“Melting like a snow, I was iron-hard…” The Presidential Library sheds light on the life and oeuvre of Marina Tsvetaeva

The 126th anniversary of the birth of Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva will be marked on October 8, 2018. The time of dramatic changes left a tragic mark on her life and oeuvre. The variety of abstracts of theses about M. I. Tsvetaeva’s writings, which are available in the electronic collections of the Presidential Library, give an insight into the complex poetry of the poetess, or rather the poet, as she had referred to herself: “Synthesis of Literary and Musical Genres in the Lyric Poems of M. I. Tsvetaeva and A. I. Tsvetaeva” (2013), “Existential Motives in the Poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva” (2016). “The Rhythm of M. Tsvetaeva’s Prose” (2013) along with other materials can be found in the library’s Electronic Reading Room.

Marina and her younger sister Anastasia were born in Moscow to a family of intelligentsia. Their father Ivan Vladimirovich was the founder and the first director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, Professor of Ancient History, Art and Epigraphy at Moscow University. Mother Maria Alexandrovna was a pianist, a student of A. G. Rubinstein. She used to play the piano and read aloud the best books from the home library. Although she died young, she could open the world of music and Russian literature to her beloved daughters.

“From the early childhood there was a feeling of passion for the word, literally, for the letters it consisted of. - Anastasia Tsvetaeva wrote in the book “Memoirs”, which is analyzed in Ye. Kosatykh’s thesis “The Creative World of A. I. Tsvetaeva” (2009). The digitized abstract of the thesis is available on the portal of the Presidential Library. - The sound of words filled with their meaning, gave a sense of complete joy. Just as we started to speak - three languages right from the start, we realized we were like characters of a fairy tale, who had discovered a mountain cave with precious stones that were guarded by gnomes. The precious existence of a word, as the source of sparkling, awoke such a strong emotion, that at the age of six or seven was torment and happiness of power. <...> This natural delight of the “language” might explain the fact that I do not remember any difficulties while “learning” languages. It was just like you were at home, where everything was familiar to you.

It goes without saying that Marina’s talent was much greater than mine. She was exceptionally bright from the early childhood”.

Marina Tsvetaeva is still considered to be a “complex” poet, the same as a "complex" prose writer. She seems to be too unconventional and at first sight declaratively non-classical. But if you read the lines more carefully and try to step into Marina Tsvetaeva’s multidimensional world, the poetess would stop seem complex. She would become essential.

From an early age she was attached to the picture “Duel”, which hung in her mother’s bedroom. “Snow, black twigs of trees, two men in black help the third one walk towards the sled – another man, with his back to them, is leaving. The one being helped is Pushkin, another one, who is leaving is d'Anthès. D'Anthès challenged Pushkin to a duel and killed him there among dark leafless trees”, Marina Tsvetaeva later described her impression of the poet in the essay “My Pushkin”.

“The first thing I learned about Pushkin was that he was killed. Then I learned that Pushkin was a poet, and d'Anthès was a Frenchman. D'Anthès  grew to hate Pushkin because the former couldn’t write poems, challenged him to a duel and killed him by a shot to the stomach ... After Pushkin’s duel a wave of deep sympathy swept over me every time I heard simple "stomachache". We all suffered a stomach wound by that shot.

Marina Tsvetaeva’s first literary experience was associated with Moscow symbolists. In her teens Tsvetaeva got acquainted with Bryusov, who had a great influence on her early poetry. Her first attempts in writing were collections of poems “The Evening Album” (1910) and “The Magic Lantern” (1912). The artistic world of a house in the Crimea, in Koktebel, created by the critic and poet Maximilian Voloshin, had a profound impact on the young talent, too. It was there that the poetess met her future husband Sergey Efron.

Being the friend of poets Maximilian Voloshin, Andrey Bely and Mikhail Kuzmin, she created unique portraits of each of them in her books. The collection “The Demesne of the Swans” came out later, when the familiar world of hers fell apart. Her husband was a White officer at the beginning of the Civil War, an agent of the Joint State Political Directorate as the war ended, and later he was shot. But the poetess knew nothing about that. She passed away in 1941...