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Tsvetaeva
Marina Tsvetaeva was, with Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Pasternak, one of the four great Russian poets of this century. In a tragic time her fate was perhaps the most tragic of all. Born in 1892, the daughter of a gifted pianist and the founder of what is today the Pushkin Museum, Tsvetaeva had an intense, cloistered and romantic childhood. Her early teenage years were spent largely in Italy, Switzerland and Germany, as the family travelled Europe in search of a cure for her mother's tuberculosis. In 1910 she published her first collection of poetry, which was immediately recognized in literary circles as the work of a true poet, and the following year in the Crimea she met Sergey Efron, the man around whom her life would revolve to the end. Although Tsvetaeva married him, had three children by him and dedicated her life to him, she had passionate affairs with many lovers, the poets Osip Mandelstam and Sofia Parnok foremost amongst them. In 1917 Sergey joined the White Army and Marina did not see him again for five years. She and her elder daughter, Alya, barely survived the Revolution (her younger daughter died) and, in 1922, they joined Efron in emigration in Prague. There, and later in Paris, she wrote and published many of her greatest works, and kept up an intense correspondence with Rilke and Pasternak. However, by 1939, hardly known in her own country, estranged from her husband and virtually ostracized by the emigre community, she was nevertheless persuaded by Sergey, who had by then been exposed as a Soviet agent, to return to Moscow. Efron and Alya were arrested, and as the German Army pushed ever deeper into Russia, Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Elabuga on the KamaRiver. There, on 31 August 1941, Tsvetaeva took her own life.
Viktoria Schweitzer, who is recognized as being pre-eminent amongst Tsvetaeva specialists, spent twenty years researching her subject and was able to interview many of the people who knew Tsvetaeva personally, including her daughter and her sister. This is the first full-length story of the life and work of this supreme lyric poet and prose stylist to be based on such detailed research.
Viktoria Schweitzer, who is recognized as being pre-eminent amongst Tsvetaeva specialists, spent twenty years researching her subject and was able to interview many of the people who knew Tsvetaeva personally, including her daughter and her sister. This is the first full-length story of the life and work of this supreme lyric poet and prose stylist to be based on such detailed research.
413 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1992
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 14, 2020
I've never been a big lover of biographies, but do plan to read more of them this year, predominantly on some of my favourite writers. As a fan of Tsvetaeva (she's probably my most cherished female poet), Russian history, and Russian poetry in general, I found Schweitzer's book ticked all the boxes in what you would want from an in depth bio. There is just so much detail covering Tsvetaeva's life: some things I knew, most things I didn't, that I wouldn't even know where to begin to highlight some of it. I suppose the most fascinating thing for me overall away from her poetry and family life was her relationships in regards to other writers, including love affairs with Osip Mandelstam and Sofia Parnok, and correspondences with Boris Pasternak and Rainer Maria Rilke. The final third was certainly the most powerful, and had moments that were just so heartbreaking, building up to her tragic death. It's the best biography I've read to date for sure.
July 29, 2010
Talk about a life like a novel!! Wonderful book, one of the great Russian poets of the Revolutionary era. The book gives you a life that reads like a novel. One of the most poignant moments came when her husband, Sergei Efron, likens his passionate wife to a fire that needs constant fuel, and that he didn't have enough to even raise smoke anymore. A great writer isn't always a great human being, but what an amazing character. Also tremendous insights into her poetry, the circumstances surrounding the various poem cycles--a fine fine literary profile.
January 1, 2018
The Prisoner of Poetry
There are two broad categories of biography that you can read. One is the kind in which the author tackles a whole period in a country's history, bringing in the culture that created his/her subject as well as the influence that character had on the times. Good examples of this sort are Samuel Eliot Morison's "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" about Columbus, John Womack Jr.'s "Zapata and the Mexican Revolution", or Paul Murray Kendall's "Louis XI"---all first class biographies. The second kind is more intimate; a narrower focus on the character, in which the author tries to plumb the psychological depths of the person and reveal the motivations and underlying feelings behind their achievements. TSVETAEVA is certainly of the second variety. Though Marina Tsvetaeva, one of Russia's foremost poets in the 20th century, lived through wars, revolution, repression, and radical social-economic change in her country, the book pays minimal attention to any of it. If you, the reader, are not aware of the depth and sweep of all these things in Russia or the USSR in the years 1914-1941, you are not going to understand this book. The facts that Tsvetaeva was persona-non-grata after the 1917 Revolution, that her works were suppressed till long after her death, that she had to be discovered by the younger generations, that one of Russia's great poets was not mentioned in schools for a long time---these important things are very much underplayed by the author, who seems to have written for a Russian audience alone. Painstakingly, lovingly reconstructed from the poems, the letters, the diaries, and many interviews, this biography is surely a labor of many years. For the details and for the many insights into the life and psychology of a complex woman out of tune with her times, I'd certainly award this book five stars, but on the other hand, it is packed with an enormous amount of detail, more than most non-Russian readers can absorb. I sometimes felt repelled by the cloying quality of the author's adulation of her famous subject. Also, the translations of the poetry are amazingly wooden. I can get no feeling of why Russians consider Tsvetaeva such a great poet, though I'm prepared to accept that she is.
