Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva was, with Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Pasternak, one of the four great Russian poets of this century. In a tragic time her fate was perhaps the most tragic of all. Born in 1892, the daughter of a gifted pianist and the founder of what is today the Pushkin Museum, Tsvetaeva had an intense, cloistered and romantic childhood. Her early teenage years were spent largely in Italy, Switzerland and Germany, as the family travelled Europe in search of a cure for her mother's tuberculosis. In 1910 she published her first collection of poetry, which was immediately recognized in literary circles as the work of a true poet, and the following year in the Crimea she met Sergey Efron, the man around whom her life would revolve to the end. Although Tsvetaeva married him, had three children by him and dedicated her life to him, she had passionate affairs with many lovers, the poets Osip Mandelstam and Sofia Parnok foremost amongst them.