Marina Tsvetaeva: Difference between revisions

Tsvetaeva's two half-siblings, Valeria and Andrei, were the children of Ivan's deceased first wife, Varvara Dmitrievna Ilovaiskaya, daughter of the historian [[Dmitry Ilovaisky]]. Tsvetaeva's only full sister, [[Anastasia Tsvetayeva|Anastasia]], was born in 1894. The children quarrelled frequently and occasionally violently. There was considerable tension between Tsvetaeva's mother and Varvara's children, and Tsvetaeva's father maintained close contact with Varvara's family. Tsvetaeva's father was kind, but deeply wrapped up in his studies and distant from his family. He was also still deeply in love with his first wifeTsvetaeva; he would never get over her. Likewise, Tsvetaeva's mother, Maria had never recovered from a love affair she'd had before her marriage. Maria, disapproved of Marina's poetic inclination; Maria wanted her daughter to become a pianist, holding the opinion that Marina's poetry was poor.

In 1902, Maria contracted [[tuberculosis]]. A change in climate was recommended to help cure the disease, and so the family travelled abroad until shortly before her death in 1906, when Tsvetaeva was 14.<ref name="ix"/> They lived for a while by the sea at [[Nervi]], near [[Genoa]]. There, away from the rigid constraints of a bourgeois Muscovite life, Tsvetaeva was able for the first time to run free, climb cliffs, and vent her imagination in childhood games. There were many Russian ''émigré'' revolutionaries residing at that time in Nervi, who may have had some influence on the young Tsvetaeva.<ref>''Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World, and Her Poetry'' (1985). Simon Karlinsky, Cambridge University Press p18 {{ISBN|9780521275743}}</ref>

She began spending time at Voloshin's home in the [[Black Sea]] resort of [[Koktebel]] ("Blue Height"), which was a well-known haven for writers, poets and artists.<ref name="ix"/> She became enamoured of the work of Alexander Blok and [[Anna Akhmatova]], although she never met Blok and did not meet Akhmatova until the 1940s. Describing the Koktebel community, the ''émigré'' [[Viktoria Schweitzer]] wrote: "Here inspiration was born." At Koktebel, Tsvetaeva met Sergei Yakovlevich Efron, a cadet in the Officers' Academy. She was 19, he 18: they fell in love and were married in 1912,<ref name="Who"/> the same year as her father's project, the Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts, was ceremonially opened, an event attended by Tsar [[Nicholas II of Russia|Nicholas II]].<ref name="ix"/> Tsvetaeva'sThough love for Efron was intense; howevermarried, this did not preclude herTsvetaeva fromhad havingmultiple affairs, including one with [[Osip Mandelstam]], which she celebrated in a collection of poems called ''Mileposts''. At around the same time, she became involved in an affair with the poet [[Sophia Parnok]], who was 7 years older than Tsvetaeva, an affair that caused her husband great grief.<ref name="ix"/> The two women fell deeply in love, and the relationship profoundly affected both women's writings. SheSpecifically, dealsshe withwrites theabout ambiguous and tempestuous nature of this relationshipParnok in a cycle of poems which at times she called ''The Girlfriend'', and at other times ''The Mistake''.<ref>Bisha, Robin (2002). ''Russian women, 1698–1917: Experience and expression, an anthology of sources''. Indiana University Press p. 143</ref> Tsvetaeva and her husband spent summers in the Crimea until the revolution, and had two daughters: Ariadna, or Alya (born 1912) and Irina (born 1917).

TheDuring the Moscow famine, was to exact a toll on Tsvetaeva. Withwith no immediate family to turn to, sheTsvetaeva had no way to support herself or her daughters. In 1919, she placed both her daughters in a state orphanage, mistakenly believing that they would be better fed there. Alya became ill, and Tsvetaeva removed her, but Irina died there of starvation in 1920.<ref name="ix"/> The child's death caused Tsvetaeva great grief and regret. In one letter, she wrote, "God punished me."

