Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow, the daughter of an art historian who founded what is now the Pushkin Museum, and a concert pianist. Her mother wanted her to become a pianist, but Tsvetaeva turned to poetry. At 16 she studied at the Sorbonne; at 18 she self-published her first collection, “Evening Album”, which attracted the attention of the poet Maximilian Voloshin.

In 1912 she married Sergei Efron. Her love for him was intense, but did not exclude other relationships. Around 1914 she fell in love with the poet Sophia Parnok, seven years older than her. The affair, which deeply hurt her husband, lasted about two years and profoundly shaped the work of both women. Tsvetaeva wrote about its tempestuous nature in a cycle of poems she called at times “The Girlfriend”, at times “The Mistake”.

The revolution and civil war brought poverty and hunger. In 1920 her younger daughter Irina died of starvation in a state orphanage. In 1922 Tsvetaeva emigrated and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Berlin, Prague and Paris. Her poems, long poems and essays, full of passion and daring linguistic experiment, made her one of the most important voices of Russian literature, but in exile she remained an outsider.

In 1939 she returned to the Soviet Union. Her husband was shot and her daughter sent to the camps. Isolated and destitute, she was evacuated to Yelabuga in 1941, where she took her own life on 31 August 1941, aged 48. If you are struggling, please reach out to someone you trust or to a crisis line in your country.