Volume 34, Number 15 · October 8, 1987
Poet of the Air
By John Bayley
Marina Tsvetaeva: The Woman, her World and her Poetry
by Simon Karlinsky
Cambridge University Press, 289 pp., $15.95 (paper)
A Captive Lion: The Life of Marina Tsvetayeva
by Elaine Feinstein
Dutton, 289 pp., $19.95
Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetayeva
translated by Elaine Feinstein
Dutton, 108 pp., $12.95
In Literature and Revolution, published in 1924 and widely translated, Trotsky expressed a special contempt for Russian women poets. The new socialist society had no use for them. All they require, in their lives or in their so-called poems, is a man and God, whom they regard as a convenient friend of the family, capable of performing from time to time the duties of a doctor specializing in feminine complaints. As to God, 'How this individual, no longer young, and burdened by the personal, often bothersome errands of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and others, manages in his spare time to direct the destinies of the universe is simply incomprehensible.'
Review, 2703 words
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