of a bell — there’s a hammer. We live at the top and through seven doors we hear everything: every scrape of someone else’s saw, every stroke of someone else’s axe, every slam of someone else’s door, every sound in the yard, everything, except knocking at our door!) And — suddenly — someone’s knocking! — either Alya, throwing on her blue coat, made for her when she was two years old, or I, not throwing on anything — head downstairs, groping, galloping, first past the staircase with no banister (we burned it), then down those stairs — to the chain on the front door. (Actually, you can get in without our help, but not everyone knows it.)
I didn’t record my eternal, one and the same — in the same words! — prayer before sleep.
But the life of the soul — Alya’s and mine — grows out of my verse — my plays — her notebooks.
I wanted to record only the day.

The several pieces collected here depict the great poetess reflecting on various themes: like, for example, her new job (1918 in Moscow) making lists in the People's Commissariat of Nationalities (Narkomnats), and then to her reactions on the execution of the Tsar Nikolai Romanov and the assassination of V.I.Lenin (Moscow, 1918-19). In all these, as in her major works, her originality and aesthetics never fall out of prominence, and also in her trenchant opinions on her contemporaries and fellow poets.

In 1910, when Tsvetaeva had released her first collection of poems, she had received critical acclaim from the then well-known Symbolist poet and critic Valery Briusov and the Acmeist poet Nikolai Gumilyov (Akhmatova's husband executed by the Soviet secret police in 1921, and one of the founding fathers of Acmeism along with Mandelstam and Akhmatova). Although she was praised for her originality, Briusov's gave literary caveats about the utter frankness of her poems which “at times becomes embarrassing, as though you’d peered impolitely through a half-closed window into someone else’s apartment and witnessed a scene that outsiders should not see.” These astute comments from a noted literary critic and poet rankled her for a long time so that fifteen years later, after his death, Tsvetaeva mercilessly dissected Briusov’s work and his bureaucratic rise to the position of poetry commissar under the Soviet regime, in the piece entitled A Hero of Labour. This is the last piece of the collection and, probably, one of her most critical and perceptive pieces of writing. It was originally unrelated in any way to the proposed Earthly Signs and was composed in 1925. Therein, we get a deep insight into the workings of her intellect and her trenchant opinions on her contemporaries ranging from Blok to Balmont, Bely to Sologub, Mandelstam to Pasternak, among many others.

Yes, life in general hasn’t given me many such encounters. Blok— twice. Kuzmin — once, Sologub — once. Pasternak — a lot — five times, Mayakovsky — as many, Akhmatova — never, Gumilyov — never.
One real conversation with Vyacheslav in my life. (There have been lucky moments, but faced with the bitterness of everything not taken . . .)
I always skirted the great ones in life, I orbited them, as a planet does another planet. Add the mountain of my own love to their everyday cares and psychic burden? Because, if not for love — why bother to meet? For other things there are books. And if it’s not a mountain (I take it in all its dimensions) — then is it really love? In this mixture of protection and pride, in this most natural step backward at the sight of greatness — lies the key to many bypassings (not only my own, but of humans in general, that’s why I mention it).
Protect oneself? From what you came into this world to do? No, in my vocabulary “protection” is always — to protect someone else.
And perhaps that’s the way it should be — further on. To see further, so as to see more, so as to see with more. And my lot — the distances between myself and the suns — is noble.
Thus, to the question: that’s it? My answer: “Yes — but how!”

Here, also in a lengthy digression, she draws parallels and contrasts between the Symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont (of whose verses she was particularly fond of) and Briusov:

Balmont, Briusov. People who grew up in those years never named one of them without naming (at least mentally) the other. There were other poets, no lesser, and they were named individually. With these two — it was as if they’d made an arrangement. These names came in a pair.
Paired names are not new: Goethe and Schiller, Byron and Shelley, Pushkin and Lermontov. The fraternity of two powers, two heights. There’s no mystery in this pairing. But “Balmont and Briusov” — what is the mystery?
It is in the polarity of the two names — of the gifts — of the personalities, in the extreme expression in each of one of two basic types of creativity, in the naturally arising juxtaposition, in their mutual exclusivity.
Everything that is not Balmont — is Briusov, and everything that is not Briusov — is Balmont.
Not two names — but two camps, two personages, two races.

