Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva

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Marina Tsvetaeva (1925)Tsvetaeva signature 1941.svg

Marina Tsvetaeva ( Russian Марина Ивановна Цветаева , scientific. Transliteration Marina Ivanovna Cvetaeva ; born September 26 . Jul / 8. October  1892 greg. In Moscow , Russian Empire ; † 31 August 1941 in Yelabuga , Tatar ASSR Russian SFSR , Soviet Union ) was a Russian poet and writer. She is one of the most important Russian poets of the 20th century .

Life

Childhood and adolescence

Much of Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry has its roots deep in her repressed and restless childhood, which was nonetheless rich and unique. Her father Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev was a professor of art history at Moscow University and later founded the Alexander III Museum, now known as the Pushkin Museum .

Marija Aleksandrowna Meyn , Tsvetaev's second wife and Marina's mother, was a highly educated, but erratic and frustrated concert pianist with German and Polish ancestors. This fact later fired Marina Tsvetaeva's imagination and encouraged her to identify with the Polish aristocracy and with German poets.

Marina had two half-siblings from her father's first marriage, Valerija and Andrei; In 1894 her younger sister Anastasija was born, who was preferred by her mother. Tsvetaeva's father loved her, but was heavily involved in his studies and found little time for the family. In addition, he had never got over the death of his first wife, the opera singer Varwara Ilowaiskaya, and continued to mourn her. Marina's mother, for her part, mourned a great but unhappy love in her youth.

Maria Alexandrovna disapproved of her daughter's poetry because she wanted to see her as a pianist and found her poetry poor. There was particular tension between Marina's mother and Warwara's children.

Marina Zwetajewa (1904–1905) lived in Freiburg

In 1902 the mother fell ill with tuberculosis . Until her death in 1906, the family traveled through Europe to seek relief from climate change. For a while they lived in Nervi near Genoa . Here, far from the strict rules of bourgeois Moscow society, the ten-year-old was free for the first time, played, climbed through the cliffs and was able to let her imagination run wild. The numerous Russian emigrants who lived in this area at the time may also have had some influence on the sensitive child. The Tsvetaeva children went wild over time, which was allowed until June 1904, when Marina was sent to a school in Lausanne . The family lived in Freiburg im Breisgau from 1904 to 1905 and spent the summer holidays at the Engel inn in Horben . The family's many moves resulted in a number of school changes, and Marina learned Italian, French and German on the travels.

In 1908 she studied literary history at the Sorbonne .

During this time, the heyday of symbolism began in Russian poetry, a revolutionary development in literature that would greatly influence Tsvetaeva's later work. She was not fascinated by the theory, but by the poetry and incredible seriousness with which poets like Andrei Bely and Alexander Blok created their works. Tsvetaeva's first volume of poems, evening album ( Вечерний альбом ) was published in 1910 and attracted the attention of the poet and critic Maximilian Voloshin , whom Tsvetaeva described after his death in her text "Living about a living" ( Живое о живом , 1932). Voloshin met Tsvetaeva and soon became her friend and mentor.

She spent some time in Voloshin's home in Koktebel on the Black Sea , which was a well-known meeting place for poets, writers and artists. She became friends with Andrei Bely, whom she described in her essay Captive Mind ( Пленный дух , 1934). She was also fascinated by the works of Alexander Blok and Anna Akhmatova , although she never met Blok and Akhmatova much later. In her description of the community in Koktebel Viktoria Schweitzer wrote : This was "the hour of her inspiration".

In Koktebel, Tsvetaeva met Sergei Yakovlevich Efron , an officer cadet , who was persecuted by the misfortune . She was 19 and he was 18 years old: they fell in love on the spot and married in 1912, the year in which her father's life's work, the Museum Alexander III. (Pushkin Museum), was ceremoniously opened by Tsar Nicholas II .

Marina Tsvetaeva's strong love for Efron did not stop her from having love stories with other men, including Ossip Mandelstam , to whom she dedicated a collection of poems called Milestones ( Версты , 1916). A stormy and ambivalent relationship (1914–1916) with the lesbian poet Sofia Parnok , who was seven years older than her, was treated in the cycle of poems The Friend ( Подруга ) and The Mistake ( Ошибка , 1920).

Until the revolution , Tsvetaeva lived with her husband in the Crimea ; she had two daughters: Ariadna (1912-1975) and Irina (1917-1920) and a son Georgi (1925-1944). In 1914 Efron volunteered for the front; In 1917 he was stationed in Moscow in the 56th Reserve Regiment.

