Marina Tsvetaeva Books

This book is the best introduction to Tsvetaeva's work available in English. It's punchy, incredibly witty and drenched with irony. Livingstone does an amazing job preserving the poet's energy, imagery, rhythm and even rhyme schemes. The most sensitive translation ever. Enjoy!

Tsvetaeva's version of the Pied Piper of Hamlyn legend is one of her finest and most complex works. Angela Livingstone's translation is endowed with remarkable vitality.

Very good translations of the great, hard-to-translate Russian poet. The six long poems that comprise the collection, On a Red Steed, Poem of the Mountain, An Attempt at a Room, Poem of the End, New Year's Greetings, and Poem of the Air, retain the compressed power of Tsvetaeva's short poems. Tsvetaeva's tormented spirit shines through. There is also good selection of Tsvetaeva's short poems in the back. A must read for all who love modern Russian poetry.

Marina Tsvetaeva is simply amazing. Feinstein does a superb job here translating, considering Tsvetaeva is nearly impossible to translate out of Russian.
This book is cheap, wonderful and most people I know end up getting a copy from me as a gift at some time.

Finestein's translations are so awful, it is no wonder that few English speakers want to know who Tsvetaeva is. She loses the rhythm, rhyme, literary devices, and everything for which Tsvetaeva's poetry is so loved. The duality of meanings and word play is also completely lost. Try Angela Livingstone's translations - they are excellent.

Tsvetaeva's life was filled with tragedy (she lived through and in Revolutionary Russia (her husband fought for the White Army) and in Czechoslovakia during the German occupation) her heart shouted for a personal love the message which rings echoing through her words as she has deep philosophical understanding and awareness of her world which she rides over like gravel in fodder for her clinging to the personal loves of her heart which reigned supreme. She spat her poverty and desperation with pride at the shallow, whoever they might be, and challenged the dignity of heaven. She was a powerful poet who believed in living each moment for what it was and holding love at an undisputable high.

Some of my favorite quotes from segments of the book...

Because even more than God
himself I love his angels.
From: Bent with Worry

He is the one that mixes
Up the cards
And confuses arithmetic and weight
Demands answers from the school bench
Who altogether refutes Kant
From: The Poet

We entered one another's eyes
As if they were oases

All poets are Jews

Everything that I love changes from an external thing into an inward one, from the moment of my love, it stops being external (from the Introduction).

I can't attest to the authenticity of the translations, as I know little Russian, Reviews seem mixed; but Feinstein, for me, makes some engrossing connections of words that must ring true to some extent.

I do not know Russian. I cannot comment on whether or not Elaine Feinstein has captured or missed completely the supposedly brilliant aural qualities of the original verse.
What I can say is that reading these poems I have a sense of true poetry. There is a depth of feeling and a passion, a soul being revealed in depth, a life in its sufferings and straining for beauty.
Perhaps more words are irrelevant, and I shall just give a few excerpts from the book.

From ' I know the truth'

'The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,
the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet,
And soon all of us will sleep under the earth,we
who never let each other sleep above it. '

From 'What is this gypsy passion for separation'

'that no one turning over our letters has
yet understood how completely and
how deeply faithless we are, which is
to say: how true we are to ourselves.'

From ' You loved me'

You loved me. And your lies had their own probity.
There was truth in every falsehood
Your love went far beyond any possible
boundary as no one else's could.

Your love seemed to last even longer
than time itself. Now you wave your hand-
and suddenly your love for me is over!
That is the truth in five words."

Read this book! and read about her life. She witnessed so much darkness and her words open up these experiences, lay them bare. I really wonder what her writing would have been if she had lived a different life, one without so much tragedy. She also recognized, as did Virginia Woolfe, that it is difficult for women to write amidst the responsibilities of everyday life -- "I have no time to think . . . I have only ever been myself in notebooks . . . for all my life I have been leading a child by the hand." Her work stays with you long after the book closes.

MILESTONES is Robin Kemball's translation of Marina Tsvetaeva's VERSTY I, a collection of eighty-four poems written beyond January and December 1916 when the poet was twenty-four and still a resident of Imperial Russia. Beyond the translation of the poems, the book also contains the original Russian text, as well as an introduction and commentary by the translator.

Some of Tsvetaeva's poetry here belongs still to the juvenile, overtly feminine style of her earliest work. Lyrics like "Whence cometh such tender rapture" (written to Osip Mandelstam, a verse notably orchestrated by Shostakovich) are fairly insubstantial. However, overall the collection stands out as her first truly mature work due to its elegant centering around several related themes. At this time, Tsvetaeva was a fan and correspondent of the poets Osip Mandelstam, Alexander Blok, and Anna Akhmatova, all of whom were based on Saint Petersburg. MILESTONES represents a sort of presentation of Tsvetaeva's cherished hometown Moscow to them. The city's many churches is one promiment donation, as when she writes in poem 28 "Seven hills--like seven church bells, / Round seven church bells stand---belfries. / There are forty times forty in all," or in poem 26 we find "Above the city Peter spurned of old, / the thunder of her belfry chimes has rolled." Elsewhere Tsvetaeva contemplates Blok walking alongside the Neva in Saint Petersburg, as she delights in the Moskva river.

Another powerful feature of the collection is its juxtaposition throughout of the bloom of youth and the inevitability of death. Already in the first poem we read "And over me---the owl to cry, / And over me--the grass to sigh...", and in poem 33 "Eat drink, and be merry, my soul! / But there'll come the day--, / Lay me in the wold, / At the four crossroads." And though Tsvetaeva was only nominally Orthodox, and lead quite the scandalous life, we find many poignant observations of the beauty of Orthodox liturgy here. Poem 18, a chronicle of a visit to the liturgy of the Feast of the Annunciation, is my favourite of all the lyrics here in its intense combination of reflection on the self and of feeling part of an ancient tradition: "A group of peasant / Women, gray and old, ... / Crossing themselves severalfold, ... / Before the candles' rays. / As for me, I merrily ... / Thrust my way through the crowd. / I run down to the river Moskva / To watch the ice flow there."

I read the collection in the original Russian, and came to the English translation and notes only in preparing to review the volume here. Kimball's introduction is very enlightening on the context and prosody of the poems. Similarly the notes, though sparing, are quite helpful. I'm less satisfied with his translation, which tries to reflect the sound of the original in English. I am not a fan of adaption translations which are meant to work on their own, instead, I prefer that translations only be a crib for the reader to use until he can read the poetry in the original language. Still, Kimball does deserve praise for being generally faithful to the exact Russian wording, and especially for retaining the dash, Tsvetaeva's favourite punctuation, which many translators eliminate to the detriment of their supposedly faithful English renderings.

For me, Tsvetaeva's best work came later, after her emigration to Czechoslovakia after the establishment of the Soviet Union, in such works as "Hour of the Soul" and "Poem of the End". Still, MILESTONES is generally a very entertaining, occasionally awe-inspiring work.

There are two broad categories of biography that you can read. One is the kind in which the author tackles a whole period in a country's history, bringing in the culture that created his/her subject as well as the influence that character had on the times. Good examples of this sort are Samuel Eliot Morison's "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" about Columbus, John Womack Jr.'s "Zapata and the Mexican Revolution", or Paul Murray Kendall's "Louis XI"---all first class biographies. The second kind is more intimate; a narrower focus on the character, in which the author tries to plumb the psychological depths of the person and reveal the motivations and underlying feelings behind their achievements. TSVETAEVA is certainly of the second variety. Though Marina Tsvetaeva, one of Russia's foremost poets in the 20th century, lived through wars, revolution, repression, and radical social-economic change in her country, the book pays minimal attention to any of it. If you, the reader, are not aware of the depth and sweep of all these things in Russia or the USSR in the years 1914-1941, you are not going to understand this book. The facts that Tsvetaeva was persona-non grata after the 1917 Revolution, that her works were suppressed till long after her death, that she had to be discovered by the younger generations, that one of Russia's great poets was not mentioned in schools for a long time---these important things are very much underplayed by the author, who seems to have written for a Russian audience alone. Painstakingly, lovingly reconstructed from the poems, the letters, the diaries, and many interviews, this biography is surely a labor of many years. For the details and for the many insights into the life and psychology of a complex woman out of tune with her times, I'd certainly award this book five stars, but on the other hand, it is packed with an enormous amount of detail, more than most non-Russian readers can absorb. I sometimes felt repelled by the cloying quality of the author's adulation of her famous subject. Also, the translations of the poetry are amazingly wooden. I can get no feeling of why Russians consider Tsvetaeva such a great poet, though I'm prepared to accept that she is.

Tsvetaeva grew up before the Revolution in a well-off family. Her mother transferred a lot of her cultural aspirations to her, or we may say that Tsvetaeva inherited a lot of her mother's emotional intensity and need to be the center of all relationships around her. Ideas such as "money is filth" and "only the things of the spirit matter" were common among certain classes in Europe, but they lead to very unhappy lives if inherited money runs out. I find Tsvetaeva a most unpleasant person right from childhood, a person who could write that "it is stupid and indecent to be happy", a person who therefore would be in love with tragedy, loneliness and unhappiness all her life. She neglected and betrayed her husband, abandoned all her myriad lovers, drove her children away, (one starved to death in an orphanage at an early age) and eventually hung herself. She favored the White (losing) side in the Revolution, leaving Russia in the mid-20s to live abroad. In exile, she moved only in the tightknit Russian emigre communities in Germany, Czechoslovakia and France, never opening to anything that wasn't already familiar. Besides being influenced by Pushkin, she had strange semi- or full romantic relationships with a number of famous people, who are written about here---Mandelstam, Blok, and Pasternak are those most known in the West---but one is left with the feeling that she just needed a series of "idols" or "ideal men" (or women) to whom she could dedicate her emotive poetry which fed off her constant inner turmoil. Her own husband likened her to a huge stove whose fires needed more and more `wood'. The ashes would be thrown out without further thought. Though I found Tsvetaeva impossible to like and the translations of her poetry did not inspire me to read more, I still recommend TSVETAEVA as a most fascinating biography. Her story is part of the immense tragedy that is Russian history in the 20th century.

here we have three great poets. sounds inviting, interesting, wonderful. instead boris writes like an infatuated 14 year old. marina is often hysterical. their ego's are so soft, constant reassurance seems to be the name of the game. a polite letter from a bored rilke has marina and boris delirious with happiness, too excited to sleep, pouring over every 'the' and 'and', looking, searching for 'deeper meaning.' if this book is read as letters by three unknowns, i doubt it would be published. boris is a cad. after one letter stating undying love for marina, he wishes to leave his wife, leave his child, pack his suitcase and live happily ever after with an also married marina. i guess their life partners are expendable when it comes to poetry, or, more like it, the rich and pathetic fantasy world of boris and marina. this is one of the most uninteresting books i have read. my advice - stick to the poetry and avoid these sickly sweet letters.

Words have tremendous power, and reading the letters written from one person to another often helps us to know that person far more intimately than anythng else ever could.

During the summer of 1926, three extraordinary poets (two Russian and one German) began a correxpondence of the highest order. These three extraordinary people were Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva and Ranier Maria Rilke. Rilke, who is revered as a god by both Pasternak and Tsvetayeva, is seen by them as the very essence of poetry, itself.

None of these three correspondents is having a good year: Pasternak is still living in Moscow, attempting to reconcile his life to the Bolshevik regime; Tsvetayeva has been exiled to France with her husband and children and is living in the direst financial straits, with each day presenting a new hurdle in the struggle to simply "get by;" Rilke's situation is perhaps the worst of all...he is dying of leukemia in Switzerland.

Pasternak and Tsvetayeva have already exchanged years of letters filled with the passion and romance of poetry, itself. Although Pasternak saw Rilke briefly in 1900, Tsvetayeva has never laid eyes on her idol. These three poets are, however, connected by a bond far stronger than the physical. They are kindred spirits, and each find repetitions and echoes of himself in the other.

Tsvetayeva quickly becomes the driving force of this trio. This is not surprising given her character. She's the most outrageous of the three, the boldest, the neediest, the one most likely to bare her inner soul to its very depths. Tsvetayeva's exuberance, however, eventually has disatrous effects.

Although Pasternak and Tsvetayeva consider Rilke their superior by far, these are not the letters of acolyte to mentor, but an exchange of thoughts and ideas among equals. If you've ever read the sappy, sentimental "Letters to a Young Poet," you'll find a very different Rilke in this book. Gone is the grandiose, condescending Rilke. In his place we find an enthusiastic Rilke, one filled with an almost overwhelming "joie de vivre," despite his sad circumstances.

As Susan Sontag says in her preface, these letters are definitely love letters of the highest order. The poets seek to possess and consume one another as only lovers can. But even these lovers haven't suspected that one of their trio is fatally ill. Pasternak and Tsvetayeva are both shocked and devastated when Rilke dies.

Love, many people will argue, is best expressed when the people involved are able to spend time together. There is, however, something to be said for separateness, for there is much that can only come to the surface when the lover is separated from the beloved.

These letters can teach us much about Rilke, Pasternak and Tsvetayeva. They can also teach us much about the very depths of the soul...both its anguish and those sublime, angelic heights...areas not often explored by anyone, anywhere, at any time.

This book, the March/Sept. 2001 edition, is for me like a hot springs swimming pool for the tired body, what spring is to the birds, what rain is for parched meadows: a sensory experience that brings well-being to the sore human soul. The jacket cover comments by John Bayley and Mark Rudman give an accurate idea of what the correspondence was between these three writers 80 summers ago: yes, the letters among them are literature, and yes, reading them might make us weep for a vanished golden age of culture. But this collection of letters and poetry is for us today, addresses our global conflicts now; Rilke and Tsvetayeva knew that they were writing for the future; Pasternak knew that, too, but in these letters Boris comes across as more firmly rooted in the present moment (perhaps because he's best known as the author of a novel, Dr. Zhivago, immortalized by a David Lean film in the mid-1960s).

I know nothing of the Russian and German languages and cannot judge the translation as a "correct" one, but the reader who benefits from this book is one who wonders what people felt and how they lived during a time when the Soviet government was ratcheting up the tension that led to the period of the commissars and Stalin. When I began reading this book, I knew little about Rilke and Pasternak, and had never heard of Marina Tsvetayeva. But these writers--as human beings--were no different than anyone else in that they were subjected to the same pressures as anyone living in poverty and fear. Rilke, Pasternak, and Tsvetayeva reacted to their circumstances with beautiful words. They have proven to me--beyond a doubt--that even under the worst governmental regimes, the intelligence we give to our emotions and the joy we have in verbal expression will triumph. Today, we merely die of complacency.

Ultimately, this edition is Marina Tsvetayeva's book: her genius is evident in every phrase of her two essays inspired by the death of Rainer Maria Rilke--80 years ago, December 29, 1926--essays of lyrical prose-poetry translated beautifully by Jamey Gambrell, and appended to the end of the correspondence. The reader cannot simply turn to the back of the book and read Tsvetayeva's essay "Your Death"; one must read everything that comes before. This book also reminds me how indebted all writers and readers are to anyone who--often through extraordinary efforts--saved fragile paper documents, also the artistry and science of translators, archivists, and libraries, as well as the descendants and extended family of the writers. Thank you Alexandra Ryabinina, Yevgeny Pasternak and Yelena Pasternak, Konstantin Azadovsky, Margaret Wettlin and Walter Arndt for a truly astounding commitment to culture.

Here's one

Fascinated with Russian Art age

of poetry and painting , propelled shortly before and after the tsar revolution..

What an incredibly creative age, non the less, artisically !

This book

is for ultra die hards.

Poets, ultimately con vey JOY

This book wills not to include that.

The miracle of this time

Amidst unimaginable repression

Beauty swayed .

This book does not support this .

This high-resolution account of Tsvetaeva's last couple of years struggles with understanding the sequence of events that led Tsvetaeva to killing herself. Much of the detail is published here for the first time, compliments of Kudrova's archival work and her interviews with people who knew Tsvetaeva and her family. Unfortunately, the data is fragmented and far from sufficient for drawing a conclusive picture about the way Tsvetaeva came to that fateful decision. Kudrova argues against the theories that the quarrel with the son or her mental illness prompted Tsvetaeva's suicide. The author ultimately blames KGB and the Bolshevik Revolution for Tsvetaeva's death. Undoubtedly, without the Revolution and KGB, Tsvetaeva would have had fewer reasons to end her life. Yet, the book offers no proof of KGB's direct involvement with Tsvetaeva. As for its indirect involvement - arrest of Tsvetaeva's family - maybe among millions of other people in the USSR whose family members were taken away she was the one especially shaken. Even before her return to the USSR and the quick successions of her daughter's and her husband's arrests, Tsvetaeva was feeling incredibly lonely: among people due to her often-abrasive manner and among poets because of the uncompromising uniqueness of her poetry. Arrest of her family may have proved for Tsvetaeva that last straw that broke the bond with the remaining kindred spirits. Still, hard as it was for Tsvetaeva to loose the loved ones to KGB and GULAG, nowhere is it apparent in the book that their arrest was the main reason for her suicide.

The theme of "one against everybody" recurs throughout Tsvetaeva's life. It may be her single most defining quality. Ever since the early childhood Tsvetaeva was a lonely figure in the family of a remote father, fully occupied with the creation of his Museum of Fine Arts, and a curt and dissatisfied with her own life mother, who moreover favored Tsvetaeva's sister over Marina. Highly original, Tsvetaeva's poetry was rarely admired by the readers or even her fellow poets. Moreover, during the long 17 years of emigration, Tsvetaeva found herself in the opposition to many Russian émigré factions since her uncompromising stand on literary and social matters alienated many. In her own family she was the only one who did not want to return to the USSR from France.

In the last two years of her life she was pursued by a series of tragic events. In her most needy time, her adolescent children were striving for the greatest independence. When KGB was the agent of terror in most people's eyes, her husband was working for the organization. While since childhood she had an intensely dear regard for Germany, reinforced by her German heritage, now fascist Germany was synonymous with evil. Both Czech Republic and France, for which she developed warm feelings over the last 17 years of living in these countries, have fallen to Hitler. Raised from the young age in the spirit of relentless labor, and always admitting that she could not do any work but literary, she was now hard pressed to find any job, even as a dishwasher, let alone as a writer. Having to evacuate from Moscow, she could not any more stand in the long prison lines to give her parcels to the incarcerated husband and daughter. Her adolescent son, who was her only soul mate at the time, in accordance with age did not have much use for her. Everything in her life was going wrong and she felt utterly alone.

The translation feels a bit awkward. My few cursory comparisons with the original proved that the translator used a fairly freestyle approach. Although, a few places where the translations from Russian are literal may give the reader a taste for the original.

I was left with a dual feeling after reading the book. On one hand, the book's facts are decidedly for a Tsvetaeva connoisseur. The narrative spans only two of Tsvetaeva's 49 years. Moreover, roughly half of the book is devoted to Tsvetaeva's husband and daughter and considers their involvement with the new Soviet state. Some of the author's conclusions are based on the interpretation of someone's single enigmatic phrase. In this respect, the book feels like a collection of fine-point facts that should help future researchers of Tsvetaeva, but does not amount to a stand-alone work. On the other hand, even for someone not familiar with the poet or her time the book will give a taste for the horrors of one of the most original Russian poets caught between the Soviet and Nazi terror machines while struggling to piece together her literary and personal life.

Simon Karlinsky's MARINA TSVETAEVA: The Woman, Her World, and Her Poetry is a biography of this Russian poetess who after initial fame experience tragedy and exile and died, in tragic suicide and decades before her time, in some of the darkest days of Soviet history.

The biographical element of the book is well-written. We are taken from Tsetaeva's birth to her untimely death. Her numerous infidelities which had great influence on her writing--including her two lesbian affairs long neglected in Soviet scholarship--are detailed. Karlinsky's attempt to explain Tsetaeva's world is also generally commendable. He shows the social circles in which the poet moved in Moscow and in exile in Berlin, Prague, and Paris, tracking her intersections with numerous other intellectuals. The work betrays its Cold War origins in criticizing the Soviet Union at every opportunity. While Communism was a barbaric system partly responsible for Tsvetaeva's end, it often seems like the author is going out of his way to take a shot at it. Karlinsky's final aim, to cover her poetry, is mostly unrealised. While some large poems, especially ones difficult to understand such as "On a Red Steed", are covered, most of her oeuvre is neglected. Stand-out gems such as "Night of the Soul" are missing completely.

For lovers of literature interested in this great poet, I would recommend Karlinsky's MARINA TSETAEVA. However, one should also acquire critical commentary on her works in order to compensate for Karlinsky's meagre treatment.