Soviet secret service, also lived there; Emilia Litauer, a French Communist, was a frequent house guest. But while the house was crowded, Tsvetaeva found herself intensely lonely. Kudrova has discovered that many people close to the family – including Samuil Gurevich, the man whom Alya loved – routinely reported on them to the secret police.
Efron’s belief in Communism was genuine, and remained unshaken even after the arrests of both Tsvetaeva’s sister Anastasia and D.S. Mirsky, the literary critic who had been their close friend. Alya was as convinced as her father of the nobility of Soviet principles. Nevertheless, she was arrested, on Sunday, 27 August 1939 – just after the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and days before the German invasion of Poland touched off the Second World War. Emily Litauer was arrested at the same time, and the prisoners were questioned about one another.
Kudrova has been able to read the KGB files of their interrogation. Alya, she finds, began to ‘confess’ to imagi - nary crimes within a month of her arrest. ‘I didn’t engage i n anti-Soviet conversations. I reported them to the NKV D agents with whom I was in contact.’ From this a reader woul d conclude that Alya was regularly reporting to the NKVD . But Kudrova treats these confessions with appropriat e caution: it is not clear whether they were true, or just part o f Alya’s survival strategy
. Not until 1956, when Khruschev’s Twentieth Part y Congress publicly exposed the crimes of the Stalin period , was Alya able to write about the vicious treatment sh e received in prison. ‘I was beaten unmercifully with rubbe r truncheons, for twenty days and nights,’ she recalled. ‘I wa s deprived of sleep ... kept in a cold incarceration ce ll, undressed, standing to attention; they staged a fake exe cu- tion.’ It is not surprising that she finally gave the interrogators what they wanted: a declaration that Efron had been a double agent. ‘Not wishing to conceal anything from the investigation,’ she was recorded as saying, ‘I must re port that my father was an agent of French intelligence.’ Five days later, a warrant for Efron’s arrest was drawn up. A fter some delay – which, in Kudrova’s opinion, suggests that someone higher up the chain of command had t o be consulted – Efron was brought in by the secret police on 9 October. Many writers about Efron have been impat ient with his changing political allegiances and his inabilit y to find work. Any view of him as feeble will have to be rev ised. He was a sick, unhappy man, yet his KGB file sho ws him behaving with exemplary cou rage . There was only one exchange about Tsvetaeva: Efron denied that she had ever carried out any anti-Soviet work, even though she wrote for White émigré newspa pers. We can assume he was not treated gently. Yet it was o nly when he was told that his friend Emilia Litauer had unma sked his ‘antisocial behaviour’, and that his own daug hter had confirmed it, that he was overwhelmed. The files r eveal that he asked for a break in the interrogation: ‘Right no w, I can’t talk. I’m ve ry tired.’ Tsvetaeva, of course, knew none of this. S he went to Moscow hoping to find friends; and lived for a few monthd in Golitsyno through the Winter and Spring of 1940. Once the bombing began, she escaped with Mur t o Yelabuga, across the river from Chistopol in Tatarstan , where the Writers Union was housing its members. Ku drova judi- ciously examines the existing accounts of what led to her suicide thereafter. According to her sister Anastasia, Mur was r esponsible, since his mother might have killed herself hopi ng he would have a better chance of acceptance without he r. However, Anastasia was in prison at the time, and has no evidence to support this theory. Her daughter Alya blamed
Aseev, who was responsible for deciding who was allowed to live in Chistopol. Maria Belkina, who knew Tsvetaeva in Moscow, attributes her death instead to the onset of ment al illness. Kirill Khenkin, the author of A Topsy Turvy World which first appeared in the West assigns a fatal role to the local NKVD. After making her own inquiries in Chisto pol, Kudrova rejects Khenkin’s speculations, and carefull y weighs the other stories. When Mur wrote in his diary that
‘few people will remember me with a good word’, he was sadl y prescient. He has been blamed in most memoirs for showin g too little appreciation of his mother’s poetry, and for a se lfish lack of concern for his mother’s welfare in her last we eks. There is strong evidence that he quarrelled with Tsvetaev a on the last night of her life, and I believe that this, whi ch would have reduced her sense of being needed, was an imp ortant factor in her decision. In support of Belkina’s mental-illnes s hypothesis, Kudrova suggests that Tsvetaeva’s journals s how a loss of the will to live even before she left Moscow. C ertainly, she had written of ‘looking for a hook’. Yet the distinguished writer Lydia Chukovskaya, a first-hand witn ess who kept a personal diary, resists the idea that Tsv etaeva’s state bordered on mental illness. She recognised tha t, in spite of Tsvetaeva’s despair, energy flowed from h er when ever she spoke. Perhaps the most poignant new witnes s discovered by Kudrova is Nina Gordon, a woman who had a conversation with Tsvetaeva on the day before her death, without knowing who she was. She recalls Tsvetaeva saying, ‘It is important to have someone nearby, or some one you grew up with, with whom you can share common memories.’ Had she waited only a little longer she would have had Boris Pasternak as a companion in Chistopol. Instead, on 31 August 1941 she chose to hang herse lf from a nail. Her last note to Mur is unbearably sad: ‘Forgive me. It would have been worse to go on.... I’m ter ribly ill. I’m no longer myself. I love you madly. Tell papa and Alya – if you see them – that I loved them until th e last moment and explain that I had com e to a dead end.’
