Books by Marina Tsvetaeva
Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922 (New York Review Books Classics)
A moving collection of autobiographical essays from a Russian poet and refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Marina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life buffeted by political upheaval. The essays collected in this volume are based on diaries she kept during the turbulent years of the Revolution and Civil War. In them she records conversations of women in the markets, soldiers and peasants on the train traveling from the Crimea to Moscow in October 1917, fighting in the streets of Moscow, a frantic scramble with co-workers to dig frozen potatoes out of a cellar, and poetry readings organized by a newly minted Soviet bohemia. Alone in Moscow with two small children, no income, and a missing husband, Tsvetaeva struggled to feed her daughters (one of whom died of malnutrition in an orphanage), find employment in the Soviet bureaucracy, and keep writing poetry. Her keen and ruthless eye observes with compassion and humor—bringing the social, economic, and cultural chaos of the period to life. These autobiographical writings not only give a vivid eyewitness account of Russian history but provide vital insights into the workings of Tsvetaeva’s unique poetics.
Includes black and white photographs.
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Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva
"A poet of genius."Vladimir Nabokov
Via what Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine call "readings"not translationsof fragments of Marina Tsvetaeva's poems and prose, Tsvetaeva's lyrical genius is made accessible and poignant to a new generation of readers. By juxtaposing fragments of her poems with short pieces of prose, we begin to know her as poet, friend, enemy, woman, lover, and revolutionary.
From "Poems for Moscow (2)":
From my handstake this city not made by hands,
my strange, my beautiful brother.
Take it, church by churchall forty times forty churches,
and flying up over them, the small pigeons;
And Spassky Gatesin their flower
where the Orthodox take off their hats;
And the Chapel of Starsrefuge chapel
where the floor ispolished by tears;
Take the circle of the five cathedrals,
my soul, my holy friend.
Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892 and died in 1941. Her poetry stands among the greatest works of twentieth century Russian writers.
Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the Whiting Writers' Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship awarded annually by Poetry magazine.
Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets award for Dream Barker in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass, from Copper Canyon Press. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 19652003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.
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Selected Poems
An acclaimed translation of the best work of the passionate Russian poet
An admired contemporary of Rilke, Akhmatova, and Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva was a witness to the political turmoil and the social devastation wrought by the Russian Revolution and a powerfully inspired chronicler of a difficult life and exile sustained by poetry. Pasternak "was immediately overcome by the immense lyrical power of her poetic form. It... had spring living from experience—personal, and neither narrow-chested nor short of breath from line to line but rich and compact and enveloping"
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Moscow in the Plague Year: Poems
Written during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed, these poems are suffused with Tsvetaeva's irony and humor, which undoubtedly accounted for her success in not only reaching the end of the plague year alive, but making it the most productive of her career. We meet a drummer boy idolizing Napoleon, an irrepressibly mischievous grandmother who refuses to apologize to God on Judgment Day, and an androgynous (and luminous) Joan of Arc.
"Represented on a graph, Tsvetaeva's work would exhibit a curve - or rather, a straight line - rising at almost a right angle because of her constant effort to raise the pitch a note higher, an idea higher ... 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." --Joseph Brodsky
While your eyes follow me into the grave, write up the whole caboodle on my cross! 'Her days began with songs, ended in tears, but when she died, she split her sides with laugher!'
--from Moscow in the Plague Year: Poems
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Letter to the Amazon (Eastern European Poets, 41)
Literary Nonfiction. Translated from the Russian by A'Dora Phillips & Gaëlle Cogan. Introduction by Catherine Ciepiela. Like many of Marina Tsvetaeva's essays and poems, LETTER TO THE AMAZON is addressed to another writer, in this case Natalie Clifford Barney, a wealthy American expatriate in Paris. Though written in 1932, Tsvetaeva's letter was in response to what Barney said about lesbian relationships and motherhood in her 1920 Pensées dune Amazone (Thoughts of an Amazon). Tsvetaeva uses her essay to emphasize what is to her mind a general truth of lesbian relationships (i.e. they cannot endure because of a woman's innate desire for a child) and to explore her seemingly agonized feelings about Sophia Parnok, the Russian poet with whom she fell in love in 1914, when Tsvetaeva was twenty-two and Parnok twenty-nine.
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Virginia's Sisters
by Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Anna Akhmatova, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zelda Fitzgerald, Marina Tsvetaeva
The anthology includes stories and poems by well-known authors such as Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Gertrude Stein, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Emma Goldman, Katherine Mansfield as well as many new translations of international women's writing from the same period. These include writers such as Colette, Maria Messina, Antonia Pozzi, Fani Popova Mutafova, Magda Isanos, Gabriela Mistral, Carmen de Burgos, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, May Ziadeh, Yenta Serdatzky and others.
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The Story of Sonechka
It is 1918 in Moscow. The communist revolution is in full swing. Food is scarce, living conditions harsh. Two women meet on the stage of an empty theater. One is the now famous twenty-six-year-old poet Maria Tsvetaeva, the other the twenty-four-year-old actress Sonia Holliday (Sonechka). The Story of Sonechka, written almost twenty years later, is a vivid account, at once comic and tragic, of their love for each other. A previously untranslated masterpiece (Dmitry Bikov calls it "one of the five best books in world literature"), it stands as a testament to the artistry with which Tsvetaeva wrote prose; the vicissitudes of her life, love, and work; and the intense dynamics of Moscow culture in the wake of the Revolution. It also constitutes an exceedingly rare and early example of queer prose literature originally written in Russian.
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