MARINA TSVETAEVA
1892 – 1941
IN PRAISE OF THE RICH
Herewith, having warned you beforehand
That between us is many miles' space,
That I am one of the riff-raff,
And in life have an honest place:
Under wheels of all excesses,
Host to hunchback and cripple, queer fish…
Herewith I shout from the rooftops,
Declare it –– I love the rich.
For their root that is rotten, decrepit,
From the cradle growing its wound,
Their hands moving in unconscious habit
From their pockets, and to them returned.
For the softest requests that their mouths make,
Each obeyed like an ordering cry,
And because they won't get into heaven,
And won't look you straight in the eye.
For their secrets –– by special delivery,
Their passions –– by courier post,
For their nights, which are foisted upon them,
(Even kissing and drinking are forced!)
And because in their cotton-wool yawning,
Their gilding, their counting itch,
They can't buy me, impudent upstart,
I affirm that I love the rich.
Never mind that shine, of the shaven,
That wined, dined look (I wink and it's mine),
It's that sudden look of the craven,
Those eyes with their doggy shine,
Doubting… are the scales set at zero?
Are the weights perhaps not loaded short?
Because of all the world's outcasts
These are the sorriest sort.
An unpleasant fable informs us
How some camels pass through needle eyes.
…For their look of 'To death' I'm astonished,
As they plead their infirmities
Like bankruptcy. 'I'd have lent… Been glad to'
…For the quiet words, mouthed with a twitch:
'I counted in carats, was a brother…'
I swear it: I love the rich.
30 September 1922
Translated by
DAVID McDUFF
1987
Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow on 8 October 1892 to Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a professor of Fine Art, and his second wife Maria
Alexandrovna Mein, a concert pianist. The marriage was not a happy one, causing Maria Alexandrovna to take out her feelings of frustration on her prodigiously gifted daughter which included doing everything possible to discourage the girl from writing.
Tsvetaeva began writing poetry in her native Russian at the age of six. Under her mother's influence she also trained as a pianist, practicing four hours each day until, in her teenage years, she abandoned her musical studies to focus on writing, which would remain her primary form of creative expression despite her mother's efforts to dissuade her from pursuing it.
When Maria Alexandrovna contracted tuberculosis in 1902 the family moved abroad for several years, spending time in Italy, France, Germany and other European countries before returning to Russia in 1906. Her mother died soon afterward and in 1908 Tsvetaeva returned to France to study literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, a city which had a thriving émigre community, many of whose members were interested in the emerging Russian Symbolist movement pioneered by poets such as Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova and the poet/critic Maximilian Voloshin. Their work inspired Tsvetaeva to self-publish her first poetry collection Vecherny Albom [Evening Album] in 1910, a volume which brought her to the attention of Voloshin and saw her invited to spend time at his home in the resort community of Koktebel on the Black Sea where she was able to meet and socialize with other poets, writers and artists.
It was also at Koktebel that Tsvetaeva met Sergei Yakovlevich Efron, a seventeen year old cadet in the Officers' Academy whom she would marry in 1912. Although she loved her husband and eventually bore him three children, this did not prevent her conducting passionate love affairs with her fellow poets Osip Mandelstam and Sophia Parnok (an encounter which had a profound impact on the work of both women) and, in 1922, with the former military officer (and close friend of Efron's) Konstantin Rodzevich — a relationship that would directly inspire her famous works Poem of the End and Poem of the Mountain.
The outbreak of World War One saw Efron posted to the eastern front, although he was stationed back in Moscow by the time the Russian Revolution began in October 1917. After the revolution Efron joined the White Army which fought for the restoration of the monarchy in the country's ensuing Civil War — a choice he came to feel increasingly ambivalent about despite Tsvetaeva's lack of sympathy for the Bolshevik cause and her resentment of the hardships the new regime imposed on the lives of ordinary Russians.
