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A moving collection of autobiographical essays from a Russian poet and refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution. Marina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life buffeted by political upheaval. The essays collected in this volume are based on diaries she kept during the turbulent years of the Revolution and Civil War. In them she records conversations of women in the markets, soldiers and peasants on the train traveling from the Crimea to Moscow in October 1917, fighting in the streets of Moscow, a frantic scramble with co-workers to dig...
Two of America's most passionate poets work magic to unearth the true voice of Tsvetaeva, to open [her] veins.
She shows us a woman embodying the values of nineteenth-century romanticism, yet radical in her poetry, supremely independent in her art, but desperate for appreciation and love, simultaneously mother and child in her complicated sexual relationships with men and women. Here we see the poet who could read her work glorifying the White Army to an audience of Red Army men, the woman who, with her husband a Soviet agent in Paris, could write a long poem about the execution of the last Tsar.
Tsvetaeva's work has an originality and diversity that has been hitherto neglected by critics. Michael Makin's book examines in depth her entire poetic output, paying particular attention to the appropriation, and frequent distortion, of familiar literary material in her lyrical, dramatic, and narrative verse. Major chapters are devoted to the long narrative poems, the mature lyric verse, and the verse plays, on which very little has so far been written.
Milestones is an apt title for this collection, for the eighty-four poems within show a poet passing from mere talent into mastery of her craft. Composed between January and December of 1916, these poems find the twenty-four year-old Tsvetaeva thirsting for the fullness of life while at the same time contemplating the inevitability of death-a theme she was to revisit many times in her career. Tsvetaeva's work of the time also reflects her knowledge of (and pride in) her native culture, especially the centrality of Moscow as the ultimate destination of all Russians. Throughout the verse she opens up to the sensual wonders of nature-sky, forest, wind, and not least her beloved daughter Alya, who would come to figure greatly in the work and legacy of her mother. Milestones lays out a sensual feast of moods, themes, styles, and rhythms-all the ingredients that would in time reveal Tsvetaeva as one of the most daring and original poets of her time.
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.
After Russia is considered the high point in Tsvetaeva's output of shorter poems. Tsvetaeva told Pasternak that all that mattered in the book was its anguish. Technical mastery and experimentation are underpinned by suicidal thoughts, a sense of exclusion from the circle of human love and companionship, and an increasing alienation from life.
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.
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Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was one of the four great Russian poets of the 20th century, along with Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Pasternak. She also wrote outstanding prose. Endowed with 'phenomenally heightened linguistic sensitivity' (Joseph Brodsky), Tsvetaeva was primarily concerned with the nature of poetic creation and what it means to be a poet. Among the most exciting of all explorations of this theme are the essays 'Art in the Light of Conscience', her spirited defence of poetry;'The Poet on the Critic', which earned her the enmity of many; and 'The Poet and Time', the key to understanding her work. Her richly diverse essays provide incomparable insights into poetry, the poetic proces...