Marina Tsvetaeva – författare

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) 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 beset by loss and hardship. This volume presents for the first time in English a collection of essays published in the Russian émigré press after Tsvetaeva left Moscow in 1922. Based on diaries she kept from 1917 to 1920, Earthly Signs describes the broad social, economic, and cultural chaos provoked by the Bolshevik Revolution. Events and individuals are seen through the lens of her personal experience-that of a destitute young woman of upper-class background with two small children (one of whom died of starvation), a missing husband, and no means of support other than her poetry.These autobiographical writings, rich sources of information on Tsvetaeva and her literary contemporaries, are also significant for the insights they provide into the sources and methodology of her difficult poetic language. In addition, they supply a unique eyewitness account of a dramatic period in Russian history, told by a gifted and outspoken poet.

Milestones is an apt title for this collection, for the 84 poems within show a poet passing from mere talent into mastery of her craft. Composed between January and December 1916, these poems find the 24-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 - which was the ultimate destination of all Russians. Throughout these verses she opens up 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.

Marina Tsvetaeva is among the great European poets of the twentieth century. With Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, she retained her humanity and integrity through Russia's 'terrible years' of the Great Terror. Even in her long, tragic exile, her roots were in Russia and the great tradition of Russian poetry. Her voice lives in part because it remains alert to her past, and to cultures, especially French, where she spent her exile.When Elaine Feinstein first read Tsvetaeva's poems in the 1960s, they transformed her. Their intensity and honesty spoke to her directly. To her first translations, published to acclaim in 1971, she added in later years, not least the sequence 'Girlfriend', dedicated to Tsvetaeva's lover the poet Sofia Parnok. Feinstein published Tsvetaeva's biography in 1987.

Milestones (Vyorsty) is an early collection by Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), published in Moscow in 1922, before she left the country for the West. The book celebrates--among other things-her friendship with fellow-poet, Osip Mandelstam, and was her most innovative collection to that point, as well as an indication of the way her work would develop in her full maturity as a writer.

After Russia (1928) is considered to mark the high point in Marina Tsvetaeva's output of shorter, lyrical poems. Tsvetaeva told Boris Pasternak that all that mattered in the book was its anguish. Breathtaking 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 itself. The sequence `Trees' evokes the hills and woods of Bohemia where Tsvetaeva loved to roam, while `Wires' takes telegraph wires as the central image for the geographical distance separating her from Pasternak.

Boris Pasternak is both the presiding spirit and the addressee of specific poems in After Russia, Marina Tsvetaeva's last collection, published in Paris 13 years before she died. The two poets engaged in an impassioned correspondence which offers crucial insights into the background and meaning of certain items. If a group of remarkably tender poems concerns the emigre critic Alexander Bakhrakh, remarkably little space is devoted to Tsvetaeva's cataclysmic affair with her husband's friend Konstantin Rozdevich during the last months of 1923. Towards the end, references to Russia and Russian culture-so studiously avoided earlier-flood back, making the final obeisance to a Russian peasant woman and to Pasternak in Moscow a fitting close.

The poems in Youthful Verses cover the years between 1913 and 1915, a period of unparalleled freedom in Marina Tsvetaeva's life. Recently married and with a baby daughter, she chronicles in a sequence of astonishing honesty and frankness her love for a slightly older woman poet. Despite a disturbing undercurrent of self-denigration, these poems are characterised throughout by deft humour, a pervasive sense of mischief, and a high degree of formal perfection.

Marina Tsvetaeva is acknowledged today as one of the twentieth century's greatest poets, a masterful innovator who produced a remarkable body of work before her untimely death in 1941. This bilingual collection contains six of her acclaimed narrative poems, most translated into English for the first time. Tsvetaeva always regarded the narrative poem as her true challenge, and she created powerful and intensely original works in this genre. They can be seen as markers of various stages in her poetic development, ranging from the early, folk-accented 'On a Red Steed' to the lyrical-confessional 'Poem of the Mountain' and 'Poem of the End' to the more metaphysical later poems, 'An Attempt at a Room,' a beautiful requiem for Rainer Maria Rilke, 'New Year's Greetings,' and 'Poem of the Air,' a stirring celebration of Lindbergh's transatlantic flight and the quest for the soul's freedom."There has been no more passionate voice in twentieth-century Russian literature." -Joseph Brodsky

The poems in this volume were composed between August 1917 and October 1918 and thus they span the most turbulent period of the 20th century in Russia, as the nascent republic was overthrown by the Bolsheviks and the country descended into civil war. This collection concentrates on the lyric poems that Tsvetaeva wrote at this time, whose importance should not be underestimated. Each offers a modest, unassuming gateway to the immense world of her imagination and her travailed, eternally questioning and endangered humanity, even those with a missing word or phrase she did not find the time to locate and craft amidst the overwhelming flow of inspiration. Like the events which formed their background, these poems raise ethical and human issues to which no simple answers can be found. And when Tsvetaeva announces, as the winter of 1918-1919 approaches, that 'It befits heroes to be frozen', she prompts us to consider the nature of her own, personal heroism at a stage when the very worst was still to come.

