Marina Tsvetaeva - Russian Poet, Her Voice Now Heard

Last week I stood in a room in Marina Tsvetaeva's (tsva-TI-va) Moscow flat. Sunlight poured through a window, across her writing desk, onto her chair, the bookshelf behind, and finally to the wood floor at my feet.  Galina, our guide, opened a book of Marina's poetry and began reading.

There's a window lit, -
Shining all the time.
Maybe they just sit
Or perhaps, drink wine.
Maybe two embraced
And it doesn't end,
In every single place,
There's one, my friend.

Not from candles or lamps, the lights arise:
But, from sleepless eyes!

Window - parting woe
Window - meeting glee
A hundred candles glow
Or maybe - only three. . .
Then, it starts anew
And I can't find peace.
In my house, too,
There is one like this.

Pray, I beg you, friend, for the sleepless place,
For the window's blaze.
(translation by Andrey Kneller)

She closed the book and said, "These floors, these walls remember her voice, her quiet footsteps where she wrote in the early morning, then opened her door to the day's problems."

I followed Galina, along with the other participants in the tour of "Russian Poets of the 1920s and 30s," to the next room of the Marina Tsvetaeva Memorial Flat and Museum Cultural Center.

A trunk, child's table with chairs, wrought iron white crib, stuffed animals, book - a reconstructed setting, period pieces, symbolizing lives lived here almost a hundred years ago.  Galina continues,  "Marina and her husband, Sergey Efron, had 3 children - a son, Gregory, and daughters, Irina and Alya.  During the famine following the Revolution, Marina sent Irina to a state orphanage where she heard there was more food.  Tragically, she was misinformed. Irina died of malnutrition."  Galina opened the book and read of the depths of Marina's guilt and sadness.

Two hands lightly lowered
On a child's head!
I was given two little heads
One for each.

Both of them,
Clenched in frenzy, with all my might,
Grabbing the older one from darkness---
I could not save the younger one.

Two little hands to caress, to smooth
The tender curly heads.
Two hands---and now one of them
Overnight became empty.

The fair one---on a thin little neck
Like a dandelion on its stalk,
I have still not grasped
That my child is in the earth.
-(translation contained in book by Lily Feiler, Marina Tsvetaeva: The Double Beat of Heaven and Hell)

From room to room, poem to poem, we learned of this woman's life.
A woman ~
*whose early years were lived in an upper class family, attending European schools
*whose adult years, 17 of them, were spent in exile due to her and her husband's anti-Bolshevik sentiments
*whose work was shunned by established Soviet writers upon her return to Russia
*whose writing was banned from publication in Russia until the early 1960s
*whose husband was executed as a spy
*whose daughter, Alya, was imprisoned in a camp for 8 years
*whose life was ended, by her own hand, as she lived in poverty

In the Russia of today, Marina is regarded, in the words of our guide, as "one of the greatest Russian poets of the 20th century."  I can only shake my head in wonder at History's repetitions, as it invariably  finds value in voices once silenced.  Is it only with time, perspective and elimination of fear that writers such a Tsvetaeva and contempories, Pasternak, Akhmatova and Mandelshtam  can be heard?          

Marina's poetry is a testament to her life, to a time of upheaval, of life-altering choices, of events beyond her grasp to control, when her writing was likely her most constant and consoling companion.  She wrote through the intensity of her joys and despairs, her losses and final loneliness.  In the truest sense of a lyric poet, she expressed her deepest emotions as if a lyre were sounding each syllable.

Before leaving Marina's home, Galina stopped in one last room, opened her book and read.

My poems, written early, when I doubted
that I could ever play the poet's part,
erupting, as though water from a fountain
or sparks from a petard,

and rushing as though little demons, senseless,
into the sanctuary, where incense spreads,
my poems about death and adolescence,
-that still remain unread! -

collecting dust in bookstores all this time,
(where no one comes to carry them away!)
my poems, like exquisite, precious wines,
will have their day!
-translation by Andrey Kneller

 Marina's poems have found another reader in me. . . and now in you.

Marina Tsvetaeva
1892-1941