Nina Berberova about Marina Tsvetajeva in the book Italics are mine.
MARINA Tsvetaeva's SONGS IN POP-CULTURES, A CENTURY AFTER THE ESTABLISHMENT
Vi, the last Gutenbergians you still opt for (more comfortable) reading text from paper, you can scan the QR code on your smartphone, via the link to listen to the rock version of the song "Passer" written in 1913. and created with the help of VI 2026. directed by Andrej Belih (stage name Artess) who engages in the musical production of Tsvetaeva's poetic works, Njekrasova, Krilov and others.
https: //youtube.be/m_vV5eXdiW0?si=I8Q8IfxiigPjyKV1
(The one who kissed a lot and laughed when she shouldn't, ask a similar passer-by to stop, but don't stand there with your head down, but to think about her easily and forget her easily…
Идёшь, на меня похожий,
Глаза устремляя вниз.
Я их опускала — тоже!
Прохожий, остановись!
Не думай, что здесь — могила,
Что я появлюсь, грозя…
Я слишком сама любила
Смеяться, когда нельзя!
Но только не стой угрюмо,
Главу опустив на грудь.
Легко обо мне подумай,
Легко обо мне забудь.
"Proud gait, high forehead, short straight cut hair, maybe a bold boy, maybe just a sensitive young lady? The young lady prefers the Comtesse de Noy (Marie Laure de Noy, an eccentric artist associated with Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau and Louis Buñuel) and the flag of Vendée (Vendée, a department in the Loire region, known for the counter-revolutionary uprising of 1793-1796) (…)
Дата в этом году.! Remove the Botticelli reproductions from the walls, throw the volumes of Mises (Alfred de Mise, French romantic poet of the 19th century) and Madame de Noy, the wind has rushed into your room, it is Marina Tsvetaeva who goes and sings her songs (…)
How wildly, how loudly (the boy) sings about the land of Moscow and the Kaluga road, about the joys of Stenka Razina, about her crazy, greedy, unrelenting love. The Russian heathen, how much joy there is in her, she was baptized in vain, she was taught in vain. Her verse is sonorous, interrupted, like a spring stream, and there is a lot in it of the green of the groves, and the blue of the sky, and the black earth, and somewhere in the distance, bright red scarves of women..."
This is how the poet Ilya Ehrenburg described Marina Tsvetaeva in the book Portraits of contemporary writers, published in Berlin in 1922. Among other things, he noticed that in one of Marina Tsvetaeva's songs she talks about her two grandmothers - one simple, dear, who feeds her son's students, and the other a Polish lady, white-handed. "Two bloods. One Marina."
Her father, Ivan Tsvetayev, son of a village priest, professor of art history at Moscow University and founder of the famous Museum of Fine Arts (today the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts), was a man of ascetic character and encyclopedic knowledge.
Her mother, of German-Polish origin, Maria Alexandrovna, on her father's side a German born in Main, married Ivan Tsvetayev at the age of twenty-two with the express intention of replacing the mother of his two children, his first wife, the opera singer Varvara Ilovayska, who died in 1890, a few days after the birth of her son.
Maria Alexandrovna, a gifted pianist, a student of Arthur Rubinstein, ambitious, emotionally strained and disappointed that she did not achieve a concert career, wanted her daughter Marina Ivanovna Tsvetayeva, whom she gave birth to in 1892, to become a pianist.
"I inherited music, romanticism and Germany from my mother," wrote Marina Tsvetajeva in her diary, which she started writing at the age of six. She was fluent in Russian, French and German, in which she and her sister Anastasia (Asya) received their basic education in a boarding house near the Black Forest, as they moved from boarding house to boarding house in Switzerland and Germany for two years with their mother, who suffered from tuberculosis.
GIFTED, SAD AND UNCONTROLLED
When her mother died of tuberculosis, Marina gave up her musical ambitions at the age of 14, but the melody and rhythm remained in her poetry. As a high school student, she was a prodigy. Sarvita, self-conscious, determined, temperamental, but impudent and unrestrained.
When she was expelled from the prestigious Girls' High School of Varvara Pavlovna von Derviz, her father transferred her to the Alferovska High School, where Shalyapin's daughter and Leo Tolstoy's granddaughter studied, and they tried to enroll their daughters in the well-known families of the Serovs, Golitsyns, Gagarins...
In the Private Gymnasium, the third she attended, Marina was perceived as an exotic bird that accidentally flew into someone else's flock.