My own favorite passage from this unearthly (although termed 'earthly'!) book is from the excerpts when she reflects on the contrasting roles between an actor and a poet, or more generally, between theater and poetry (this reflection arose when she was commenting on the way theater people hate the way she recited her poems):

…The poet’s job: having opened — to hide. The voice for him is armor, a mask. Unsheltered by the voice — he is naked. The poet always covers his tracks. The poet’s voice — like water — puts out the fire (the line). The poet cannot declaim: it’s shameful and insulting. The poet — is solitary, the stage boards for him — are a pillory. To present your poems with the voice (the most perfect of conductors!), to use Psyche for success?! The great negotiation of writing them down and publishing them is enough for me!
“I am not the impresario of my own shame!”
An actor is something else. An actor — is secondary. As much as the poet — is être, so is the actor — paraître. The actor is a vampire, the actor is ivy, the actor is a polyp. Say what you like: I will never believe that Ivan Ivanovich (and they are all — Ivan Ivanoviches!) can summon the will to feel himself Hamlet each evening. The poet is imprisoned by Psyche; the actor wants to imprison Psyche. Finally, the poet — is a goal unto himself, rests in himself (in Psyche). If you put him on an island — will he stop being? But what a pitiful spectacle: an island — and an actor!
An actor — is for others, unthinkable without others, an actor — is because of others. The last applause — is the last beat of his heart.
The actor’s job — lasts merely an hour. He must hurry. And primarily, he must use: his own, another’s — it doesn’t matter! Shakespeare’s verse, his own powerful thigh — everything goes into the pot! And you propose that I, a poet, drink my fill of this dubious swill? (I’m not talking about myself nor for myself: for Psyche!)
No, gentlemen of the stage, our domains — are different. We want — an island without beasts, you — beasts without the island. And it’s no accident that in former times you were buried beyond the churchyard gates!

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Everyday life is a sack: with holes. And you carry it anyway.) ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

Loved this book--it provides insight into life during the early days of the Russian Revolution and the nascent Soviet state, as well as insight into Tsvetaeva as a person and a poet.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

While there is some repetition in the entries, there is some lovely writing here. I think I would have gotten more out of it had I read her poetry, but I have not. Now, however, I want to.

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tsvetaeva spent the five years that followed the October Revolution unlearning how to be bourgeois. Out with Symbolism and silk tassels on the lampshades, in with office jobs, frozen potatoes, and soldierly jibes and leers. While her husband fought for the Whites in the south, Tsvetaeva foraged for rations in Bolshevik Moscow, cared for her two young daughters (one of whom died of malnutrition), and somehow found the presence of mind to write these vivid, unflinching, and entirely modern prose pieces about her trials and triumphs in the nascent Soviet state. The fragmentary style she adopted, full of wordplay and happy demotic noise, reminds me a little of a literary transcription of Soviet montage, except that instead of the camera, there’s Marina, entirely embodied and en-selfed despite the pressures to make like a comrade in the brave new mass.

It’s surprising how uncomplaining and entirely unself-pitying Tsvetaeva is in these pieces, in fact how many moments of humor, joy, and human connection she extracts from such ugly conditions. She manages to see people through the parties, and turn unpromising situations into exercises for the imagination, like a prisoner flexing in the yard. A unique glimpse of a desperate period, but also a testament to the poet’s ability—anyone’s—to find a hole through the fence of mere period.

[inês · Rating 5 out of 5]

“And if I’m asked about the earth on another planet - what I saw there, what I remember most, sorting through things and leaving much aside - I’ll smile.”

Reading Tsvetaeva sometimes feels like witnessing language in a primordial, undiluted form / as though you’d peered impolitely through a half-closed window into someone else’s apartment and witnessed a scene that outsiders should not see. (Gambrell/Briusov)

[Stacey]

nyrb bookclub book.

The Russian revolution doesn't sound like much fun. Tsvetaeva seems especially ill-prepared for its travails, in that she's pretty damn crazy in an art-school girl way. My question is, once they divided up the bourgeois houses into little apartments, what did people do about bathrooms? Chamberpots?

