A Russian Psyche: The Poetic Mind of Marina Tsvetaeva

Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s powerful poetic voice and her tragic life have often prompted literary commentators to treat her as either a martyr or a monster. Born in Russia in 1892, she emigrated to Europe in 1922, returned to the Soviet Union at the height of the Stalinist Terror, and committed suicide in 1941. Alyssa Dinega focuses on the poetry, rediscovering Tsvetaeva as a serious thinker with a coherent artistic and philosophical vision.

Reviews

“Working with smoking-hot material and completely at home in the scarcely cooler mass of previous scholarship, Dinega knows her own mind. Without idealizing or simplifying her subject, she never loses control, compassion, or awe.”
—Caryl Emerson, Princeton University

“Significantly expands our understanding of this great and tragic writer and of what it means to be a woman poet.”
—Olga Peters Hasty, author of Pushkin’s Tatiana