When their father was in Dresden because of the future Moscow Museum of Fine Arts, she spent another summer with her sister in Germany. He wrote in his diary: "The small town of Loschwitz near Dresden, I'm sixteen years old, I smoke in a pastor's family, my hair is short, five centimeter heels, I go on a date with a centaur statue in the forest, I don't know a beet from a carrot (in a pastor's family!), the rejections are too numerous to list! Rejections? No, they loved me, no, they tolerated me... This is the land of freedom. I confirm it."
At the tender age of 16, she attended (and did not finish) a course in Old French literature at the Sorbonne, and like a lovelorn girl, she waited at the exit of the theater for Sarah Bernard, the unforgettable Phaedra and the Lady with the Camellias, dismissed from the Comédie Française due to her difficult nature - and threw flowers at her feet.
CARNELOL THAT DETERMINED DESTINY
Already her school songs, published after high school in a collection Evening album, attracted the attention of poets Nikolai Gumilyov, Valery Bryusov and Maksimilian Voloshin.
In the house of symbolist Maksimilian Voloshin in Koktebel, Crimea, on May 5, 1911, the fates of then nineteen-year-old Marina Tsvetaeva and seventeen-year-old Sergei Yakovlevich Efron, who suffered from tuberculosis and suffered the death of his brother and mother, crossed paths.
His father, Jakov Efron, a Jew who converted to the Lutheran faith when he married Jelisaveta from the noble Durn family, was associated in his youth with the People's Will, a secret revolutionary organization of mostly young socialist intellectuals who assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881. His mother Jelisaveta, who joined the Social Revolutionaries, immigrated to Paris in 1906 with her son Constantine, and when he committed suicide, she also ended her life.
Marina said she would marry Sergei if he found her a carnelian, a reddish semi-precious stone worn as a talisman because it was believed to influence the wearer's fate.
They got married in 1912. In 1913, Marina gave birth to a daughter whom she gave the ancient name of Ariadna, called her Alya, believed that she was a prodigy and tried to raise her the way her mother had raised her. For the first two or three years after the birth of her daughter, Marina lived in Crimea, spending the summer in Koktebel and the winter in Yalta.
Getting married young, Marina and Sergej remained in a marriage of fatal attachment until the end of their lives, with many departures and returns, separation in the whirlwind of the revolutionary era.
After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Sergei Efron volunteered for the army several times, but was rejected due to poor health, so he served as a paramedic in an ambulance train that transported the wounded from the front.
And on July 16, 1914, Marina wrote that she was not interested in royal accounts and people's quarrels while incense was lit in coffins and spurs rattled with cries of "war, war":
Война, война! — Кажденья у киотов
И стрёкот шпор...
Но нету дела мне до царских счётов,
Народных ссор.
In December 1914, in the midst of the First World War, despite Russia's conflict with Germany, in a poem Germania says:
“Svetu si data za hajku pustu
Neprijateljima tvojim nema broja.
Al’ kako da te napustim
Kako da te izdam – kad si moja…”
FRIEND OF SOFIA PARNOK
Poems, diaries, prose texts and personal "novels" that are difficult to separate from the poetics of Marina Tsvetaeva represent an emotional diary of revolutionary tectonic changes and the breaking of taboos in the aesthetic, moral, political, social and psychological spheres, which will mark the entire 20th century.
In 1915, in a cycle of poems A friend Marina Tsvetayeva dedicates a verse about Sappho, the Greek poet from Lesvos, seven years older than the poet Sofia Parnok, who openly wrote about her seven lesbian relationships, and published journalistic texts under the pseudonym Andrey Polyanin.
Using the anaphora "For your inspired temptations", she sang about the readiness to surrender like a helpless child to a new, unknown feeling. The cycle ended on May 6, 1915 with the verse "Ti nisi on!" and request:
"Stop loving me..."
And there was nothing left between the two of them.
A few years later, Marina's similar feelings will be awakened for actress Sonya Holliday, resulting in another cycle, Sonječki's poems.
WILD AND LIVELY MARINA AND MANDELJŠTAM
The romance between the green-eyed Marina Tsvetajeva and the wide-eyed poet, acmeist Osip Mandeljštam flared up at the beginning of January 1916, when they took turns reading their poems at a literary evening, and the audience demanded to read more with applause.
It was in the home of the poet Leonid Kanegiser, the one who, as a member of the anti-Bolshevik group, would kill the president of the Petrograd Cheka, Ulitsky, on August 30, 1918 – the same day that the anarchist and SR Fanny Yefimovna Kaplan shot Lenin. Kanegiser will be shot.
Tsvetaeva dedicated 10 songs to Mandeljštam. In one, she compared him to Gavril Deržavin, a poet of the classicism era and one of her early role models.
"I know: our gifts are unequal. My voice is, for the first time, quiet. What is my ill-mannered verse to you, young man? Derzhavine!"