Revolutionary years

Tsvetaeva experienced the October Revolution firsthand. On the train she met ordinary people and was shocked by the angry and violent atmosphere. In her diary she wrote: "In the air of the train compartment there were only three sharp words: bourgeois, junker, bloodsucker".

After the revolution, Efron joined the White Army, and Marina returned to Moscow in the hope of meeting her husband again. She was then stuck in the city for five years.

She wrote six verse dramas and poetry, such as The Tsar's Girl ( Царь-Девица ), and her epic about the civil war, Swan Camp ( Лебединый стан , 1917–1921), glorified the fighters against communism. The diary-style cycle of poems begins on the day of Tsar Nicholas II's abdication in March 1917 and ends late in 1920, when the anti-communist White Army was finally defeated. The "swans" in the poem's title represent the White Army volunteers like her husband Efron.

The Moscow famine took a terrible toll on Marina Tsvetaeva. With no relatives to turn to, she had no way of protecting herself or her daughters. In 1919 she placed Irina in the children's home in Kunzewo near Moscow, under the mistaken assumption that she would be better cared for there - however, Irina died there on February 15, 1920 of malnutrition. The death of the child plunged Tsvetaeva into deep grief and despair; in a letter she wrote: "God has punished me".

During these years Tsvetaeva maintained a close and intense friendship with the actress Sofie Gollidey , for whom she wrote a number of plays.

exile

Berlin and Prague

Memorial plaque on the house at Trautenaustraße 9 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf

In 1922 she left the Soviet Union with her daughter Ariadna and met Efron again in Berlin . There she published the poetry collections Separation ( Разлука ), Poems to Blok ( Стихи к Блоку ) and The Tsar's Girl .

In August 1922 the family moved to Prague . Since they could not afford an apartment in Prague themselves (Efron studied political science and sociology at Charles University and lived in a dormitory), Marina Tsvetaeva and Ariadna rented rooms in a village outside Prague.

In Prague, Marina Tsvetaeva had a passionate love affair with Konstantin Bojeslav Rosdewitsch , a former officer. The affair became well known among émigré circles, and even Efron found out about it. Efron was shocked, as can be seen from a letter to Voloshin, although he himself had stalked women on numerous occasions.

Her separation from Rosdewitsch in 1923 inspired Tsvetaeva almost immediately to her great work Poem from the End. New Year's Letter ( Поэма Конца ). She also processed the relationship with Rosdewitsch in the Poem vom Berg ( Поэма Горы , 1924–1939).

Around the same time, Marina Tsvetaeva's far more important - spiritual - relationship with Boris Pasternak , who had remained in the Soviet Union, began. The two met only rarely and each very briefly, but maintained a close friendship until the poet returned to Russia.

In the summer of 1924 Marina Tsvetaeva and her husband lived in the suburbs of Prague; and here Marina became pregnant with her son Georgi. In addition to the family's material difficulties, Efrons suffered from tuberculosis at this time. Tsvetaeva received a meager grant from the Czechoslovak state , which was granted to artists and writers. In addition, she did as much as she could to support the family through readings and book proceeds. She turned more and more to writing prose because she found it paid better than poetry.

Paris

In 1925 the family settled in Paris , where they were to spend the next 14 years, and where Georgi was born, whom she later only called "Mur". She actually wanted to call him Boris, after Pasternak, but Efron was strictly against it and insisted on Georgi. Georgi was to be a very difficult and exhausting child. Yet his mother loved him as only she could love, full of devotion and obsession. As an older sister, Ariadna immediately took on the role of helper and confidante of her mother and was thus robbed of a large part of her childhood. Nevertheless, Georgi became more and more difficult and rebellious over the years and did not thank his mother for her devotion.

Marina Tsvetaeva did not feel at home in Paris; the dominant Russian émigré writers' circles accused her of lacking or unclear criticism of the Soviet Union, despite her passionate poems from the time of the civil war.

In particular, she was resented by a letter of admiration to the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky . The émigré magazine Die neue Nachrichten , which had often featured articles from Tsvetaeva, then stopped printing anything from her. She found solace in correspondence with Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke , the Czech poet Anna Tesková and the critics Mirsky and Aleksander Bachrach .

In the meantime, her husband developed sympathy for the Soviets and felt homesick for Russia. However, because of his past as a “white” soldier, he was afraid. He finally began - either out of sympathy or to buy goodwill - to work as a spy for the NKVD , the forerunner of the KGB . Ariadna shared his views and turned increasingly against her mother. In 1937 she returned to the Soviet Union.

