ABSTRACT
Soviet literary elite. In August 1941, after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, she was evacuated to Elabuga, where she committed suicide and where she is buried in an unmarked mass grave.
She started writing poetry at the age of six. Her first two collections of verse, The Evening Album (1910) and The Magic Lantern (1912), offer a mythlike evocation of childhood experiences. The Evening Album was received favorably by such established writers as Briusov and Gumilyov Her poems in the collection Mileposts I. (1921) present a consecutive lyrical chronicle of the year 1916 in a diary format. Her use of more than one kind of foot in the line is a major innovation in Russian versification. Similarly novel is her simultaneous use of the archaic and colloquial dialects. A lyric chronicle of 1917, the year of two Russian revolutions, is offered in the collection The Demesne of the Swans, written between 1917 and 1921 and published in 1957. In her poetic diary, Craft (1923), personal themes merge with concerns about postrevolutionary Russia. This and another collection, After Russia (1928), represent the peak of Tsvetaeva s achievement. Inspired by her experiences in a provincial and philistine Czech town, she wrote perhaps her best work, the long, satirical poem, The Pied Piper (1925-1926), which is based on a German legend. The "Poem of the Staircase," written in 1926, is a lyrical narrative of the Paris squalor, in which the impoverished poet had to make her home. Also in Paris she wrote her two neoclassical verse tragedies, Ariadne (1927) and Phaedre (1928). Her only piece of prose fiction is the Letter to an Amazon, written in 1932, which examines lesbian love. In 1938-1939, before her return to the Soviet Union, she wrote her "Verses to Czechoslovakia," which voice her strong sympathies with the invaded people.
