A Silver Age poet writing between exile and return
Her 1939 return shows the price an émigré writer could face on returning to Stalin's USSR.
A Silver Age poet, prose writer, and translator, she lived in exile in Berlin, Prague, and Paris after the Civil War, returned to the USSR in 1939, and died in wartime evacuation at Yelabuga.
Career Timeline
- 1910Self-publishes first collection, Evening Album
- 1922–1939Émigré life in Berlin, Prague, and Paris
- 1939Returns to the USSR
- 1941Dies in wartime evacuation at Yelabuga
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionPoet of the civil warWhile her husband served with the Whites, she recorded the civil war years in verse from an impoverished Moscow.
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeThe poet who returnedA poet who returned after her husband and daughter were arrested and took her own life in 1941.
The Price of Return: Family Tragedy
Tsvetaeva's husband Sergei Efron, a former White Army officer during the Civil War, was recruited by the Soviet NKVD while in emigration. In September 1937, after NKVD defector Ignace Reiss was assassinated in Switzerland, Efron, implicated in the affair, fled France for Moscow. Their daughter Ariadna had already returned to the USSR in March 1937. Tsvetaeva herself hesitated but followed in June 1939, bringing their son Georgy. The family initially stayed at an NKVD dacha in Bolshevo, near Moscow. But on August 27, 1939, Ariadna was arrested; on October 10, Efron followed. Efron was shot at the Lubyanka on October 16, 1941, six weeks after Tsvetaeva's own death. Ariadna endured fifteen years of camps and exile before rehabilitation in 1955. After the arrests Tsvetaeva wrote almost no original poetry, scraping by on translations. Stranded in wartime evacuation at Yelabuga with no means to support her son, she hanged herself on August 31, 1941. Her suicide note to her son read: 'Murlyga! Forgive me, but going on would only have been worse. I am seriously ill, this is no longer me. I cannot live any longer.' Georgy was killed at the front in 1944. The return devoured the entire Tsvetaeva family.