Mariia Aleksandrovna's Polish background became a source of Tsvetaeva's private mythology, which later crystallized around the figure of her namesake, the seventeenth-century Polish adventurer Marina Mnishek.įrom her early childhood Tsvetaeva lived an extremely intense emotional and intellectual life. At the same time, Tsvetaeva enjoyed the moments when her mother read with the children the works of French and German authors (mainly sentimental and romantic tales). The tense relationship with her mother, described in several of Tsvetaeva's essays, especially in "Mat' i muzyka" (My Mother and Music, written in 1934 published in Sovremennye zapiski , 1935), became the first-and arguably the most fundamental-psychological trauma of her life. A disciplinarian who suffered much because of the loss of her career as a musician (which she sacrificed to her familial duties), Mariia Aleksandrovna forced the young Tsvetaeva to practice piano and disapproved of her daughter's early verse. The birth of two daughters, rather than sons, disappointed her greatly: even if she apparently came to love Asia, she remained cold and unemotional toward her firstborn child. Mariia Aleksandrovna was twenty-one years younger than her husband, and although she respected and admired him until the end of her life, their marriage proved to be an unhappy one. Both Tsvetaeva and her sister became writers, albeit of unequal stature Asia produced extensive memoirs that serve as a prominent, if highly idealized, source for her older sister's childhood and youth. In addition to Tsvetaeva they had another daughter, Anastasiia (known as Asia). Ivan Vladimirovich was a widower when he married Mariia Aleksandrovna, a wealthy woman and talented pianist of Baltic German and Polish descent. Tsvetaeva described the fulfillment of her father's lifelong dream in one of her autobiographical essays, "Otkrytie muzeia" (The Opening of the Museum, written in 1933, published in Vstrechi , 1934). For more than two decades he devoted himself to the creation of a museum of classical sculpture in Moscow finally completed in 1912 and now known as the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, it has developed into the best museum in the Russian capital. Petersburg and taught at Moscow University-first as a lecturer in Latin literature, then as a professor of the theory and history of the arts. One of four sons of a poor village priest, Ivan Vladimirovich was a self-made man who graduated from the University of St. Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was born on 26 September 1892 to Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev and Mariia Aleksandrovna (Mein) Tsvetaeva. In her Weltanschauung and spiritual proclivities Tsvetaeva is likely related to Romanticism in the broadest sense of the term. Her post-Symbolist poetics was experimental to a degree: it displayed certain common traits with Russian Futurism, which she valued highly, yet it remained idiosyncratic and distinctive. Both in art and in life she had an eager and avid, almost a rapacious need for definition and finality, and in pursuing this she outstripped everyone else" (from Pasternak's Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, 1991). In the words of Pasternak, "Tsvetaeva had an active, virile, militant soul, resolute and indomitable. She was a poet of exceptional intensity and dense verbal texture-as well as a brilliant essayist-and she disregarded the conveniences of any school. Still, Tsvetaeva's personality and her creative work transcend any narrow classifications. Together with Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, she is frequently considered a representative of the "Moscow branch" of twentieth-century Russian poetry, as opposed to the "Petersburg branch," which included Anna Andreevna Akhmatova and Osip Emil'evich Mandel'shtam . Marina Tsvetaeva was a native of Moscow, a city that played a significant role in her poetry and prose. (Adapted from: "Tsvetayeva, Marina Ivanovna." Merriam Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature, Merriam-Webster, 1995). Upon the evacuation of Moscow during World War II, she was relocated to a remote town, where she committed suicide in 1941. In 1939 Tsvetayeva followed them, settling in Moscow, where she worked on poetic translations. Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (Efron) was a Russian poet whose verse is distinctive for its staccato rhythms, originality, and directness and who, though little known outside Russia, is considered one of the finest 20th-century poets in the Russian language. Tsvetayeva left the Soviet Union in 1922, going to Berlin and Prague, and finally, in 1925, settling in Paris. In the 1930s Tsvetayeva's poetry increasingly reflected alienation from her émigré existence and a deepening nostalgia for Russia At the end of the '30s her husband-who had begun to cooperate with the communists-returned to the Soviet Union, taking their daughter with him (both were later victims of Joseph Stalin's terror).
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