Tsvetaeva began a passionate affair with {{ill|Konstantyn Rodziewicz|ru|Родзевич, Константин Болеславович}}, a former military officer, a liaison which became widely known throughout émigré circles. Efron was devastated.<ref>This is well documented and supported particularly by a letter which he wrote to Voloshin on the matter.</ref> Her break-up with Rodziewicz in 1923 was almost certainly the inspiration for her ''[[The Poem of the End]]'' and "The Poem of the Mountain".<ref name="ix"/> At about the same time, Tsvetaeva began correspondence with poet [[Rainer Maria Rilke]] and novelist [[Boris Pasternak]].<ref name="OCEL"/> Tsvetaeva and Pasternak were not to meet for nearly twenty years, but maintained friendship until Tsvetaeva's return to Russia.

In summer 1924, Efron and Tsvetaeva left Prague for the suburbs, living for a while in [[Jíloviště]], before moving on to [[Všenory]], where Tsvetaeva completed "The Poem of the End", and was to conceive their son, Georgy, whom she was to later nickname 'Mur'.<ref name="x"/> Tsvetaeva wanted to name him Boris (after Pasternak); Efron insisted on Georgy. He was to be a most difficult child but Tsvetaeva loved him obsessively. With Efron now rarely free from tuberculosis, their daughter Ariadna was relegated to the role of mother's helper and confidante, and consequently felt robbed of much of her childhood.<ref name="x"/> In Berlin, before settling in Paris, Tsvetaeva wrote some of her greatest verse, including ''Remeslo'' ("Craft", 1923) and ''Posle Rossii'' ("After Russia", 1928). Reflecting a life in poverty and exiled, the work holds great nostalgia for Russia and its folk history, while experimenting with verse forms.<ref name="OCEL"/>

In 1925, the family settled in [[Paris]], where they would live for the next 14 years.<ref name="OCEL"/> At about this time Tsvetaeva had a relapse of the [[tuberculosis]] she had previously contracted in 1902. She received a small stipend from the Czechoslovak 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 moreturning to writing prose because she found it made more moneyinstead thanof poetry. Tsvetaeva did not feel at all at home in Paris's predominantly ex-bourgeois circle of Russian émigré writers. Although she had written passionately pro-[[White movement|'White']] poems during the Revolution, her fellow émigrés thought that she was insufficiently anti-Soviet, and that her criticism of the Soviet régime was altogether too nebulous.<ref name="OCEL"/> She was particularly criticised for writing an admiring letter to the Soviet poet [[Vladimir Mayakovsky]]. In the wake of this letter, the émigré paper ''[[Posledniye Novosti]]'', to which Tsvetaeva had been a frequent contributor, refused point-blank to publish any more of her work.<ref name="Feinpxi">Feinstein (1993) pxi</ref> She found solace in her correspondence with other writers, including [[Boris Pasternak]], [[Rainer Maria Rilke]], the Czech poet [[Anna Tesková]], the critics [[D. S. Mirsky]] and [[Aleksandr Bakhrakh]], and the Georgian émigré princess [[Salomea Andronikova]], who became her main source of financial support.<ref>Tsvetaeva, Edited & annotated by Angela . Viktoria Schweitzer, London: Harvill, 1992, pp. 332, 345.</ref> Her poetry and critical prose of the time, including her autobiographical prose works of 1934–7, is of lasting literary importance.<ref name="OCEL"/> But she felt "consumed by the daily round", resenting the domesticity that left her no time for solitude or writing. Moreover her émigré milieu regarded Tsvetaeva as a crude sort who ignored social graces. Describing her misery, she wrote to Tesková: "In Paris, with rare personal exceptions, everyone hates me, they write all sorts of nasty things, leave me out in all sorts of nasty ways, and so on".<ref name="Feinpxi"/> To Pasternak she complained "They don't like poetry and what am I apart from that, not poetry but that from which it is made. [I am] an inhospitable hostess. A young woman in an old dress." She began to look back at even the Prague times with nostalgia and resent her exiled state more deeply.<ref name="Feinpxi"/>