ABSTRACT
In 1925 Tsvetayeva transferred her residence to Paris, now the main Russian émigré cultural centre. Her original intention had been to pay a temporary visit to the French capital, where she had been invited to give a poetry recital. It was so successful that she decided not to return to Prague, and was to spend her next fourteen years in the suburbs of Paris. Tsvetayeva’s unpopularity in France was increased by her enthusiasm for certain home–based poets, particularly Mayakovsky and Pasternak. Tsvetayeva the dramatist continues to ventilate a favourite theme of her maturity, the “by–passing” of love: its frustration, its nonachieve–ment, its nonconsummation. Tsvetayeva went on to write a further half dozen longer poems of up to several hundred lines in Paris in the late 1920s. Tsvetayeva once remarked that of all those whom she had met in life, only Rilke and Pasternak had been equal to her in human and poetic strength.