Tsvetaeva grew up before the Revolution in a well-off family. Her mother transferred a lot of her cultural aspirations to her, or we may say that Tsvetaeva inherited a lot of her mother's emotional intensity and need to be the center of all relationships around her. Ideas such as "money is filth" and "only the things of the spirit matter" were common among certain classes in Europe, but they lead to very unhappy lives if inherited money runs out. I find Tsvetaeva a most unpleasant person right from childhood, a person who could write that "it is stupid and indecent to be happy", a person who therefore would be in love with tragedy, loneliness and unhappiness all her life. She neglected and betrayed her husband, abandoned all her myriad lovers, drove her children away, (one starved to death in an orphanage at an early age) and eventually hung herself. She favored the White (losing) side in the Revolution, leaving Russia in the mid-20s to live abroad. In exile, she moved only in the tightknit Russian emigre communities in Germany, Czechoslovakia and France, never opening to anything that wasn't already familiar. Besides being influenced by Pushkin's work, she had strange semi- or full romantic relationships with a number of famous people, who are written about here---Mandelstam, Blok, and Pasternak are those most known in the West---but one is left with the feeling that she just needed a series of "idols" or "ideal men" (or women) to whom she could dedicate her emotive poetry which fed off her constant inner turmoil. Her own husband likened her to a huge stove whose fires needed more and more `wood'. The ashes would be thrown out without further thought. Though I found Tsvetaeva impossible to like and the translations of her poetry did not inspire me to read more, I still recommend TSVETAEVA as a most fascinating biography. Her story is part of the immense tragedy that is Russian history in the 20th century.
There are two broad categories of biography that you can read. One is the kind in which the author tackles a whole period in a country's history, bringing in the culture that created his/her subject as well as the influence that character had on the times. Good examples of this sort are Samuel Eliot Morison's "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" about Columbus, John Womack Jr.'s "Zapata and the Mexican Revolution", or Paul Murray Kendall's "Louis XI"---all first class biographies. The second kind is more intimate; a narrower focus on the character, in which the author tries to plumb the psychological depths of the person and reveal the motivations and underlying feelings behind their achievements. TSVETAEVA is certainly of the second variety. Though Marina Tsvetaeva, one of Russia's foremost poets in the 20th century, lived through wars, revolution, repression, and radical social-economic change in her country, the book pays minimal attention to any of it. If you, the reader, are not aware of the depth and sweep of all these things in Russia or the USSR in the years 1914-1941, you are not going to understand this book. The facts that Tsvetaeva was persona-non-grata after the 1917 Revolution, that her works were suppressed till long after her death, that she had to be discovered by the younger generations, that one of Russia's great poets was not mentioned in schools for a long time---these important things are very much underplayed by the author, who seems to have written for a Russian audience alone. Painstakingly, lovingly reconstructed from the poems, the letters, the diaries, and many interviews, this biography is surely a labor of many years. For the details and for the many insights into the life and psychology of a complex woman out of tune with her times, I'd certainly award this book five stars, but on the other hand, it is packed with an enormous amount of detail, more than most non-Russian readers can absorb. I sometimes felt repelled by the cloying quality of the author's adulation of her famous subject. Also, the translations of the poetry are amazingly wooden. I can get no feeling of why Russians consider Tsvetaeva such a great poet, though I'm prepared to accept that she is.
