ELAINE FEINSTEIN

Tsvetaeva’s Last Days

, The Death of a Poet: The Last Days of

Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Mary Ann Szporluk, with an Introduction by Ellendea Proffer (Gerald Duckworth) £20

While writing the biography of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova over recent months, I have become increasingly preoccupied by the differences between her character and that of Marina Tsvetaeva, whose poems I translated many years ago. Both women must be counted among the greatest European poets of the twentieth century. Their temperaments, however, are markedly disparate. Akhmatova kept her dignity even in the face of tragedy; Tsvetaeva showed her emotions nakedly. Akhmatova’s poetry is marked by a classic restraint; Tsvetaeva’s by a constant pressure to invent new forms. Most of Tsvetaeva’s poems use difficult syntax, wild metaphors and frequent leaps over what can be easily understood. Her pages are filled with dashes and spattered with exclamation marks. Akhmatova, in contrast, is bare, bony and precise.

It would be hard to say which of them led a more difficult life. Tsvetaeva went into exile, and suffered poverty, humiliation and neglect; Akhmatova refused to leave Russia and was rewarded by the cat-and-mouse attention of Stalin, a ban on publication and the imprisonment of her son and second husband. For all Akhmatova’s beauty and an imperial presence which led men to fall in love with her even in old age, her deepest relationships ended unhappily; Tsvetaeva once declared that, although she knew she would be the most important figure in the memoirs of her male friends, she had ‘never counted in the masculine present’.

Akhmatova’s second husband Nikolai Punin, and her only son, Lev, were both in the Gulag when the two women had their only meeting in Moscow 1941. Tsvetaeva’s husband and daughter were also in prison then, although she had her son Mur with her. Both women were profoundly Christian. Yet while Akhmatova soldiered on through many deaths, rejections and loneliness to reach seventy-six, Tsvetaeva killed herself aged forty-nine in Yelabuga on the banks of the Kama. Irma Kudrova’s elegant, shrewd book examines how that death came about.

To do so, she looks in detail at the two years of Tsvetaeva’s life which preceded her death. Drawing on the newly opened files of the KGB, and on the testimony of witnesses who have never spoken before, Kudrova sheds new light on Tsvetaeva’s appalling situation. Not only is her book compulsive reading for anyone who cares about Tsvetaeva, it draws a vivid picture of what it was like to be alive at the height of Stalin’s terror.

Suicide, however, is an act of desperation, for which there can be no simple explanation and in the West critics would find Tsvetaeva’s childhood at least significant. Tsvetaeva’s early years were dominated by her mother, a gifted woman who spoke French and German and played the piano brilliantly. While Akhmatova’s mother lived in a gentle dream,

Marina’s mother, Maria, burned with passionate intensity. She was a gifted pianist, who had been compelled to give up any hope of a musical career by her father. She had also been involved with a married man before being forced to settle for a widower still in love with his first wife and totally devoted to his world of Art History. All the frustrated energies of this remarkable woman were directed towards the education of her first child. She had hoped for a son, but soon recognised the precocity of her daughter and was determined Marina should fulfil her own ambitions as a concert pianist. In the process she was despotic and demanding. Where Akhmatova was carelessly allowed to be as indolent or adventurous as she chose every summer in the south of Russia, Marina was treated with an attention only a little short of cruelty. She was forced to learn the piano for four hours a day, and then, as her love of literature became apparent, she was denied writing paper and had her early attempts at poetry ridiculed. It was a Spartan childhood. Marina inherited her mother’s fiery nature and although, after her mother’s death, Marina gave up the piano altogether, her need to excel remained ferocious. As Tsvetaeva put it: ‘After a mother like that, I had no alternative but to become a poet.’

Tsvetaeva remained dedicated to poetry through a life that was a history of loss. Born on 9 October 1892 she saw her country devastated by a Revolution she did not support; she lost a child in the Moscow famine of 1919 and endured unremitting poverty after she and her surviving daughter followed her husband Sergei Efron into exile. She was briefly happy in Prague, but as an émigré in France, she saw her early fame vanish, and learned to accept loneliness and rejection.

It was to follow Efron that Tsvetaeva returned to Russia in 1939. She had first met him in childhood, and though she may have loved other men more passionately, their bond was as close as that of siblings. In 1937, Efron – who had fought against the Bolshevik Revolution as a soldier in the White Army – was forced to flee back to Russia, when he was unexpectedly exposed as an agent of the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB). It was an unbearable shock for Tsvetaeva, who refused to believe Efron was involved in the crime of which the French police suspected him: the murder of Ignace Reiss, a devoted Polish Communist who was assassinated in Zurich after protesting against Stalin’s persecutions.

When Efron fled, Tsvetaeva’s daughter Alya – a convinced Communist – was already in Russia; her adolescent son, Mur, longed to go to the homeland he had never seen; and the émigré community in France was largely hostile to her. In these circumstances, her decision to follow Efron to Russia was perhaps unsurprising, but it proved a tragic mistake. She returned in 1939 to a country in the grip of Stalin’s terror.

Tsvetaeva went to live in Bolshevo, a suburb of Moscow, in a dacha which had been allocated to Efron by the NKVD. The Klepinins, a couple whom Efron had recruited into the

Elaine Feinstein: Tsvetaeva’s Last Days