In the same year Efron also had to return home because the French police accused him of the murder of the Soviet dissident Ignaz Reiss . Questioning of the retarded Marina Tsvetaeva revealed that she apparently did not know anything about her husband's activities. However, since then she has been ostracized in Paris because it was assumed to have relations with the NKVD.

Soviet Union

The Second World War made Europe just as insecure and hostile as Russia, and Marina Tsvetaeva felt that she had no choice - in 1939 she too returned to the Soviet Union with her son.

She had not foreseen the horror that awaited her. Under Stalin , everyone who had lived abroad was suspect, as was everyone in the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia . Tsvetaeva's sister was in prison before she returned, and although Anastasia survived the Stalin era, the sisters were never to see each other again.

All doors were closed for Marina Tsvetaeva. Pasternak got her some translation work, but the recognized Soviet writers refused to help and ignored her plight. Nikolai Assejew , whose help she had hoped for, shied away from her for fear for his life and his career.

Efron and Ariadna were arrested for espionage. It turned out that Ariadna's fiancé was actually an NKVD agent who had been spying on the family. Efron was shot dead in 1941 and Ariadna spent eight years in prison. After Stalin's death, both were exonerated from the allegations.

In 1941 Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Yelabuga in the Tatar Autonomous Republic . They had no means of subsistence. Georgi harassed his mother in her poverty and begged her to leave the place; she saw no way of complying with his demands, but still tried to get permission to move to Chistopol .

Marina Tsvetaeva hanged herself on August 31, 1941. The exact location of her grave is still unknown today.

rehabilitation

Neither Stalin nor the communist regime as a whole were sympathetic to their work. It was not until the 1960s that she was rehabilitated with her work in the Soviet Union .

Appreciation

Tsvetaeva's poetry grew out of her own complex personality, her versatile talent and eccentricity, and her poetic use of language. God, existence, human soul, the predestination of the poet, the fate of Russia, love for Germany, Greek mythology, spiritual friendship, female sexuality and the tension between female feelings were topics of her work, which combined the opposing schools of acmeism and symbolism .

Marina Tsvetaeva in German translation (selection)

  • On your own way. Diary prose. Moscow 1917–1920, Paris 1934 (translated and afterword by Marie-Luise Bott). 5th edition. Library Suhrkamp 953, Frankfurt am Main 2007 (German first edition 1987), ISBN 978-3-518-01953-5 .
  • Selected works , 3 volumes (poetry, prose, letters), Berlin (GDR): Volk und Welt, 1989, ISBN 3-353-00315-0
  • Encounters with Maximilian Woloschin, Andrej Belyj and Rudolf Steiner (translated by Ilma Rakusa and Rolf-Dietrich Keil, edited and with an afterword by Taja Gut). Pforte, Dornach 2000, ISBN 3-85636-135-9 .
  • An evening out of this world. Little prose (translated and with an afterword by Ilma Rakusa). Library Suhrkamp 1317, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-22317-8 .
  • Rainer Maria Rilke and Marina Zwetajewa, a conversation in letters. (Translated by Angela Martini-Wonde and the 'New Year's Letter' by Felix Philipp Ingold). Published by Konstantin M. Asadowski, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1992. ISBN 3-458-16336-0 .
  • A trapped spirit. (Essays, translated and afterword by Rolf-Dietrich Keil ). Library Suhrkamp 1009, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-518-22009-8 .
  • Story by Sonečka. Lilith, Berlin 1984, ISBN 3-922946-02-X .
  • The story of a dedication. Poems and prose (translated from Russian, edited and with an afterword essay by Ralph Dutli ). Ammann, Zurich 1994/2003 , ISBN 3-250-10216-4 .
  • The house on the Old Pimen. Selection. (Efeuturm. Father and his museum. Two “forest kings”. 9 poems. Letters to Vera Bunina and Anna Tesková) . Translation by Elke Erb , Reclam-Verlag , Leipzig 1989, ISBN 3-379-00302-6 .
  • Earthly signs. Essays. Insel Verlag, Leipzig 1990, ISBN 3-7351-0054-6 . ( Insel-Bücherei 1078/2)
  • On a red steed. Poem . Poems and letters to Yevgeny Lann, WW Rosanco, Gronskij and Rodzewitsch . Translation Bettina Eberspächer . Oberbaum Verlag, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-926409-62-2 .
  • Letters to Anatolij Steiger . Translation Bettina Eberspächer. Oberbaum Verlag, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-928254-51-0 .
  • Letters to Ariadna Berg . Translation Bettina Eberspächer. Oberbaum Verlag, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-928254-25-1 .
  • Letters to the daughter. Diaries, letters, poems . Translation Bettina Eberspächer, Oberbaum Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-928254-69-3 .
  • Plays: Jack of Hearts. The blizzard. The stone angel . Translation Bettina Eberspächer, Oberbaum Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-928254-66-9 .
  • Love poems. (Translated from Russian, edited and with an afterword essay by Ralph Dutli). Ammann, Zurich 1997/2002, ISBN 3-250-30008-X .
  • My female brother. Letter to the Amazon (translated from the French and afterword by Ralph Dutli). Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 1985/1995, ISBN 3-88221-356-6 .
  • Mother and the music. Autobiographical prose. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-518-01941-4 .
  • Phoenix. Verse drama in three pictures. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-22057-8 .
  • Poem from the end. New year letter. Edition per procura, Vienna 2003, ISBN 3-901118-50-0 .
  • Marina Tsvetaeva / Anna Akhmatova: You drink my soul with a straw. Poems. Read by Katharina Thalbach and Ralph Dutli. Booklet essay: Ralph Dutli. 1 CD. der Hörverlag, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-89940-155-7
  • Rowan tree. Selected poems (Russian and German). dtv, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-423-12629-9 .
  • Try to be jealous. Poems (Russian and German). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-518-22340-2 .
  • Between us - the double blade. Reclam, Leipzig 1994, ISBN 3-379-01508-3 .
  • To Germany December 1, 1914. Poem - translation by Gert Hans Wengel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 29, 2014, p. 20
  • Praise to Aphrodite. Poems of love and passion (translated from Russian and with an essay by Ralph Dutli). Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2021, ISBN 978-3-8353-3943-9