Tsvetaeva grew up before the Revolution in a well-off family. Her mother transferred a lot of her cultural aspirations to her, or we may say that Tsvetaeva inherited a lot of her mother's emotional intensity and need to be the center of all relationships around her. Ideas such as "money is filth" and "only the things of the spirit matter" were common among certain classes in Europe, but they lead to very unhappy lives if inherited money runs out. I find Tsvetaeva a most unpleasant person right from childhood, a person who could write that "it is stupid and indecent to be happy", a person who therefore would be in love with tragedy, loneliness and unhappiness all her life. She neglected and betrayed her husband, abandoned all her myriad lovers, drove her children away, (one starved to death in an orphanage at an early age) and eventually hung herself. She favored the White (losing) side in the Revolution, leaving Russia in the mid-20s to live abroad. In exile, she moved only in the tightknit Russian emigre communities in Germany, Czechoslovakia and France, never opening to anything that wasn't already familiar. Besides being influenced by Pushkin's work, she had strange semi- or full romantic relationships with a number of famous people, who are written about here---Mandelstam, Blok, and Pasternak are those most known in the West---but one is left with the feeling that she just needed a series of "idols" or "ideal men" (or women) to whom she could dedicate her emotive poetry which fed off her constant inner turmoil. Her own husband likened her to a huge stove whose fires needed more and more `wood'. The ashes would be thrown out without further thought. Though I found Tsvetaeva impossible to like and the translations of her poetry did not inspire me to read more, I still recommend TSVETAEVA as a most fascinating biography. Her story is part of the immense tragedy that is Russian history in the 20th century.
July 30, 2008
A biography of the doomed Russian poet, with analysis of some of her poetry.
Tsvetaeva wrote "Fear and pity, anger and longing, were the passions of my childhood."
Schweitzer: What is the Poet? What is the Poet's role in the world? These "eternal" themes exercised Tsvetaeva's creative imagination. The foundation of her own outlook is an instinctive feeling that the Poet stands in opposition to the world. The Poet is the prisoner of his or her gift and time.
Tsvetaeva: A poet's marriage with his time is a forced marriage. A marriage which, like any violence to which he has been subjected, he feels ashamed of -- and from which he tries to escape.
Schweitzer: A transparent wall separates the one "doomed to be a poet" from other people, a wall which they perhaps do not see, which can be approached but not passed.
Schweitzer: ...when she was fully adult she insisted...that egocentricity is a normal characteristic of poets.
Tsvetaeva: The creative state is a state of enchantment...The creative state is a state of dreaming.
Schweitzer: How could the same person feel two such very different emotions, write two such different poems, at one and the same time? The poet is an unpredictable, unaccountable creature, unable to foresee what will demand utterance from one day, one hour indeed, to the next.
Tsvetaeva: I never did and never shall belong to any poetic school.
Schweitzer: In my view, nothing helps us more to interpret a poem than to hear the poet read it.
Tsvetaeva: Who am I writing for? Not for the millions, not for one person alone, and not for myself. I write for the sake of the thing itself. The thing writes itself through me.
Schweitzer: (summarizing Tsvetaeva's article "Poets with History and Poets without History) Briefly, poets with history are always in motion, always developing, discovering themselves in the world. Poets without history -- pure lyric poets -- do not move, do not develop, they discover the world in themselves.
Tsvetaeva: Can there be such a thing as catastrophic development?...throughout his poetic career Blok was not developing but tearing himself to pieces.
Ouch. But I get what they're saying.
Tsvetaeva wrote "Fear and pity, anger and longing, were the passions of my childhood."
Schweitzer: What is the Poet? What is the Poet's role in the world? These "eternal" themes exercised Tsvetaeva's creative imagination. The foundation of her own outlook is an instinctive feeling that the Poet stands in opposition to the world. The Poet is the prisoner of his or her gift and time.
Tsvetaeva: A poet's marriage with his time is a forced marriage. A marriage which, like any violence to which he has been subjected, he feels ashamed of -- and from which he tries to escape.
Schweitzer: A transparent wall separates the one "doomed to be a poet" from other people, a wall which they perhaps do not see, which can be approached but not passed.
Schweitzer: ...when she was fully adult she insisted...that egocentricity is a normal characteristic of poets.
Tsvetaeva: The creative state is a state of enchantment...The creative state is a state of dreaming.
Schweitzer: How could the same person feel two such very different emotions, write two such different poems, at one and the same time? The poet is an unpredictable, unaccountable creature, unable to foresee what will demand utterance from one day, one hour indeed, to the next.
Tsvetaeva: I never did and never shall belong to any poetic school.
Schweitzer: In my view, nothing helps us more to interpret a poem than to hear the poet read it.
Tsvetaeva: Who am I writing for? Not for the millions, not for one person alone, and not for myself. I write for the sake of the thing itself. The thing writes itself through me.
Schweitzer: (summarizing Tsvetaeva's article "Poets with History and Poets without History) Briefly, poets with history are always in motion, always developing, discovering themselves in the world. Poets without history -- pure lyric poets -- do not move, do not develop, they discover the world in themselves.
