Marina Tsvetaeva Quotes

“(T)here was no missing the enormous irony of the fact that from Russia--"a country where her poems were needed, like bread, she had ended up in a country where nobody needed her or anyone else's poems. Even Russian people in emigration ceased to need them," Tsvetaeva said, "And that made Russian poets miserable.”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

“The discomfort provoked is what makes this poem so important. Placing that event (the barbaric treatment of the family of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva in 1939) beside the idealisation of Stalin in MacLean's poem sets all sorts of crucial questions resonating. It raises the hugely disturbing question of the prolonged support offered by writers and intellectuals in the West for a regime characterised by an appalling degree of criminality systematically applied. The fact that Stalin's armies defeated Hitler's does nothing to change the nature of the regime he headed. Within four years of writing 'An Cuilithionn', MacLean became totally alienated from his poem for these very reasons. It would be wonderful if they made it a bad poem, but they don't. You can write splendid poetry in support of a mistaken political cause. MacLean was not the only one to get it wrong - far from it.”
― Christopher Whyte