Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941)

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow, Russia, a daughter of Ivan Vladimirovich Tsvetaev, a professor of Fine Art at the University of Moscow, and his second wife Maria Alexandrovna, a concert pianist. Anastasia Tsvetaevna was her younger sister. The family traveled abroad and Marina attended schools in Switzerland and Germany, and studied history and literature at the Sorbonne. In 1910, she self-published her first collection of poems. In 1912, she married Sergei Efron, also a poet and a Russian military officer, with whom she would have three children. Her second collection of verses, Magic Lantern, also appeared in 1912. Between 1917 and 1922, she wrote a cycle of six plays in prose and verse. In 1919, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, in an attempt to save her two daughters from starvation, Marina placed them in a state orphanage, but Irina died there of malnutrition. Marina and her daughter Ariadna then left Russia in 1922 to join Efron in Berlin. They lived in Paris and Prague and had a son, Gregori. The family returned to Moscow in 1939. Efron and Ariadna were arrested on charges of espionage in 1941. He was executed, and Ariadna was sent to a forced labor camp. Marina Tsvetaeva committed suicide that year at age 48. Much of her work was re-published posthumously in the Soviet Union after 1961, and brought her international recognition as a major poet.