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was wonderful. I love that the poet’s brilliantly insightful journal demonstrates her genius for words. Even in prose, she’s a poet. I love that the journal gives us a window on her creative personality, her philosophy of poetry, her confidence as a poet. I love also that the journal explains the tragedy of the time period better than almost any other primary source I’ve encountered.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first encountered Tsvetaeva a few years back when reading a volume of her poetry published by penguin classics. Moscow “diaries” covers her prose writings during the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Russian Civil War. I place diaries in quotations because only portions of the work translated and collected here take that format. This is more a mixture of diary, literary criticism, experimental prose, and biography.

There are portions of the text that reflect on the lives on ordinary Russians during years of constant tumult, her anxiety and worry about her husband, who fought with the “White Guard” against the Reds, and the intense poverty that she and her children experienced. Throughout Tsvetaeva’s prose one finds a consummate spiritualist waging war with the dialectical materialism of the Bolshevik/Communist regime. In her conversations about love and human connection, juxtaposed with the material want of the populace, she takes a decided stance on the power of poetry to communicate something beyond the physical realm. Further, she exposes the irony of a regime “for the workers” that simultaneously plunged workers into desperate conditions, such as their searching for edible potatoes in the literal muck and filth of a rotting, flooded cellar of months-old crop, or the mental calculus required to acquire basic staples like flour. While the regime sought to annihilate spirituality—there’s an oblique reference here to Christians preparing to sacrifice themselves against the Reds—it simultaneously provided nothing upon which the populace could satiate its very physical hunger. As the animals in Orwell’s fairy tale once noted, despite the statistics and good news bandied about the farm by the pigs, all the animals sensed that they had more food and fuller stomachs in the days of Jones.

Another portion, perhaps the longest single section of the volume, presents literary criticism and a biography of Valery Briusov, a notable Russian poet and translator who wedded his interests to the Soviet regime during the 1920s. Needless to say, Tsvetaeva did not care much for Briusov. There’s a lot here too about Tsvetaeva’s poetical birth.

This is more of a specialized volume. If you’re really interested in Tsvetaeva or in social aspects of this portion of Russian history, there’s much to love here. If you lack that contextual knowledge, this work may prove frustrating.

[Rachael]

I’m glad Briusov was dead when this was published because that last chapter would have made him kill
Himself

[Tracy Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

2024 Book No.2
EARTHLY SIGNS, MOSCOW DIARIES, 1917-1922 by MARINA TSVETAEVA
“Nationality is not nothing
but it’s not everything.”

“Like first love,
The heart of Russia will not forget you.”

And I’ll not be forgetting Tsvetaeva very soon either.

[Audi Martel · Rating 3 out of 5]

An clear view of the difficulties of life during Russian revolution and civil war, and yet while Tsvetaeva struggles through these awful times, I oddly feel little emotion for her (other than respect for her proud feminist voice). There was an emotional guard up, feigned detachment, and cockiness to her writing that did not endear me to her. I also found Tsvetaeva’s musings on Russian poets hard to get through as I am mostly unfamiliar with the many poets’ work she references extensively throughout.

[James Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essays by one of the greatest Russian poets of the Twentieth Century provide a taste of the literary and cultural life of her emigre life. With only her poetry for support she provides a memoir of her personal experience in difficult times. Joseph Brodsky praised her: "No more passionate voice ever sounded in Russian poetry of the twentieth century. This is an excellent book to read as an adjunct to her poetry.

[Marianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genius

The writings of a true genius. Marina has a voice all her own, and this is the voice you hear throughout this book. Even her prose is poetic. What an amazing read. I felt transported to Moscow 1929-20; the dead of winter; the horrors of finding yourself living in the attic of your own home, and incapable of sustaining oneself and the little children who depend on you. What a life. What a tragedy.

[Riet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ik ken haar gedichten en heb haar biografie gelezen. Dan is het mooi om nu haar dagboeken vanuit Moskou te lezen. Dit is de periode van de revolutie en de eerste jaren erna. Zij beschrijft de ongelofelijke armoede en honger, die de mensen toen leden. vooral als je niet bij de partij hoorde. Zij is scherp in haar beschrijvingen van mededichters uit die tijd.

[A L]

I won't read an anti-communist memoir unless the prose is this kind of next level good.

[Tom Wascoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

A diary. Random thoughts and observations. Good insight into the living conditions in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. Observations on obscure (to me) Russian poets.