Settings

literature

  • Marija Belkina: The last years of the Tsvetaeva Marina. Insel, Frankfurt 2002, ISBN 3-458-16153-8 .
  • Bettina Eberspächer : Reality and Transcendence . Marina Cvetaeva's poetic synthesis . Verlag Otto Sagner, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-87690-383-1 .
  • Ilja Ehrenburg : Memoirs. People - Years - Life I 1891–1922. Munich 1962, special edition 1965, ISBN 3-463-00511-5 , pp. 346–354.
  • Elaine Feinstein : Marina Tsvetaeva. A biography. Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, Frankfurt 1990, ISBN 3-627-10018-2 .
  • Adolf J. Schmid : Marina Zwetajewa 1892–1941: on the trail of a unique poet and a symbolic figure of her time - with memories of a childhood in Freiburg and in the Black Forest - and with a number of historical connections . Rombach-Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau 1992, ISBN 3-929410-01-X .
  • Elke Schmitter: Marina Tsvetaeva: No hook, no chandelier. In: passions. 99 women authors of world literature. Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-570-01048-8 , pp. 624-628.
  • Thomas Urban : Russian writers in Berlin in the twenties . Nicolai, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-89479-097-0 , pp. 130-145.
  • Anastasija Tsvetaeva: childhood with Marina . Limes, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-8090-2119-9 .
  • Claus-Peter Hilger: The Russian poet Marina Zwetajewa in: Heimat am Hochrhein, yearbook of the district Waldshut 2005, Verlag Edition Isele, Eggingen. ISBN 3-86142-331-6 , pp. 71-74

Web links

Commons : Marina Tsvetaeva  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Marina Tsvetaeva (Russian)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ From 1885 professor for Roman literature, from 1889 professor for art history. S. ru: Цветаев, Иван Владимирович and [1] .
  2. ↑ Nice memories of Horben. Badische Zeitung, September 5, 2001, accessed on August 4, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Viktoria Schweitzer: Marina Tsvetaeva . HarperCollins, 1992, ISBN 0-00-272053-1 .
  4. ↑ Marina Tsvetaeva: "To Germany" (written at the end of 1914)
personal data
SURNAME Tsvetaeva, Marina Ivanovna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Цветаева, Марина Ивановна (Russian); Cvetaeva, Marina Ivanovna; Cvetajevová, Marina; Svetajeva, Marina I .; Tsvétaeva, Marina I .; Tsvetayeva, Marina; Zvetaieva, Marina
SHORT DESCRIPTION Russian poet and writer
BIRTH DATE October 8, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Moscow , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH August 31, 1941
PLACE OF DEATH Yelabuga , Tatar ASSR , Russian SFSR , Soviet Union