Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva wrote poems that sound like a conversation carried on at a raised pitch — not declamation, but talk, passionate and exact. “I like that you are sick, though not with me.” “Only yesterday he looked into my eyes.” Every poem reads as a direct address to someone in particular.

She was born in Moscow in 1892. Her father was Ivan Tsvetaev, the professor who founded the Museum of Fine Arts; her mother, a pianist, died early. Marina wrote verse from childhood.

Emigration meant Prague, Berlin, Paris — poverty, obscurity, longing. In 1939 she returned to Russia: her husband was arrested and shot, her daughter sent to a labor camp.

In August 1941, in wartime evacuation at Yelabuga, she hanged herself. She was forty-eight.