Volume 27, Number 16 · October 23, 1980
A Poet's Tragedy
By John Bayley
The Demesne of the Swans
by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated and edited by Robin Kemball
Ardis, 211 pp., $7.50 (paper)
Tsvetaeva: A Pictorial Biography
edited by Ellendea Proffer, translated by J. Marin King
Ardis, 143 pp., $10.00 (paper)
A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose
by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated and edited by J. Marin King
Ardis, 491 pp., $7.50 (paper)
Marina Tsvetaeva is the most Russian of poets in the same sense in which Hardy could be called the most English of poets, or Whitman the most American. Paradoxically Russia's greatest poet, Pushkin, is not, in the obvious sense, very Russian. Of course a Russian poetry-lover would rightly say that this is a meaningless observation, but it does none the less remain true that Shakespeare and Pushkin are not placed by their nationality. Other poets are, and Tsvetaeva is one. It alters the case not at all—in fact it confirms it—that her family origins were also part Polish, part German: the most intensively English persons often come from Ireland, and American expatriates have been known to be more French than the French.
Review, 4060 words
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