Marina Tsvetaeva

Born Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva on October 8, 1892, in Moscow, the daughter of Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a professor of fine art who founded what is now the Pushkin Museum, and Maria Alexandrovna Mein, a gifted concert pianist of German and Polish descent who wanted her daughter to become a musician, not a poet. When Maria contracted tuberculosis in 1902, the family traveled across Europe seeking cures, Nervi near Genoa, Lausanne, the Black Forest, and the young Marina acquired Italian, French, and German while abandoning her mother's strict musical regimen for poetry. Maria died in 1906, when Marina was fourteen. She self-published her first collection, Evening Album, in 1910, at eighteen, and it drew the admiring attention of the poet and critic Maximilian Voloshin. At Voloshin's artists' colony in Koktebel on the Black Sea, she met Sergei Efron, an eighteen-year-old military cadet; they married in 1912. The Russian Revolution shattered their world. Efron joined the White Army. Alone in Moscow during the famine of 1918-1920, Tsvetaeva struggled to feed her two daughters. Desperate, she placed the younger, Irina, in a state orphanage, where the child died of starvation in 1919, a loss that haunted Tsvetaeva for the rest of her life. She emigrated in 1922, reuniting with Efron in Prague and later Paris, but the family lived in grinding poverty, increasingly isolated from the emigre community. Her poetry during these years, dense, rhythmically explosive, syntactically daring, reached extraordinary heights, though it found few readers. She returned to the Soviet Union in 1939, only to discover that Efron had been working as a Soviet intelligence agent. He and their daughter Ariadna were arrested in 1941; Efron was executed. Evacuated to the town of Yelabuga during the German invasion, alone and destitute, Tsvetaeva hanged herself on August 31, 1941.