Tsvetaeva: Can there be such a thing as catastrophic development?...throughout his poetic career Blok was not developing but tearing himself to pieces.
Ouch. But I get what they're saying.
May 19, 2012
Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry was featured in the March 2012 issue of Poetry Magazine. I picked up this biography without knonwing anything about her life. What a sad, sad story. I was interested in this story, but the writing style (in translation) was a little ponderous and reading felt like hard work. [A side note: I read this two days after watching the DVD of "A Dangerous Method" which is about Sabina Spielrein and Carl Jung. Spielrein and Tavetaeva were both executed during Stalin's Purge. What a tragic ending for two wonderful female intellectuals.]But I will get a book of Tsvetaeva's poetry. In the meantime, enjoy this Tsvetaeva poe:
BOUND FOR HELL
Hell, my ardent sisters, be assured,
Is where we’re bound; we’ll drink the pitch of hell—
We, who have sung the praises of the lord
With every fiber in us, every cell.
We, who did not manage to devote
Our nights to spinning, did not bend and sway
Above a cradle—in a flimsy boat,
Wrapped in a mantle, we’re now borne away.
Every morning, every day, we’d rise
And have the finest Chinese silks to wear;
And we’d strike up the songs of paradise
Around the campfire of a robbers’ lair,
We, careless seamstresses (our seams all ran,
Whether we sewed or not)—yet we have been
Such dancers, we have played the pipes of Pan:
The world was ours, each one of us a queen.
First, scarcely draped in tatters, and disheveled,
Then plaited with a starry diadem;
We’ve been in jails, at banquets we have reveled:
But the rewards of heaven, we’re lost to them,
Lost in nights of starlight, in the garden
Where apple trees from paradise are found.
No, be assured, my gentle girls, my ardent
And lovely sisters, hell is where we’re bound.
BOUND FOR HELL
Hell, my ardent sisters, be assured,
Is where we’re bound; we’ll drink the pitch of hell—
We, who have sung the praises of the lord
With every fiber in us, every cell.
We, who did not manage to devote
Our nights to spinning, did not bend and sway
Above a cradle—in a flimsy boat,
Wrapped in a mantle, we’re now borne away.
Every morning, every day, we’d rise
And have the finest Chinese silks to wear;
And we’d strike up the songs of paradise
Around the campfire of a robbers’ lair,
We, careless seamstresses (our seams all ran,
Whether we sewed or not)—yet we have been
Such dancers, we have played the pipes of Pan:
The world was ours, each one of us a queen.
First, scarcely draped in tatters, and disheveled,
Then plaited with a starry diadem;
We’ve been in jails, at banquets we have reveled:
But the rewards of heaven, we’re lost to them,
Lost in nights of starlight, in the garden
Where apple trees from paradise are found.
No, be assured, my gentle girls, my ardent
And lovely sisters, hell is where we’re bound.
May 25, 2008
I read this book out of sheer curiosity when I was actually meant to be working on my thesis! Once I'd gotten far enough into it, well, I kept wanting to know "why?" and read more and more. Russia during the war was a sad place - and though it's seldom mentioned, Tsvetaeva actually didn't love her younger daughter, which is possibly why the little girl died.
Isn't it interesting how these kinds of poets are alike? Sexton had almost as many flings as Tsvetaeva seems to have had when Efron (or in Sexton's case, Kayo) was away!!
Isn't it interesting how these kinds of poets are alike? Sexton had almost as many flings as Tsvetaeva seems to have had when Efron (or in Sexton's case, Kayo) was away!!
June 24, 2013
A dramatic and heartbreaking portrait of Tsvetaeva as a "poet." The focus is on her struggles to live as a poet and write poetry separate from and above the political currents of the turbulent times in which she lived. So the book is correspondingly light on history and heavy on the poetry, with lovely exposition of the latter. I was fine with that balance, and particularly appreciated the personal and intimate tone Schweitzer takes, interjecting her own views of events and writings. That personal element to the storytelling elevates the material above a conventional literary biography.
Read
August 3, 2021Great biography and cultural history.
August 25, 2013
Author creates realistic psychological portraits of Marina Tzvetaeva and her family members. Historical events that shaped Tzvetaeva life presented clearly and without overbearing detail. Nice read
April 13, 2017
Great,detailed biography of an exalted, otherworldly, tragic soul and amazing poet. When I was reading the book I often have a thought that this woman just cannot be judged by basic 'womanly' standards of a good mother, of a model housewife or of an accomplished professional. It was hard and painful to read some parts of this amazing life, but always enlightening and fascinating.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews