Nina Berberova about Marina Tsvetaeva in the book: Italics are mine 1960 ih.
О слезы на глазах!
Плач гнева и любви!
О Чехия в слезах!
Испания в крови!
О черная гора,
Затмившая весь свет!
Пора пора пора
Творцу вернуть билет.
15. March 11. May 1939.
MARINA CVETAJEVA'S SONGS IN POP CULTURE TODAY
Scan the QR code if you want to listen O slezy na glazah... I will return the ticket while reading the text
https://youtu.be/dDfokP5Ojxk?si=EoQ0Ny7PnzJjM46b
In Paris, in the 1930s, the Union of Friends of the Soviet Homeland was formed, later transformed into the Union of Return to the Homeland, which opened a bookstore and reading room in Paris' Rue de Bussy, where visitors could familiarize themselves with the works of Soviet writers, to read the Soviet press, or to attend discussions.
In the Alliance, he played an important role as editor of the weekly Eurasia in 1928-1929. played by Konstantin Rodzevich, Marina's pale young man with a fiery look from her Prague "novel". The son of a state councilor of Polish origin, Konstantin Rodzewicz was educated at universities in Warsaw, Kiev and Petrograd. From the first days of the October Revolution, he went over to the side of the Bolsheviks, fought in the navy in Odessa and on the Don, and in 1919 the Che-Ka (probably as a trick) sentenced him to death because he surrendered to the Whites in the Crimea under the command of Wrangel's general Yakov Slashchev (who himself, disillusioned, would later return to the USSR where he would teach at the military academy, and he would be killed by the brother of the guy he hanged in Dzhanki on Crimea, but that's another story).
Rodzevich convinced the whites, who also wanted to shoot him as a prisoner, that he surrendered because he wanted to fight as a nobleman for the victory of the imperial army. And he worked for the Reds in their background. After Gallipoli and Prague, he continued his education at the Sorbonne via Riga in Paris. He was active in the Alliance for Repatriation, and as a member of the French Communist Party he went to Spain, where as a commissioner he participated in the confrontation between the Communists and the Trotskyists and anarchists.
After the collapse of the Spanish Republic, he returned to France, where during the war he participated in the French Resistance...
He was not the only one motivated by nostalgia and disillusionment to join Soviet intelligence. The most impressive film hero of this type is Mitya from Nikita Mikhalkov's film "Deceiving Sun", (Russian Burnt by the sun, English Burnt by the Sun).
His wartime journey was more complex than that of Sergei Efron, although it is more difficult to distinguish facts from mythology in such biographies than in poetic biographies.
EURASIA, OR THE REPENTANCE OF THE WHITE GUARDIANS
After Pyotr S. Arapov, one of the organizers of the Alliance, did not return after three or four trips to the USSR in 1930, Sergei Efron assumed a leading role in the Alliance for Return. He edited the newspaper Eurasia, and from 1931 he recruited and encouraged emigrants to return to their homeland, and organized the sending of about 300 emigrants to fight on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.
Sergei Efron, the son of members of the People's Will who died in exile, became a cadet in the Imperial Army and joined the White Army. When everything collapsed, he saw that many, out of revenge for the murder of their loved ones, or simply out of fear and hatred for the Reds, too often killed the captured soldiers on the spot "according to the laws of wartime" which they interpreted at their own discretion, ignoring the code of honor and the principles of the old officers. He once told Marina Tsvetaeva how he witnessed the execution of a Bolshevik commissar. The commissar's facial expression was so determined that he, cadet Sergei Efron, realized for the first time: "Our business is not the people's business."
When Sergei Efron requested permission to return to his homeland through the Soviet embassy in Paris in 1931, he was told that he needed to earn the White Guard's trust. "S. Ja. has completely withdrawn into Soviet Russia; he sees nothing else, and in it he sees only what he wants." Marina wrote on October 16, 1932 to the Czech writer Anna Tesková, a close friend from a distance, with whom she corresponded for 17 years. From 1922 to 1939, she did not correspond with anyone as long as she did with Teskova.
Marina, most likely, did not know that her husband Sergei Efron - probably under the influence of his wartime friend (and Marina's Harlequin) Rodzevich - became an associate of the Foreign Department of the GPU in Paris, and later, from 1934, of the NKVD. When he occasionally left for a few days, he never told her where he was going or why. And when she asked him, he simply replied that he was traveling on business.
Loskaja cites the contradictory testimonies of interlocutors who claim that Marina and Sergey lived practically separately towards the end of their Parisian life, that Sergey Yakovlevich Efron lived with a lady, but that, of course, he adored Marina, so, for example, he spent his vacation on the Atlantic with her and the children...
photo: tsvetaeva.lit-info.ruLIFE IN PARIS BEFORE GOING TO THE USSR: Marina Tsvetayeva with her son Mura...
ARIADNE IN MOSCOW
Daughter Ariadne shared her father's determination. While studying at the Louvre School of Drawing, she organized a youth organization in the Repatriation Association, helped design printed publications, worked in the editorial office of the magazine Our Alliance, and published several articles about life in the USSR based on texts from the Soviet press in French newspapers.
When she found a job as a dental assistant and started living the Parisian life, Marina Tsvetajeva was against it - either the job or me. Because of the conflict with her mother, Ariadne even tried to commit suicide, opening the gas valve. Her father saved her by saying that someone in that family is always thinking of suicide. He was followed by the shadow of his mother's and brother's suicide. And if the memoirs of her sister Anastasia are to be believed, Marina tried to commit suicide in her youth: once in 1908 during Sarah Bernard's visit to Moscow, but her revolver failed; and the second time in 1910 because of her unrequited love for the poet Vladimir Nilender, to whom she dedicated verses in her "Evening Album".
photo: tsvetaeva.lit-info.ru…and her daughter Ariadne
After an argument with her mother, in February 1935, Ariadne left the family apartment in Clamart, a suburb of Paris, and after a year spent with various acquaintances, on March 16, 1937, in a joyful mood, she left the Paris railway station Gare de Nord for Moscow.
Before leaving, in the middle of the street, friends cut off a piece of her hair as a souvenir.
Marina focused all her maternal ambition on Moore, whom, according to contemporaries' memories, she excessively adored and encouraged in him to become egoistic. When someone on the beach told her to take cover because she was blocking the sun, she would reportedly snap that the sun can't block the sun.
LIQUIDATION OF TRAITOR RESIDENTS
When on September 4, 1937, the dismembered body of the Soviet "resident traitor" Ignatius Poretsky (known as Ludwig, also as Rice) was found near Lausanne, Sergei Efron became a suspect. The court in Geneva asked for help from the French police, who searched the headquarters of the Alliance for Repatriation and discovered that at least twenty people were involved in the murder of the fugitive agent.
However, the police particularly focused on the role of Sergei Efron and Nikolai Andreyevich Klepinin, who as a member of the Whites came to Paris via Gallipoli and Belgrade and participated in the work of the Alliance for Return to the Homeland. The immediate assassin was allegedly Roland François Rossi, known as Abiat and Lyotchik, a Soviet intelligence officer of French-Italian descent. He was officially a waiter in the restaurant of the "Hermitage" hotel in Monte Carlo, and later in other exclusive places, all the way to New York's Waldorf Astoria.
According to the widely spread version of events, Sergei Efron was also involved in the kidnapping of General Yevgeny Karlovich Miller, the president of the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS), who in the thirties of the 20th century tried to establish contact with the Nazi regime as an ally in the fight against Bolshevism. On September 22, 1937, in Paris, the NKVD lured Miller to a meeting with General Nikolai Skoblin, who by then had been working for the Soviet intelligence service under the code name "Farmer" for several years. At the announced meeting with the German military attache Stroman and his assistant Werner Müller, Soviet agents Georgy Kosenko and Veniamin Grazhul waited instead for them. The general was put to sleep with chloroform, placed in a wooden crate and transported by a Soviet embassy truck to Avr. From there, it was sealed in a box with a diplomatic seal and transported to the steamer "Maria Ulyanova", which was sailing for the USSR. In Moscow, in the NKVD prison on Lubyanka, under the name Pyotr Vasilievich Ivanov, Miller was interrogated for two years and executed on May 11, 1939.
When an investigation was launched in France, on October 10, 1937, Sergei Efron sailed from the French port of Havre for Leningrad on the ship "Andrei Zhdanov", named after Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov, the Soviet party leader, after whom the term Zhdanovshchina was coined for ideological dogmatism in culture.
Marina, who stayed in Paris with her son Moore, was interrogated in the Paris Prefecture on October 22 and November 27, 1937. When asked where her husband was, she answered that he was 11-12. In October 1937, he went to Spain. She claimed that she does not interfere in his work, and that she does not know where he is, but that he is a weak man, of fragile health and cannot be an agent... At the end of a long interrogation, the criminal police investigator uttered a phrase that she remembered: "Your husband's activity was astonishing." – “L'activité devotremari étaitfondroyante.”
MARINA ALONE AMONG HER RELATIVES ABROAD
Emigrants were suspicious of those who, for patriotic reasons, showed sympathy for the Soviet Union or announced that they would return there. The "sad Pero" of Russian chanson Aleksandar Vertinsky, who returned from emigration to the USSR during the Patriotic War, testifies to this. When the émigré newspaper announced that her husband was an NKVD member, a Chekist, Marina was, as Nina Berberova writes, completely alone. After Serge's escape, already at the end of 1937, she submitted the documents needed to leave France. However, she waited an unusually long time for a Soviet visa.
In the book "On the Banks of the Seine", the poetess Irina Odoyevtseva describes how, before returning to the USSR, Marina Tsvetaeva said goodbye to her and her husband, the writer Georgy Ivanov, whom she could not stand considering him a St. Petersburg snob.
Georgy Ivanov quickly approaches her and kisses her hand, which she offers to him after a short hesitation.
"Marina Ivanovna! How glad I am! I was afraid I wouldn't be able to say goodbye to you before you left."
"Dear?" she asked coldly. "I didn't expect that."
"I'm so glad!" he confirmed fervently. "After all, it's unlikely we'll see each other again anytime soon."
"We will never see each other again. Never," she snapped coldly.
And he asks Odojevetseva in a slightly warmer voice: "And tell me, are you happy too?"
"Terribly glad!" says Odojevceva, sincerely. Marina shrugs her shoulders. "I'm almost ready to believe it. And now most of my former acquaintances don't recognize me on the street; they don't bow to me, they turn away from me."
"We didn't value her, we didn't love her, we didn't prevent her from returning to Moscow. Not only did we not keep her, but we pushed her to take this disastrous step. Marina Tsvetayeva is our common sin, our common guilt, an irredeemable debt," Odoyevtseva writes.
In her Reflections, Zinaida Shahovskaya quotes the words that Marina Tsvetayeva uttered with a sigh when they last met: "I have nowhere to go - and emigration is driving me."
"She was right, Shahovskaya writes, emigration really squeezed her, who needed love like air, with its complete indifference and coldness towards her."
On June 12, 1939, Marina Tsvetayeva and her son boarded the ship "Maria Ulyanova" in the French port of Avr, which was transporting a group of refugees from Spain, children and adults, as well as a group of Russians fleeing from foreign countries.
There was another reason for him to travel to the USSR. The war was approaching. Between March 15 and May 11, 1939, he wrote verses about the cry of anger and love, about the Czech Republic in tears, Španija in blood, with the suicidal conclusion that it was time to return to the Creator of the ticket. Going on a trip to Russia, she who wrote in 1917 that she would follow her husband like a dog if he remained alive, says before leaving: "Wot, she went like a bitch..."
IN LENINGRAD, AFTER 17 YEARS
The ship arrived in Leningrad on June 18. After seventeen years, Marina Tsvetajeva returned to her homeland, which she previously thought she would never return to. In one poem, she says that neither on the map nor in the vastness of the land is there such a land as her daughter Ariadne described in her letters from Moscow, and she wondered if it was possible to return to the destroyed home.
In Leningrad, as the philologist Irma Kudrova writes in the book "The Death of Marina Tsvetaeva", she found herself in a surreal world. Marina and Mur were welcomed by Ana Jakovljevna Trupchinskaya, her husband's older sister. She hesitated to take them to her house, because she and her student daughter would be intensively interrogated in the "Big House", the headquarters of the NKVD on Litejny Prospekt, about everyone who visited their apartment.
The three of them were walking through the bright June streets of Leningrad. The walls of many buildings were decorated with huge posters that propagated work as the ideal of a socialist society: a large young man in a workman's overalls and a buxom girl in a red scarf, a sheaf of ripe ears of grain. Gatherings and celebrations in honor of space conquerors, pilots, polar explorers, paratroopers alternated with condemnations and curses addressed to her compatriots who were labeled as traitors of all that is sacred, as bandits who lost the last remnants of conscience.
While they were approaching Moscow by train the next day, she thought who would she see first on the platform?
Your husband, daughter, sister? Maybe even Pasternak?
On the platform, they were met only by Ariadne accompanied by a man of medium height, slightly plump, slightly deaf, with a charming smile of white teeth. He is introduced as Samuil Gurevich, Ariadne's friend and colleague. She will later say that this is her boyfriend, and he, by the way, worked for the NKVD.
In house no. 4/33 in the settlement "Novi Bit" in Bolshev, (now it is Marina Tsvetayeva Street, No. 15), which belonged to the NKVD, not the Literary Fund, as Alya lied in her letters to her mother, her sick husband Sergey Yakovlevich Efron was waiting for her. He spent the first year of his Soviet life under the name Andreyev in NKVD sanatoriums. In Odessa, he bathed in the sea, in Kislovodsk in mineral baths and drank healing mineral water narzan.
Two families lived together in separate rooms with a common dining room in the dacha intended for the accommodation of agents under special treatment: in addition to Marina, Sergey, Moore and Ariadne Efron, Efron's colleague from the Paris Repatriation Alliance Nikolai Andreyevich Klepinini, his wife Nina Nikolaevna and their son Dmitri, who arrived in Moscow well before Marina, lived there.
In her diary, Tsvetaeva will remember those days like this: "... Unpleasant... Gradually my heart aches... I live without paper, I don't show myself to anyone... The undertones are terrifying... S.'s illness. Fear of his heart breaking... My hands are full of work... Basement: 100 times a day. When should I write? Crazy heat that I don't notice: streams of sweat and tears flow in the sink. I have no one to turn to holding…”
And sister Asya? Where is she? - Asja was arrested. Back in 1937, a month and a half before Sergej Yakovlevich's arrival in Moscow.
But why? – Nobody knows.
How come no one knows? And Andrjusha, son? - He was also arrested. He was visiting his mother when they came to pick her up.
And Seryozha didn't find out what was happening? - He tried, but he couldn't. He also hoped that Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky, a longtime friend of Marina Tsvetaeva and Sergiy Efron, a critic and philologist known in the circles of the Russian emigration, a popular professor at King's College in London, who returned to Russia in 1933, would help.
But none of that happened... And Mirski was arrested in 1937.
LONG FAREWELL, EXCESSIVE TEARS...
Two and a half months after Marina Tsvetaeva's arrival in Moscow, on August 27, 1939, Marina's daughter Ariadna Sergeevna Efron was arrested. Tsvetaeva wrote in her diary:
"I'm unwrapping the wound, living flesh. On the night of the 27th, Alya's departure. Alya is cheerful, holding on bravely. She's joking... She's leaving without saying goodbye!"
'Alja, without saying goodbye to anyone?!'
She, in tears, waves over her shoulder!
Commander (old man, kindly): 'Better that way. A long goodbye, too many tears...'"
In September 1939, the NKVD arrested Sergei Efron, and in November Nikolai Klepinin, his wife Antonina (Nina) Nikolaevna and her eldest son from his first marriage, Alexei Seseman. The prosecutor's momentum was grandiose and comprehensively paradoxical in time, space and geostrategy.
Nikolai Klepinin is accused of having connections with the intelligence services of France, Belgium, Germany, the United States and Great Britain; his wife Nina Nikolaevna Klepinyna for connections with the Gestapo... And all of them are accused of being connected to the writer Roman Gul (also accused of working for the Gestapo); and transparent threads with Georgy Leontijevic Pyatakov, who was shot in 1937 as a member of the "Parallel Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center" after a public trial in the Hall with Pillars of the House of Trade Unions.
Sergi Efron was accused of being a French spy as a former White Guardsman infiltrated into the state security of the USSR, but of being in a relationship with Abram Slutsky (died in the presence of the authorities in 1938) and Sergei Spiegelglas (arrested in 1938), who worked under the general commissar of state security Henrikh Grigorievich Yagoda (executed in 1938).
LETTER TO BERIA
After the arrest of Ariadne and Sergei Efron, Marin Tsvetaev wrote a letter to the head of the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria, on December 23, 1939:
"...Immediately after the arrest of my daughter on August 27, 1939, exactly two years after his departure to the Soviet Union, my husband was also arrested on October 10, completely ill and tormented by her misfortune. I do not know what my husband is accused of, but I know that he is incapable of any betrayal, duplicity or fraud. I have known him - 1911-1939 - for almost 30 years, but what I know about him, I knew from his first days: that he is a man of the greatest purity, self-sacrifice and responsibility. Friends and enemies will say the same…
I conclude with a plea for justice. This man served his homeland and the idea of communism with soul and body, word and deed. He is seriously ill; I don't know how much life he has left, especially after such a trauma. It would be terrible if he died without being freed."
What do the Russians say, they cut down the forest, wood chips fly, the poet's letter does not help?
It will be continued in the next issue:
- The life and poetics of Marina Tsvetaeva between Eros and Thanatos
– Which one of us is she following?
– A paradox in the calendar
– Fear for the fate of the son
- "You can hang on to it, it won't break..."
- The unattainable job of the sink in the writer's club
– Mental breakdown
– Requiem
- He kills the Red Army man George Efron Moore
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