When Mandelstam came to Moscow, Tsvetaeva wrote: "Wonderful days from February to June 1916, the days when I gave Mandelstam Moscow."
When he was leaving, she sang: "I love you over hundreds of species that separate us".
When their mutual poetic and emotional admiration cooled, which happened quickly, the poet Nadezhda Jakovljevna Mandeljstam (Hazina) admitted that her relationship with Mandeljstam would not have developed so easily and simply if he had not met the wild and lively, reckless and dedicated Marina in his life, who unleashed in him the love of life and the ability for spontaneous and unbridled love.
"IF GOD PERFORMS THAT MIRACLE AND KEEP YOU ALIVE, I WILL FOLLOW YOU LIKE A DOG... "
Sergej Efron, a descendant of anti-regime patriots and a tuber, nevertheless enrolled in a cadet school, and when he graduated on February 11, 1917, he enrolled in the Peterhof School of Junkers. Six months later he was recruited into the 56th infantry reserve regiment in Nizhny Novgorod, and in the fall of 1917 he fought against the Bolsheviks in Moscow.
Marina Tsvetaeva did not know if her husband Sergei was alive when she returned to Moscow from Feodosia in Crimea in November 1917, where she had been with her sister since October, who was going through a difficult period after her husband's death.
On the train, she read vague news in the newspaper about the Kremlin, Tverskaya, Arbat, Metropol, Voznesensky Square and mountains of corpses and did not know what to believe.
In the diary notebook on November 2, 1917, he writes a letter to him, as always to - You, which will not be sent:
"Two and a half days, not a bite, not a sip. (Throat tight) The soldiers bring newspapers on pink paper. The Kremlin and all the monuments are blown up, 56th regiment. The buildings where the cadets and officers who refused to surrender are housed are blown up. 16.000 dead. At the next station, 25.000. I am silent. I smoke. My companions, one after another, they board the return trains…
Yesterday, approaching Kharkiv, I read "South End": 9.000 dead. I can't tell you about that night, because it's not over. It is now a gray morning. I'm in the corridor (...) We're getting closer to Orel. I am afraid to write to you, as much as I want, because I will burst into tears. This is all a terrible dream. I'm trying to sleep. I don't know how to write to you.
When I write to you, you exist, because I write to you! And then ah! 56th reserve regiment. Kremlin. (Remember those huge keys you used to lock the gates at night?) And most importantly, most importantly, most importantly You, Yourself. You, with your instinct for self-destruction. Can you really sit at home? If everyone stayed, you would go alone. Because you are flawless. Because you cannot allow others to be killed…
…Will it be possible to enter the city?
The eagle is coming soon. It is now around 14 pm. We will be in Moscow by two in the morning. What if I enter the house and there is no one there, not even a living soul? Where should I look for you? Maybe the house is gone? I keep feeling like this is a terrible dream. I keep expecting something to happen, but there was no news, nothing. Am I dreaming this, am I going to wake up?”
And he writes down his oath, which despite the troubled times - and his loose understanding of freedom - he will adhere to until the end of his life, at the cost of a fatal outcome:
"If God does this miracle to leave you alive, I will follow you like a dog."
On March 24, 1918, Marina will sing that the path of the White Guard is sublime, and that it is not a flock of swans in the sky, but that the holy White Guard army is melting, the final dream of the Old World is melting in a white vision: Youth - Courage - Vendée - Don.
Белая гвардия, путь твой высок (...)
Белым видением тает, тает...
Старого мира - последний сон:
Молодость - Доблесть - Вандея - Дон.
After the defeat of the anti-Bolshevik forces in Moscow, Sergei Efron went to the Don in the 3rd Officer's Regiment of General Markov. He participated in many raids and, as he says, not a single one was victorious. He survived 1.050 species (1.120 km) long so-called. The ice march between Yekaterinodar and Kazan, on which 7.000 soldiers set out in an unexpectedly severe frost for southern Russia of below 20 degrees Celsius, and after 80 days of marching - under combat for 44 days - only 1.000 of them remained alive.
The Ice Campaign did not end with "anabasis" - the return home of the besieged army - as General Anton Denikin, quoting the ancient Greek Xenophon, promised.
With the army of General Piotr Wrangel, after the defeat at Pierekop, Sergei Efron was evacuated from Crimea to Gallipoli in 1921.
Marina's lyrics in the song He looked me in the eye just yesterday. said: ships carry loved ones and the white path takes them away, the earth echoes the wail of those left in the icy steppe, life has fallen - a rusty kopeck, life has fallen like a rusty kopeck, and she, the murderer of a child in court, stands unloved and fearful.
