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Chronicles of juxtaposition of Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. This volume represents a meticulously combined notes of all existing juxtapositions of the two famous poetesses in the essays, articles of literary critics, and historians of Russian poetry. All excerpts are organized in chronological order: from 1912 to 2008. Volume contains large quantity of black and white photographs and drawings. ... Read more

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A gripping and revealing narrative of the persecution of one of Russian literature's brightest poets during the Stalin era; The Death of a Poet is a harrowing narrative account of how the forces of fate combined to destroy the life of one of twentieth-century Russian literature's most talented and esteemed poets during the bloodiest period of Stalin's regime. In 1937, at the height of her creative powers and living in exile in Paris, where rumours of Stalin's purges had been circulating in the emigre community, Marina Tsvetaeva made the fateful decision to follow her husband Sergei Efron, who had been forced to flee from French authorities, back to Moscow. She had been living in exile for more than twenty years. Soon after their reunion, both Alya, their daughter, and Efron were arrested for 'anti-Soviet activity.' 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. Incorporating unprecedented access to KGB records, Irma Kudr ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Heavy,Where's the desire,where's the light

Here's one

FascinatedwithRussianArt age

of poetryand painting, propelledshortlybefore and afterthe tsar revolution..

What an incrediblycreative age, non the less, artisically !

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is forultradie hards.

Poets, ultimately con vey JOY

This bookwills not to include that.

The miracle of this time

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Beauty swayed.

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Dead poet walking
This high-resolution account of Tsvetaeva's last couple of years struggles with understanding the sequence of events that led Tsvetaeva to killing herself. Much of the detail is published here for the first time, compliments of Kudrova's archival work and her interviews with people who knew Tsvetaeva and her family. Unfortunately, the data is fragmented and far from sufficient for drawing a conclusive picture about the way Tsvetaeva came to that fateful decision. Kudrova argues against the theories that the quarrel with the son or her mental illness prompted Tsvetaeva's suicide. The author ultimately blames KGB and the Bolshevik Revolution for Tsvetaeva's death. Undoubtedly, without the Revolution and KGB, Tsvetaeva would have had fewer reasons to end her life. Yet, the book offers no proof of KGB's direct involvement with Tsvetaeva. As for its indirect involvement - arrest of Tsvetaeva's family - maybe among millions of other people in the USSR whose family members were taken away she was the one especially shaken. Even before her return to the USSR and the quick successions of her daughter's and her husband's arrests, Tsvetaeva was feeling incredibly lonely: among people due to her often-abrasive manner and among poets because of the uncompromising uniqueness of her poetry. Arrest of her family may have proved for Tsvetaeva that last straw that broke the bond with the remaining kindred spirits. Still, hard as it was for Tsvetaeva to loose the loved ones to KGB and GULAG, nowhere is it apparent in the book that their arrest was the main reason for her suicide.

The theme of "one against everybody" recurs throughout Tsvetaeva's life. It may be her single most defining quality. Ever since the early childhood Tsvetaeva was a lonely figure in the family of a remote father, fully occupied with the creation of his Museum of Fine Arts, and a curt and dissatisfied with her own life mother, who moreover favored Tsvetaeva's sister over Marina. Highly original, Tsvetaeva's poetry was rarely admired by the readers or even her fellow poets. Moreover, during the long 17 years of emigration, Tsvetaeva found herself in the opposition to many Russian émigré factions since her uncompromising stand on literary and social matters alienated many. In her own family she was the only one who did not want to return to the USSR from France.

In the last two years of her life she was pursued by a series of tragic events. In her most needy time, her adolescent children were striving for the greatest independence. When KGB was the agent of terror in most people's eyes, her husband was working for the organization. While since childhood she had an intensely dear regard for Germany, reinforced by her German heritage, now fascist Germany was synonymous with evil. Both Czech Republic and France, for which she developed warm feelings over the last 17 years of living in these countries, have fallen to Hitler. Raised from the young age in the spirit of relentless labor, and always admitting that she could not do any work but literary, she was now hard pressed to find any job, even as a dishwasher, let alone as a writer. Having to evacuate from Moscow, she could not any more stand in the long prison lines to give her parcels to the incarcerated husband and daughter. Her adolescent son, who was her only soul mate at the time, in accordance with age did not have much use for her. Everything in her life was going wrong and she felt utterly alone.

The translation feels a bit awkward. My few cursory comparisons with the original proved that the translator used a fairly freestyle approach. Although, a few places where the translations from Russian are literal may give the reader a taste for the original.

