Marina Tsvetaeva was one of the great Russian poets of the twentieth century. Born in 1892, the daughter of a gifted pianist and the founder of what became the Pushkin Museum, she led a cloistered and intense childhood. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1910, and the following year she met Sergei Efron, whom she married. In 1917 Efron joined the White Army and Tsvetaeva did not see him again for five years. In 1922 she managed to join him in exile in Prague and there, and later in Paris, she wrote many of her greatest works. At the outbreak of World War II, estranged from Efron, who had been exposed as a Soviet spy, she returned to the Soviet Union. There, in August 1941, she committed suicide. Viktoria Schweitzer's biography, based on 20 years research, is the most detailed account of Tsvetaeva's life yet to be published.