The 3 best books by Marina Tsvetaeva

Talking about Russian literature always evokes a nineteenth-century hint of the Tolstoy, Dostoevsky o Chekhov. But also the languid feather of Marina Tsvetaeva gives us today a necessary feminine point of view of that Russian existence among the harsh cold like a struggle between the steppe and Siberia. Under these simple geographical conditions, one can better deduce the concerns from the closure of souls pushed to existential wandering from the untimely confinement of the harshest winters.

The result in the Tsvetaeva case is a literature that exponentially elevates intimacy to an upholstery overloaded with contrasts between the kind memories of childhood and everything else. With its rawness capable of awakening a poetic force only achievable in a singular voice like Marina's.

But it is that in the case of illustrious figures of literature such as Marina, who accompany their arrival to maturity with the dark dawns of the Great War and the endless Russian Revolution, what they tell halfway between the chronicle and the newspaper takes the value of rich intrahistory, of certainties with their lights and shadows far beyond what the laconic explanations (in the purely human) of history books can ever reach.

Top 3 recommended books by Marina Tsvietáieva

My mother and music

There is something of a particular relationship between each child and their parent of the same sex. Because if a father does not want to make a child what he himself chose, it is because she will want to make him what he never managed to be. And in that transmission the contradictions between desire and action appear that strengthen ties both a posteriori and serve to worsen the strengthening in crucial moments of life.

The most lyrical prose ends up turning everything into the idealized haven of the best in hard times. And in what Marina has written it is attested that love is a note held in memory as the most wonderful composition.

My mother and music is a beautiful evocation of childhood, but, above all, of the presence of the mother through a familiar element such as the piano. The fascinating poetic force of Marina Tsvietaeva flows in this story that transports us to a world where everyday life takes on a magical dimension, and life takes on an exemplary role.

My mother and music

My father and his museum

Marina Tsvetaeva wrote this autobiographical account during exile in France and published it in Russian, in 1933, in various magazines in Paris; three years later, in 1936, trying to get closer to French readers, he reworked his childhood memories in French, a set of five chapters which he named My father and his museum and which, however, never got published in life.

In both versions brought together in this volume, the author offers an emotional and lyrical evocation of the figure of her father, Ivan Tsvetaev, a university professor who dedicated his life to the founding of the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts, the current Pushkin Museum. Often laconic and fragmentary but with an extraordinary poetic force, this wonderful text, vibrant and moving, brings us closer to the intimacy of an inimitable poet than few others.

Diaries of the 1917 Revolution

If there is a paradoxical time in the history of humanity, it is the period of the Russian Revolution. The paradigm of communism passed as an idealized political legacy that was disrupted from Lenin to Stalin, to end up degenerating into the human condition itself, looking to power and convinced of its authority and its morality above all.

Communism ended up being Machiavellianism at its worst and the fault was never the ideal but rather the executors of the ideas. Beyond politics, what really explains what happened is the chronicle of a narrator affected by that more Orwellian libertarian transition that was definitely transformative for the better.

This book brings together excerpts from the diaries of Marina Tsvetaeva during one of the most dramatic periods in Russian history. Extraordinary observer, the poet collects in them her tremendous life adventures: the loneliness, the straits and the hardships that the revolution brought with it. The result is an intimate text loaded with lyricism and the lucid beauty of a personal and seductive voice.

Diaries of the 1917 Revolution
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