[Erik Tanouye · Rating 1 out of 5]

Got this via my NYRB Classics subscription. Marina Tsvetaeva suffered a lot, but she remained insufferable.

[isabell ☮︎︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

how do you review the work of a woman who IS language itself? who doesn't just write but carves words into existence, leaving behind something so incredibly raw, wounded, and immortal?

Marina Tsvetaeva ladies and gentlemen!! WHAT a woman.

these diaries are not neat reflections, not polished wisdom made for the reader's comfort. they are hunger and obsession, an unfiltered mind unraveling in real time. she writes of war, exile, motherhood, impossible loves, and impossible poetry – because what else is there? she is always writing, even in suffering, even in poverty, even in the face of betrayal, as if stopping would mean ceasing to exist.

it's impossible not to compare her to Sylvia Plath: both mothers, both poets, both women who burned too brightly, who bent language to their will and then were broken by the world. but where Plath is meticulous, controlled, Tsvetaeva is chaos – gasping, grasping, reaching beyond the limits of the page.

there is no room for distance here. you do not read Tsvetaeva – you stand inside her, let her swallow you whole. and when you come out on the other side?

you are not the same.

5 stars, not question. anything less would be a crime against literature.

[Isabel Yacura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating look at Moscow and of a woman. Despite being a book of poetry, by a poet, the only line that truly hurt me was in the prologue, of Efron's letter to Voloshin- "Marina is a woman of passions...Plunging headfirst into her hurricanes has become essential for her, the breath of life. It no longer matters who it is that arouses these hurricanes....All this with a penetrating, cold mind...A huge stove, whose fires need wood, wood, and more wood. Unwanted ashes are thrown out, and the quality of the wood is not so important. For the time being the stove draws well-- everything is converted to flame. Poor wood is burnt up more quickly, good wood takes longer.
It goes without saying that it's been a long time since I've been any use for the fire."
Heartbreaking, horrible, I can't stop thinking about it. Use for the fire indeed.

[Nicola Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

The writing is exquisite as is her intellect but I was too struck by the introduction whereby we learn the choices Tsetaeva made in relation to her three year old daughter. So, as I read I found myself haunted by the photograph of her two daughters, particularly Irina.

An intoxicating insight into 1900s Russia - such deprivation and hunger but the book still allowed some sense of humour. I must admit that I did not always follow what she was writing about but then I do think she was a true genius … and I am not. Ultimatly, she shows us how to be free in an unfree world.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tr. Jamey Gambrell. This feels more like a book for those studying Tsvetaeva or Russian poets/poetry of the revolutionary period. There are some real gems when she is writing about her everyday life and struggle to get by but there is also a lot that loses its interest if you don’t have an in-depth knowledge of the characters that she is referring to. Probably not one for the causal reader but invaluable if you have a keen interest in Tsvetaeva and her poetry so my rating should be seen in that context.

[Paul Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am reminded of the backcover reviewers' comments on my copy of Puckoon by Spike Mlligan. In true Milligan style he provided a review of his own book, which he described as:"A book of bits or a bit of a book". That definitely applies to this collection of chronologically arranged jottings. The chaos in post revolution Russia and the privations suffered by its citizens comes through but it doesn't really hang together as a history or a narrative.

[Apina_lukee_kirjoja · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Marina Tsvetaeva and her rambling, fast-speed writing. She knows how to paint places, moods, characters, change.

The Briusov essay at the end was a bit too weird for someone who'd never heard of Briusov before, and wasn't au courant with the politics of Russian poetry in the 1920s. Reads like a tiktok-feud.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some excerpts are far too brief to convey much, and it could have used additional notes to put some of the events in greater perspective, but the portion where she goes to work for the esperantist in the propaganda office is unforgettable.

[Emili · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honestly, it's not really a three star read; it's a one star, or a five star. The writing is beautiful and it was definitely engrossing, but I just can't stand her. An utterly unlikeable narrator is one thing in a fiction novel, but in a memoir? Her lack of self-awareness and empathy is palpable.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book just wasn’t my cup of tea. Compiled from scattered writing by Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the book really lacks any kind of a throughline to anchor her story. There is some inspired writing here and her descriptions of searching out food for her children during the Russian Revolution is unforgettable. But the book also would have benefited from more frequent notes to explain the various historical characters and events. Doing my own research as I read became extremely cumbersome and distracting.