Marina Tsvetaeva: a witness to the horrors of totalitarian rule

• For My Poems, Written So Early
• For my poems, written so early 
• That I didn’t even know I was a poet, 
• Hurled like drops from a fountain, 
• Like sparks from rockets,

• That burst like tiny devils, 
• Into the sanctuary of sleep and incense, 
• For my poems about youth and death 
• — For my unread poems!

• Scattered in dusty bookstores, 
• Where no one ever buys them! 
• For my poems, like precious wines, 
• A time will come.

• Poem for Blok (1)
• Your name is a — bird in my hand, 
• a piece of ice on my tongue. 
• The lips’ quick opening. 
• Your name — five letters. 
• A ball caught in flight, 
• a silver bell in my mouth. 
• A stone thrown into a silent lake 
• is — the sound of your name. 
• The light click of hooves at night 
• — your name. 
• Your name at my temple 
• — shrill click of a cocked gun. 
• Your name — impossible — 
• kiss on my eyes, 
• the chill of closed eyelids. 
• Your name — a kiss of snow. 
• Blue gulp of icy spring water. 
• With your name — sleep deepens.

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was a Russian poet considered to be one of the greatest of 20th-century Russian writers. A witness to the Russian Revolution and the oppression which resulted from the Soviet rise to power, Tsvetaeva saw firsthand the horrors of totalitarian rule. Five years after the Revolution, Tsvetaeva left Russia, living in Paris, Berlin and Prague under increasingly impoverished conditions. In 1939 she returned to Russia with her family, whereupon her husband and daughter were arrested by the state on specious charges of espionage, leading to her husband’s execution. Three years later, Tsvetaeva took her own life. She has been recognized primarily as a lyric poet so that even in her narrative poems, the lyric element remains a constant. As fellow Russian poet Joseph Brodsky noted, her poetry bore witness to her times not in what she said but in how she embodied those times through her work: “Tsvetaeva is the unique case in which the paramount spiritual experience of an epoch…served not as the object of expression but as its means, by which it was transformed into the material of art.”