Head on a Gleaming Plate - Tsvetaeva, Marina

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Résumé :
The poems in this volume were composed between August 1917 and October 1918 and thus they span the most turbulent period of the 20th century in Russia, as the nascent republic was overthrown by the Bolsheviks and the country descended into civil war. This collection concentrates on the lyric poems that Tsvetaeva wrote at this time, whose importance should not be underestimated. Each offers a modest, unassuming gateway to the immense world of her imagination and her travailed, eternally questioning and endangered humanity, even those with a missing word or phrase she did not find the time to locate and craft amidst the overwhelming flow of inspiration. Like the events which formed their background, these poems raise ethical and human issues to which no simple answers can be found. And when Tsvetaeva announces, as the winter of 1918-1919 approaches, that 'It befits heroes to be frozen', she prompts us to consider the nature of her own, personal heroism at a stage when the very worst was still to come. ...

Biographie:
The life of Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), now recognised as a major Russian and indeed European poet of the 20th century, was marked to an unusual extent by the political and ideological conflicts of her time. Born to a privileged background in Moscow, the revolutions of 1917 brought her crushing hardship and deprivation, but also ushered in a period of unparalleled creativity as poet and playwright. In 1922 she left for the west to rejoin her husband, who had fought with the counter-revolutionary forces. In 1925 the family moved from near Prague to Paris. Their existence was marked by appalling poverty and a growing alienation from the Russian ?migr? community. When in 1937 her husband was implicated in an assassination carried out by the Stalinist secret services, Tsvetaeva saw no alternative but to follow him back to the USSR. After the Nazis invaded Russia, she was evacuated to Yelabuga, where she took her own life in August 1941. The publication of well over 1,800 letters, as well as her diaries and notebooks, has revealed her to be a thinker of quite exceptional daring and philosophical profundity.

Sommaire:
The poems in this volume were composed between August 1917 and October 1918 and thus they span the most turbulent period of the 20th century in Russia, as the nascent republic was overthrown by the Bolsheviks and the country descended into civil war. This collection concentrates on the lyric poems that Tsvetaeva wrote at this time, whose importance should not be underestimated. Each offers a modest, unassuming gateway to the immense world of her imagination and her travailed, eternally questioning and endangered humanity, even those with a missing word or phrase she did not find the time to locate and craft amidst the overwhelming flow of inspiration. Like the events which formed their background, these poems raise ethical and human issues to which no simple answers can be found. And when Tsvetaeva announces, as the winter of 1918-1919 approaches, that 'It befits heroes to be frozen', she prompts us to consider the nature of her own, personal heroism at a stage when the very worst was still to come. ...