Tsvetaeva experienced all of these hardships herself after returning to Moscow while Efron was away fighting the Red Army. The city was in the grip of a terrible famine, with food so scarce that in 1919 Tsvetaeva placed her daughters — Ariadna (born in 1912 and called Alya by her parents) and Irina (born in 1917) — in a state orphanage, believing the state would at least be obligated to feed them if she made them its responsibility. She removed Alya from the orphanage when she became ill but did not remove her younger daughter Irina, only to learn in 1920 that the child had died there of starvation. Despite the overwhelming guilt and grief that Irina's death caused her, Tsvetaeva nevertheless continued to write, publishing six verse plays and many works of poetry during her five year stay in Moscow including the epic verse cycle Lebedinyi stan [The Encampment of the Swans] which sought to glorify those, like her now missing husband, who were fighting a losing battle against the Communists.
In May 1922 Tsvetaeva and her surviving daughter fled from Moscow to Berlin which, like Paris and many other European cities, was now home to a large and growing émigré community. Here they were reunited with Efron, whom Tsvetaeva had believed to be dead, and by August, having published what would become many of her best known poems including Remeslo [Craft, 1923), were living in Prague in very difficult circumstances. Czechoslovakia (as it was then known) was to remain the poet's home until 1925, when she and her family — which now included a son named Georgy, nicknamed Mur, born in 1925 — relocated to Paris.
Life was as difficult for Tsvetaeva and Efron in the French capital as it had been for them everywhere else, the difficulty compounded in this case by the poet contracting tuberculosis and feeling very much ignored by their fellow exiles who considered her work to be insufficiently critical of the new Soviet regime. Tsvetaeva found some measure of solace in her extensive correspondence with other writers including Rainer Maria Rilke, Boris Pasternak (future author of the novel Dr Zhivago) and Czech poet Anna Teskovà as well as in the financial support she received from Salomea Andronikova, a former Russian princess from the now occupied southern region of Georgia, birthplace of Josef Stalin.
This unhappy state of affairs endured for fourteen years, with Tsvetaeva feeling increasingly neglected by her community and resentful of the maternal responsibilities that left her short of time to write. Despite this, she managed to pursue a number of affairs with men and women and produce an impressive quantity of both poetical and critical texts before returning to what, by 1937, had become the USSR. Efron, who unbeknownst to her was working as a Soviet spy (probably with the knowledge and assistance of their daughter Alya), soon followed her to the USSR, forced to leave France after being implicated in the murders of a defector and Lev Levovich Sedov, son of former party leader Leon Trotsky who would himself be murdered on Stalin's orders in 1940.
Sadly, Tsvetaeva did not receive the support of the Soviet state or that of her fellow writers, most of whom were too fearful for their own lives to be willing to help an officially banned poet resume her stalled career. Efron was arrested by the NKVD, forerunner to the KGB and the same organization he had been working for in Paris, in 1941 along with Alya whose fiancée turned out to be another agent whose task it had been to observe and inform on her 'unreliable' parents. Efron would be shot on 16 October, while Alya would be sentenced to eight years in the gulag (she would remain in prison or exile for a total of sixteen years, dying in 1975 after publishing a memoir about her doomed family). With the Soviet army attempting to repel the advance of the Nazis on the country's western front, Tsvetaeva and her son Georgy were evacuated to the eastern city of Yelabuga where she again struggled to feed him, obliging her to travel to the city of Christopol in early August to search for whatever work she could find. She found none in Christopol and was denied permission to remain in the city, returning to Yelabuga where, sick and exhausted by years of loneliness and hardship, she hanged herself (or was murdered by the state as some scholars suggest) on 31 August 1941.
Like many of the artists who were victimized and mistreated by the Soviet regime, Tsvetaeva's work underwent a revival following the death of Stalin in March 1953 with much of it being republished (in the West, at least) to general acclaim after 1961. She is now considered to be one of the greatest of all Russian lyric poets, deservedly taking her place alongside her contemporaries (and fellow victims of Soviet oppression) Osip Mandelstam, Sophia Parnok, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Anna Akhmatova.
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