Marina Tsvetaeva -- a writer that was always on the outskirts of my readings and studies of Russian literature. Oh we read some of her poems (short ones) and knew her sad biography in outline and even read excerpts from her prose, but I never really had occasion to delve into her writing until this book fell into my hands. I found "A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose" of Marina Tsvetaeva on the library bookstore free cart. It did have some pages about to fall out from the middle, but I relished the chance to read a generous selection of her prose in English and then go back and try it in Russian. Her writing did not disappoint -- a mixture of beauty and strangeness. Her writing most reminds me of Pasternak's prose, but more whimsical. Do all modernist Russian poets write like this? The world of the Russian Intelligentsia at the turn of the century (20th century) was indeed small for they were always running into each other, even half a world away from Russia. My father noted to me after watching the movie "Dr. Zhivago" (he never read the book) how impossible all those chance meetings were since Russia was such a vast country, but after reading autobiographies and memoirs of these writers, it seems that it was a given that Tsvetaeva would run into Bely in Germany or that Pasternak knew Mayakovsky. It was as if these writers and poets were magnetically drawn to each other wherever they were.
This collection is a lovely introduction both to her biography and her prose writing. It also shows the depth of her literary and cultural understanding with her analysis of Pushkin and a comparison of 2 translations of Schiller's poem "Der Erlkonig". Wonderful!
Contents:
A Living Word about a Living Man
Koktebel
Max and the Folk Tale
A Captive Spirit
An Otherworldly Evening
My Father and His Museum
Charlottenburg
The Uniform
The Laurel Wreath
The Opening of the Museum
The Intended
The Tower of Ivy
The House at Old Pimen
Mother and Music
The Devil
My Pushkin
Two Forest Kings
Pushkin and Pugachev ( )