Roland's Horn. Poems 1917–1925 by Marina Tsvetaeva

The years between the twin revolutions of 1917 and Tsvetaeva’s departure at the end of April 1922, together with her daughter Alya, for Berlin and then Prague were the most productive of her entire career. In addition to a host of shorter, lyrical items, she wrote the long poems On a Red Steed and Tsar-Maiden, the latter a reworking and reimagining of folklore material in characteristically disconcerting and idiosyncratic style.

Thanks to a chance meeting on the train which brought her back from Crimea to Moscow in November 1917, Tsvetaeva became acquainted with Pavel Antokolsky and, through him, with the members of the drama studio run by Yevgeny Vakhtangov, inspiring her to write no fewer than five dramas in verse in the space of two years. There, too, she met the actor Yury Zavadsky, and the diminutive actress with an English surname, Sonechka Holliday, to both of whom she dedicated extended cycles not fully assembled till after her death, as was the cycle of twenty-seven poems addressed to the painter Nikolay Nikolayevich Vysheslavtsvev (1890–1952), headed only by his initials.

The contrast between this outpouring of verse – an estimated 735 poems just for the period covered by this volume – and the background circumstances of inconceivable hardship, could hardly be more striking.

Translated from Russian by Christopher Whyte

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