The Prisoner of Poetry
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There are two broad categories of biography that you can read. One is the kind in which the author tackles a whole period in a country's history, bringing in the culture that created his/her subject as well as the influence that character had on the times. Good examples of this sort are Samuel Eliot Morison's "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" about Columbus, John Womack Jr.'s "Zapata and the Mexican Revolution", or Paul Murray Kendall's "Louis XI"---all first class biographies. The second kind is more intimate; a narrower focus on the character, in which the author tries to plumb the psychological depths of the person and reveal the motivations and underlying feelings behind their achievements. TSVETAEVA is certainly of the second variety. Though Marina Tsvetaeva, one of Russia's foremost poets in the 20th century, lived through wars, revolution, repression, and radical social-economic change in her country, the book pays minimal attention to any of it. If you, the reader, are not aware of the depth and sweep of all these things in Russia or the USSR in the years 1914-1941, you are not going to understand this book. The facts that Tsvetaeva was persona-non grata after the 1917 Revolution, that her works were suppressed till long after her death, that she had to be discovered by the younger generations, that one of Russia's great poets was not mentioned in schools for a long time---these important things are very much underplayed by the author, who seems to have written for a Russian audience alone. Painstakingly, lovingly reconstructed from the poems, the letters, the diaries, and many interviews, this biography is surely a labor of many years. For the details and for the many insights into the life and psychology of a complex woman out of tune with her times, I'd certainly award this book five stars, but on the other hand, it is packed with an enormous amount of detail, more than most non-Russian readers can absorb. I sometimes felt repelled by the cloying quality of the author's adulation of her famous subject. Also, the translations of the poetry are amazingly wooden. I can get no feeling of why Russians consider Tsvetaeva such a great poet, though I'm prepared to accept that she is.
Tsvetaeva grew up before the Revolution in a well-off family. Her mother transferred a lot of her cultural aspirations to her, or we may say that Tsvetaeva inherited a lot of her mother's emotional intensity and need to be the center of all relationships around her. Ideas such as "money is filth" and "only the things of the spirit matter" were common among certain classes in Europe, but they lead to very unhappy lives if inherited money runs out. I find Tsvetaeva a most unpleasant person right from childhood, a person who could write that "it is stupid and indecent to be happy", a person who therefore would be in love with tragedy, loneliness and unhappiness all her life. She neglected and betrayed her husband, abandoned all her myriad lovers, drove her children away, (one starved to death in an orphanage at an early age) and eventually hung herself. She favored the White (losing) side in the Revolution, leaving Russia in the mid-20s to live abroad. In exile, she moved only in the tightknit Russian emigre communities in Germany, Czechoslovakia and France, never opening to anything that wasn't already familiar. Besides being influenced by Pushkin, she had strange semi- or full romantic relationships with a number of famous people, who are written about here---Mandelstam, Blok, and Pasternak are those most known in the West---but one is left with the feeling that she just needed a series of "idols" or "ideal men" (or women) to whom she could dedicate her emotive poetry which fed off her constant inner turmoil. Her own husband likened her to a huge stove whose fires needed more and more `wood'. The ashes would be thrown out without further thought. Though I found Tsvetaeva impossible to like and the translations of her poetry did not inspire me to read more, I still recommend TSVETAEVA as a most fascinating biography. Her story is part of the immense tragedy that is Russian history in the 20th century.
