Description
"No more passionate voice ever sounded in Russian poetry of the 20th century," Joseph Brodsky writes of Marina Tsvetaeva. And yet Western readers are only now starting to discover what Tsvetaeva's Russian audience has already recognized, "that she was one of the major poetic voices of the century" (Tomas Venclova, The New Republic).
Born to a family of Russian intelligentsia in 1892 and coming of age in the crucible of revolution and war, Tsvetaeva has been seen as a victim of her politicized time, her life and her work marked by exile, neglect, and persecution. This book is the first to show us the poet as she discovered her life through art, shaped as much by inner demons as by the political forces and harsh realities of her day. With remarkable psychological and literary subtlety, Lily Feiler traces these demons through the tragic drama of Tsvetaeva's life and poetry. Hers is a story full of contradictions, resisting social and literary conventions but enmeshed in the politics and poetry of her time. Feiler depicts the poet in her complex relation to her contemporaries-Pasternak, Rilke, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova. She shows us a woman embodying the values of nineteenth-century romanticism, yet radical in her poetry, supremely independent in her art, but desperate for appreciation and love, simultaneously mother and child in her complicated sexual relationships with men and women.
From prerevolutionary Russia to Red Moscow, from pre-World War II Berlin, Prague, and Paris to the Soviet Union under Stalin, Feiler follows the tortuous drama of Tsvetaeva's life and work to its last tragic act, exposing at each turn the passions that molded some of this century's most powerful poetry.
About the Author
Reviews
"Feiler's book is the most complete biography so far written. The poet's life is recorded and interpreted in a new way, meaningful and coherent. Marina Tsvetaeva's very dramatic life is told in splendid detail."-Simon Karlinsky, author of Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World, and Her Poetry
"The life and poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, Russia's greatest modern poet, were marked by passion, commitment and craft. The terrifying egotism that fueled her poetry and mythologized her life from childhood to suicide has never been so convincingly set out as in Lily Feiler's psychobiography."-Barbara Heldt, author of Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature
"This well-researched, thoughtful, and fair biography of Marina Tsvetaeva especially illuminates that intimate connection between passionate artist and self-destructive woman that, in very different circumstances, also characterized the genius of Sylvia Plath. Against the background of the Russian Revolution, the privations and hardships endured by this uniquely gifted but psychologically damaged Romantic are viewed with a sympathy untouched by sentimentality. I cannot imagine a better introduction to Tsvetaeva's conflicted life and work."-Anne Stevenson, author of Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath
Book Information
ISBN 9780822314820
Author Lily Feiler
Format Hardback
Page Count 336
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Born to a family of Russian intelligentsia in 1892 and coming of age in the crucible of revolution and war, Tsvetaeva has been seen as a victim of her politicized time, her life and her work marked by exile, neglect, and persecution. This book is the first to show us the poet as she discovered her life through art, shaped as much by inner demons as by the political forces and harsh realities of her day. With remarkable psychological and literary subtlety, Lily Feiler traces these demons through the tragic drama of Tsvetaeva's life and poetry. Hers is a story full of contradictions, resisting social and literary conventions but enmeshed in the politics and poetry of her time. Feiler depicts the poet in her complex relation to her contemporaries-Pasternak, Rilke, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Akhmatova. She shows us a woman embodying the values of nineteenth-century romanticism, yet radical in her poetry, supremely independent in her art, but desperate for appreciation and love, simultaneously mother and child in her complicated sexual relationships with men and women.
From prerevolutionary Russia to Red Moscow, from pre-World War II Berlin, Prague, and Paris to the Soviet Union under Stalin, Feiler follows the tortuous drama of Tsvetaeva's life and work to its last tragic act, exposing at each turn the passions that molded some of this century's most powerful poetry.
About the Author
Lily Feiler is an independent scholar and translator living in New York. Her translation of Victor Shklovsky's Mayakovsky and His Circle was nominated for the 1972 National Book Award for Translation.
Reviews
"Feiler's book is the most complete biography so far written. The poet's life is recorded and interpreted in a new way, meaningful and coherent. Marina Tsvetaeva's very dramatic life is told in splendid detail."-Simon Karlinsky, author of Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, Her World, and Her Poetry
"The life and poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva, Russia's greatest modern poet, were marked by passion, commitment and craft. The terrifying egotism that fueled her poetry and mythologized her life from childhood to suicide has never been so convincingly set out as in Lily Feiler's psychobiography."-Barbara Heldt, author of Terrible Perfection: Women and Russian Literature
"This well-researched, thoughtful, and fair biography of Marina Tsvetaeva especially illuminates that intimate connection between passionate artist and self-destructive woman that, in very different circumstances, also characterized the genius of Sylvia Plath. Against the background of the Russian Revolution, the privations and hardships endured by this uniquely gifted but psychologically damaged Romantic are viewed with a sympathy untouched by sentimentality. I cannot imagine a better introduction to Tsvetaeva's conflicted life and work."-Anne Stevenson, author of Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath
Book Information
ISBN 9780822314820
Author Lily Feiler
Format Hardback
Page Count 336
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