And even in hell they will say to him: "That's what you did to me, my dear! My dear, what did I do to you?"
Увозят милых корабли,
Уводит их дорога белая...
И стон стоит вдоль всей земли:
«Мой милый, что тебе я сделала?»
...
He learned to live in the very fire,
Sam brosil v steppe zaledeneluyu!
That's what you are, cute, made me!
My dear, что тебе я сделала?
(Yesterday more than ever, June 14, 1920)
photo: marina cvetajeva archive...ALJA AND IRINA: Marina Tsvetaeva's children
MARINA Tsvetaeva's SONGS IN POP-CULTURES A CENTURY AFTER EMERGENCE
Scan the QR code if you want to listen to Вчера ечечно v glaza gladel, from the channel When poetry becomes music (2026)
https: //www.youtube .on/watch?v=HlaPRspJzpE&list=OLAK5uy_lpBfUbfyn9VnRY9wY0dZ9YVczKP9kmbfE
"I KEEPS THINKING: 'PA, ALJA WILL GET WELL, I WILL TAKE CARE OF IRINA!' BUT IT'S TOO LATE NOW... "
In April of the revolutionary year of 1917, Marina gave birth to her second daughter, Irina Efron, her unloved child.
"Irina" Zufalskind (random child, in German). I feel no connection with her. Forgive me, Lord! How will this continue?”
Efron's sisters Vera and Lilia describe Marina as a bad mother in their letters to Sergei, and they briefly take and care for the exhausted Irina, who was retarded in development. Marina Tsvetaeva, wounded in pride, returns the child to Moscow, where in the post-revolutionary atmosphere hunger and cold reach catastrophic proportions.
She, who normally had a hard time dealing with practical problems, is barely making ends meet. The servants scattered. The family's money in the bank failed. She sold family books and other things for a sack of potatoes and sawed furniture herself to keep the children and herself warm.
From November 1918, she served in the Information Department of the Commissariat for National Affairs (Narkomnat), in April 1919 in the Central Collegium for the Care of Prisoners and Refugees (Centrplenež).
She took her older daughter Alya with her to work. She left the younger Irina, tied to a cot, in the house in Borisoglebski prolaz number 6.
Then he takes the children to the Kuznetsk Orphanage, one of the then-temporary social institutions established by the League of Save the Children in cooperation with the Moscow Red Cross and the All-Russian Committee for Aid to the Hungry.
In that wretched shelter, they first suspected that those nicely dressed children brought by "aunt" Marina were orphans, but they accepted them anyway.
Marina visits the children in the orphanage occasionally and finds them in a terrible state.
"Gradually I understand the horror of the orphanage: there is no water, the children cannot go outside due to lack of warm clothes, there is no doctor, there is no medicine, the floors are insanely dirty like soot, severe cold (the heating is broken). There is no bread. And that's it. The children, to prolong their pleasure, eat lentils grain by grain. As I get cold, I realize: this is hunger!"
Alya soon fell ill with malaria, and Tsvetaeva transferred her to the Kuntsevo hospital, and then to Moscow. The younger daughter Irina died in the orphanage on February 2, 1920.
On February 7, 1920, Marina explained why she did not go to her daughter's funeral in a letter to her friend Vera Zvyagintseva, poetess and actress of the Meyerhold Theater:
"Alya had 40,7 degrees that day and to be honest?! I just couldn't. Oh, gentlemen! A lot could be said here. I'll just say that this is a bad dream, I keep thinking that I'm going to wake up. Everyone has someone: a husband, a father, a brother. I only had Alya, and Alya was sick, and I was completely absorbed in her illness and now God punished me. And my worst horror! I didn't forget her, I didn't forget her, I was constantly struggling... And I was constantly getting ready to go, and I was constantly thinking: 'Well, Alya will get better, I'll take care of Irina!' But now it's too late.”
When in 1973 Prosveta published the then available selection from the essayistic, autobiographical and narrative prose of Marina Cvetajeva translated by Milica Nikolić, translator Petar Vujačić stated in an essay:
"There are few works in the world where writers had the courage to speak so openly about their most private problems. In this respect, Tsvetaeva went further than Rousseau, further than Tolstoy, further than all the women writers we know. Reading her confessions, we sometimes catch ourselves gasping for breath."
It will be continued in the next issue:
Harlequin's Love
Emotional Hurricane
Tsvetaeva's Epistolary Loves, Pasternak and Rilke
"Ne-meeting" Marina Tsvetajeva and Boris Pasternak
"Dear Mayakovsky... Here you have Milyukov., here I am, there you are... "
A multifaceted and alone poet
"Beautiful? I do not know. Maybe.
Vulgar? Never! "
