MARINA IVANOVNA TSVETAEVA (1892-1941) was a Russian and Soviet poet, essayist and playwright.
Her work is considered among the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature, along with Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Pasternak. Born to a family of Russian intelligentsia, Tsvetaeva lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron was executed for espionage and her surviving daughter was sent to a labor camp. Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941.
As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her as a striking chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition. She wrote of unrequited love and heartbreak, of her admiration for other writers, of the devastation of war, and of her generally troubled life. Nonetheless, she was always able to contain this raw emotion in an extremely rigorous and disciplined form, unique only to her. Joseph Brodsky, pre-eminent among Tsvetaeva's champions, said of her work: "She always carried everything she has to say to its conceivable and expressible end. In both her poetry and her prose, nothing remains hanging or leaves a feeling of ambivalence. Tsvetaeva is the unique case in which the paramount spiritual experience of an epoch (for us, the sense of ambivalence, of contradictoriness in the nature of human existence) served not as the object of expression but as its means, by which it was transformed into the material of art."
The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise noted:
* Art in the Light of Conscience: Eight Essays on Poetry (Bloodaxe, 2015). Translated by Angela Livingstone. -- ePUB + PDF
* Bride of Ice: New Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2011). Translated by Elaine Feinstein. (A slightly updated version of Selected Poems [Penguin, 1994], below)
* Essential Poetry, The (Glagoslav, 2015). Translated by Michael M. Naydan and Slava I. Yastremski.
* Moscow in the Plague Year (Archipelago, 2014). Translated by Christopher Whyte.
* My Poems (Kneller, 2011). Translated by Andrey Kneller.
* Selected Poems (Penguin, 1994). Translated by Elaine Feinstein. -- PDF
* Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2015). Translated by David McDuff.
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