I was left with a dual feeling after reading the book. On one hand, the book's facts are decidedly for a Tsvetaeva connoisseur. The narrative spans only two of Tsvetaeva's 49 years. Moreover, roughly half of the book is devoted to Tsvetaeva's husband and daughter and considers their involvement with the new Soviet state. Some of the author's conclusions are based on the interpretation of someone's single enigmatic phrase. In this respect, the book feels like a collection of fine-point facts that should help future researchers of Tsvetaeva, but does not amount to a stand-alone work. On the other hand, even for someone not familiar with the poet or her time the book will give a taste for the horrors of one of the most original Russian poets caught between the Soviet and Nazi terror machines while struggling to piece together her literary and personal life.
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Product Description
Chapters: Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Alexandra Kollontai, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Karolina Pavlova, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Ekaterina Sedia, Yelizaveta Tarakhovskaya, Lera Auerbach, Vera Figner, Marina Orlova, Mariya Petrovykh, Yelena Dembo, Bella Akhmadulina, Paullina Simons, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Zalpa Bersanova, Olga Bergholz, Sophia Parnok, Ina Konstantinova, Sophie Rostopchine, Comtesse de Ségur, Nina Berberova, Yunna Morits, Aleksandra Ishimova, Yulia Drunina, Regina Derieva, Irina Ratushinskaya, Maria Rybakova, Marina Gershenovich, Nadezhda Joffe, Anna Nikolskaya-Ekseli, Marietta Shaginyan, Eulalie Piccard, Nina Gorlanova, Anya Ulinich, Ida Mett, Lidia Ivanova. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 138. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (Russian: ; 8 October 189231 August 1941) was a Russian and Soviet poet and writer. Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow. Much of Tsvetaeva's poetry has its roots in the depths of her displaced childhood. Her father was Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a professor of art history at the University of Moscow, who later founded the Alexander III Museum, which is now known as the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. Tsvetaeva's mother, Maria Alexandrovna Meyn, was Ivan's second wife, a highly literate woman. She was also a volatile (and a frustrated) concert pianist, with some Polish ancestry on her mother's side. (This latter fact was to play on Marina's imagination, and to cause her to identify herself with the Polish aristocracy.) Marina had two half-siblings, Valeria and Andrei, who were the children of Ivan's deceased first wife, Varvara Dmitrievna Ilovaiskaya (daughter of the historian Dmitry Ilovaisky). Her only full sister, Anastasia, was born in 1894. Quarrels among the children were frequent and occasionally violent. There was con...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=20187 ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from The Modern Language Review, published by Modern Humanities Research Association on April 1, 2008. The length of the article is 829 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva.(Book review)
Author: Alexandra Harrington
Publication: The Modern Language Review (Magazine/Journal)
Date: April 1, 2008
Publisher: Modern Humanities Research Association
Volume: 103Issue: 2Page: 612(2)

Article Type: Book review

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Marina Tsvetaeva, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Kalashnikov, List of Russian Language Poets, Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lomonosov, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ivan Bunin, Ivan Krylov, Alexander Sumarokov, Nikolay Lvov, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Lyubov Sirota, Kondraty Ryleyev, Alexander Bashlachev, Mikhail Lermontov, Joseph Brodsky, Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich of Russia, Fyodor Sologub, Varlam Shalamov, Vladimir Solovyov, Apollon Grigoryev, Ilya Ehrenburg, Tatiana Mamonova, Fyodor Tyutchev, Nikolay Nekrasov, Alexander Lebed, Sergei Yesenin, Anatoly Kudryavitsky, Alexander Blok, Maria Skobtsova, Nikolay Gumilyov, Maximilian Voloshin, Bulat Okudzhava, Karolina Pavlova, Mikhail Kuzmin, Vadim Delaunay, Vasily Zhukovsky, Alexei Khvostenko, Alexander Mezhirov, Lev Chernyi, Samuil Marshak, Dmitri Prigov, Tatyana Apraksina, Yakov Knyazhnin, Innokenty Annensky, Andrei Navrozov, Vasily Kamensky, Korney Chukovsky, Ivan Kalyayev, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Andrei Bely, Mikhail Gerasimov, Valery Bryusov, Valeri Brainin, Vadim Shershenevich, Alexander Vertinsky, Evgeny Baratynsky, Konstantin Simonov, Ilya Kaminsky, Cherubina de Gabriak, Vladimir Voinovich, Sasha Chorny, Pyotr Pavlovich Yershov, Dmitry Kuzmin, Georgy Chulkov, Yelizaveta Tarakhovskaya, Gavrila Derzhavin, Alexander Esenin-Volpin, Symeon of Polotsk, Lera Auerbach, Konstantin Vaginov, Velimir Khlebnikov, Igor Talkov, Pavel Filonov, Nikolai Vladimirovich Nekrasov, Nikolai Erdman, Alexander Galich, Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov, Valentin Parnakh, Nestor Kukolnik, Arseny Tarkovsky, Vladimir Pavlovich Paley, Alexei Tsvetkov, Anna Timiryova, Mariya Petrovykh, Yuli Daniel, Afanasy Fet, Bella Akhmadulina, Lev Losev, Aleksandr Tvardovsky, Mark Sergeev, Mikhail Mikhalkov, Pyotr Vyazemsky, D. S. Mirsky, Agniya Barto, Olga Bergholz, Maxim D. Shrayer, Igor Nikolayev, Aleksey Khomyakov, Daniil Andreyev, Andrey Voznesensky...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=32442 ... Read more