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In this remarkable investigation into the conditions that led to the suicide of the great poet Marina Tsvetaeva in 1941, the eminent Russian scholar Irma Kudrova goes to a source previously unavailable to researchers -- the archives or the Soviet secret police. A true historical detective story, The End of a Poet is more than just the story of what happened to Tsvetaeva: it is a case history of terror, revealing the stunning degree to which normally honorable people were made into informers. Included are diary fragments; Tsvetaeva's last letters; the stenographic account of her interrogation by the French police; and Tsvetaeva's letter to Stalin. Includes many rare photographs.
Cast onto the street and living in fear that her own arrest was imminent, the poet who once stood at the pinnacle of Russian letters descended into a living hell, compounded by official persecution, the indifference of peers and friends and finally, the beginning of World War II and Nazi air raids over Moscow."
The memoirs of Ariadna Efron provide an intimate and indispensable perspective on the poet Marina Tsvetaeva's life and work, told from the point of view of her daughter.
This book is a major critical biography of the poet Maria Tsvetaeva by one of the foremost authorities on her work. It draws on a profusion of recent documentation and research, some of it hitherto unpublished, and encompasses the whole course of her life. Professor Karlinsky is careful to supply the reader with the necessary context for understanding the work by setting out the historical, political and literary background against which Tsvetaeva's life and literary development evolved. A particular feature of the book is a discussion of Tsvetaeva's relationships with her literary contemporaries, especially Mandelstam, Rilke, Akhmatova, Pasternak, and Mayakovsky, and of her emotional involvement with various men and women that are reflected in her poetry, plays and prose. Interest in Tsvetaeva's work has grown considerably and this important book will be essential reading both to scholars of twentieth-century Russian literature and cultural studies and to all serious students of modern literature.
This study rehabilitates Tsvetaeva as a serious, innovative ethical thinker who developed an ethics for the poet that could dispense with universal value guarantees. For Tsvetaeva, ethical judgements had to be individual rather than universal, open to revision rather than permanent. Examining her ideational background, the study sheds new light on the pre-exile years, when Tsvetaeva suffered from a profound uncertainty about the moral nature and duty of the poet. It identifies the experience of exile as a catalyst for the development of her ethical thought that culminated in 'Iskusstvo pri svete sovesti'. Considering Tsvetaeva's application of her ethics in her life, this study reveals her emphasis on the personal to be the direct result of her ethical belief in individual judgements. Her conscious effort persistently to counteract dominant political ideologies similarly stems from her ethical suspicion of any kind of claim on universal truth. Finally the study assesses the significance of Tsvetaeva's suicide, revealing it to be the inevitable, terrifying consequence of her ethical self-definition, her commitment to individual freedom, and the pursuit of higher truths.
Ignored upon its publication in 1926 in a Russian émigré periodical, Marina Tsvetaeva's extraordinary narrative poem The Ratcatcher is today deemed by critics and readers to be the zenith of her impressive oeuvre. Written in Prague and Paris in the mid-1920s and now available in the United States for the first time, The Ratcatcher is at once a paean to literary tradition and a scathing attack on the materialistic, unspiritual lifestyle embraced by post-Bolshevik Russia.
Commemorating Pushkin is a study of the fascination with Pushkin that has helped Russian culture define itself, as seen in poems, stories, essays, memoirs, films, museums, and commemorative celebrations.
Swept up in the maelstrom of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937-1938, nearly a million people died. Most were ordinary citizens who left no records and as a result have been completely forgotten. This book is the first to attempt to retrieve their stories and reconstruct their lives, drawing upon recently declassified archives of the former Soviet Secret Police in Kiev. Hiroaki Kuromiya uncovers in the archives the hushed voices of the condemned, and he chronicles the lives of dozens of individuals who shared the same dehumanizing fate: all were falsely arrested, executed, and dumped in mass graves. Kuromiya investigates the truth behind the fabricated records, filling in at least some of the details of the lives and deaths of ballerinas, priests, beggars, teachers, peasants, workers, soldiers, pensioners, homemakers, fugitives, peddlers, ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Koreans, Jews, and others. In recounting the extraordinary stories gleaned from the secret files, Kuromiya not only commemorates the dead and forgotten but also proposes a new interpretation of Soviet society that provides useful insights into the enigma of Stalinist terror.
This study of the effect of literature on readers, both as individuals and as members of social groups, focuses on Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, as a model for investigating the aesthetic and social functions of literature. The individual reader's response to the literary text is demonstrated in Part One through a broad range of memoirs, diaries, and correspondences in which Russian readers recorded their reactions to Pushkin. Among the reactions are testimonies that Pushkin's works helped readers form their personalities, provided cathartic relief in times of stress, and aided them in releasing their suppressed emotions. In his analysis, the author draws on various psychologica...
This is the first biography in any language of "Comrade Prince" D. S. Mirsky, who uniquely participated in three distinctive episodes of modern European culture. In late imperial St. Petersburg he was a poet, a student of Oriental languages and ancient history, and also a Guards officer. After fighting in World War I and the Russian Civil War, Mirsky emigrated, taught at London University, and became a literary critic and historian, writing prolifically in English, and also in Russian as a leading member of the Eurasian movement centered in Paris. His closest literary relationships were with Marina Tsvetaeva and Aleksei Remizov, and later with Maksim Gorky. In 1926-7 he published A History o...