From 1912 to 1920 Marina Tsvetaeva wrote copiously but published no books. Later she would claim that at least three major collections had fallen by the wayside in those years. The poems translated here offer readers the flavour of those vanished books, covering the period roughly from her daughter Alya's first birthday to the Tsar's abdication in March 1917 and the summer which followed. They reflect involvements with the poet Sonya Parnok and with a married economist of Polish origin, Nikodim Plutser-Sarnya. But there are also evocations of the Middle East, tributes to the Jews and to her sister Asya, plus a cycle in which Don Juan accosts Carmen and is buried in a grave amidst the Russian snow. Generally appearing in English for the very first time, they include several of the most accomplished and unforgettable poems Tsvetaeva was ever to write.

When Milestones 2 appeared in 1921, it broke a silence that had lasted eight years, in which no books by Tsvetaeva appeared, and brought Boris Pasternak the revelation of her genius. He wrote to her that he had had to break off reading aloud three different poems because interrupted by his own sobbing. The tone of its two sections is carefully crafted, profane then sacred, carnal then spiritual. Her uncollected poems from 1920 to 1925 cover the two years before she left Russia and her sojourn in Czechoslovakia, close to Prague. They reflect the preoccupations of The Craft (1923) and After Russia (1925) but also contain unexpected jewels, brief but unforgettable inspirations and annotations. Almost all of these items appear in English for the first time. The book concludes with the poems to Alexander Blok added to her original sequence after the older poet's death in August 1921.

During the Stalin years Russia had four great poets to voice the feelings of her oppressed people: Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetayeva. The first two survived the terror, but Mandelstam died in a camp and Tsvetayeva was driven to hang herself in 1941. This comprehensive selection of Tsvetayeva's poetry includes complete versions of all her major long poems and poem cycles: Poem of the End, An Attempt at a Room, Poems to Czechia and New Year Letter. It was the first English translation to use the new, definitive Russica text of her work. It also includes additional versions ascribed to F.F. Morton which first appeared in The New Yorker: these rhyming translations are actually the work of Joseph Brodsky (who lived at 44 Morton Street in New York).

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 process, and what it means to be a poet. This book includes, among many fascinating topics, a celebration of the poetry of Pasternak ('Downpour of Light') and reflections on the lives and works of other Russian poets, such as Mandelstam and Mayakovsky, as well as a magnificent study of Zhukovsky's translation of Goethe's 'Erlking'. Even during periods of extreme personal hardship, her work retained its sense of elated energy and humour, and Angela Livingstone's translations bring the English-speaking reader as close as possible to Tsvetaeva's inimitable voice. First published in English in 1992, "Art in the Light of Conscience" includes an introduction by the translator, textual notes and a glossary, as well as revised translations of 12 poems by Tsvetaeva on poets and poetry.

A unique anthology of short stories and poetry by feminist contemporaries of Virginia Woolf, who were writing about work, discrimination, war, relationships and love in the early part of the 20th Century.Includes works by English and American writers Zelda Fitzgerald, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Radclyffe Hall, Katherine Mansfield, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf, alongside their recently rediscovered 'sisters' from around the world. This book offers a diverse and international array of over 20 literary gems from women writers living in Bulgaria, Chile, China, Egypt, France, Italy, Palestine, Romania, Russia, Spain and Ukraine.

It is 1918 in Moscow. The communist revolution is in full swing. Food is scarce, living conditions harsh. Two women meet on the stage of an empty theater. One is the now famous twenty-six-year-old poet Maria Tsvetaeva, the other the twenty-four-year-old actress Sonia Holliday (Sonechka). The Story of Sonechka, written almost twenty years later, is a vivid account, at once comic and tragic, of their love for each other. A previously untranslated masterpiece (Dmitry Bikov calls it “one of the five best books in world literature”), it stands as a testament to the artistry with which Tsvetaeva wrote prose; the vicissitudes of her life, love, and work; and the intense dynamics of Moscow culture in the wake of the Revolution. It also constitutes an exceedingly rare and early example of queer prose literature originally written in Russian.

It is 1918 in Moscow. The communist revolution is in full swing. Food is scarce, living conditions harsh. Two women meet on the stage of an empty theater. One is the now famous twenty-six-year-old poet Maria Tsvetaeva, the other the twenty-four-year-old actress Sonia Holliday (Sonechka). The Story of Sonechka, written almost twenty years later, is a vivid account, at once comic and tragic, of their love for each other. A previously untranslated masterpiece (Dmitry Bikov calls it “one of the five best books in world literature”), it stands as a testament to the artistry with which Tsvetaeva wrote prose; the vicissitudes of her life, love, and work; and the intense dynamics of Moscow culture in the wake of the Revolution. It also constitutes an exceedingly rare and early example of queer prose literature originally written in Russian.