Nikolai Rubtsov Book

Few did more than Simon Karlinsky to bring Tsvetaeva’s poetic achievement to the attention of English-speaking readers. In the plus column of this pioneering critical biography is Karlinsky’s frank (though brief) assessment of her sexual attachments, along with the pre-revolutionary context writers enjoyed to express same-sex relationships; his account of the fractious politics of the Russian émigrés in Berlin, Prague, and Paris after the October Revolution; his treatment of Tsvetaeva’s husband, Sergei Efron, who converted from czarist White Army refugee to Bolshevik secret agent; and his vivid description of the poverty and domestic drudgery Tsvetaeva endured for most of her adult life, after a pampered bourgeois childhood.

In the negative column—well, somehow there’s not much Marina to Karlinsky’s Tsvetaeva. You get a good sense of her movements, her associates, her publishing history, and her critical reception. You understand how her politics clashed with nearly everyone in the diaspora, left, White or polka-dot. You see why lovers could find her too much, and why misogynist critics read her wrong. What I missed though was any real feeling for what excited so many people at the time about Tsvetaeva’s person and her writing. How is it that from the age of 18 she found influential friends and supporters? Why did she figure as such an important poet among the Russian diaspora? And why were some of the most famous poets of her age (Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, Bely, Pasternak, Briusov, Blok, etc.) so quick to acknowledge her as an equal, or at least a gifted rival? A large part of the answer has to do with her use of Russian, which Karlinsky describes but can’t hope to bring over into English. Was it just her way with diction, rhyme and meter though that got under contemporary skins? Somehow Tsvetaeva’s charisma eludes all the well-wrought context. Which is maybe what Karlinsky intended, so we'd want to read more of her texts.