Sonja Franeta - My Pink Road to Russia

Following Tsvetaeva, Parnok had other great loves: actress Lyudmila Erarskaya, mathematics professor Olga Tsuberbiller, singer Marina Maksakova. She dedicated poems to these women, including very personal and erotic details in her verse. To Maksakova, whose first name was the same as Tsvetaeva’s, Parnok wrote a poem for Tsvetaeva: “How strange that you remind me so of her!”

Parnok’s appreciation of women and literature is a gift to us all. In 1933 she died of heart problems in the village of Kirinsky, outside Moscow, with her lover and other friends at her side. Parnok’s friends did not forget and met afterwards on a regular basis to share their recollections and Sophia’s poetry at the home of Olga Tsuberbiller. Commenting on Parnok’s final years in her book, Polyakova writes: “The relationship with Vedeneyeva [her last love] was both the most tragic [because it was short] and the most brilliant time of her life: already on the threshold of death, she found the fullness of love and creativity, the greatest blessings on earth.”

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow on October 8, 1892 to an intellectual family, her mother a pianist, and her father an art history professor. She began writing poetry at the age of six and produced her first book of poems, Evening Album , at the young age of eighteen. Noticed by several important literary figures in Russia, she became part of the literary scene. She met Sergey Efron, a poet at the time, and married and had two children. She had many loves during her lifetime. When life became very difficult (she lost one of her daughters in the post-revolutionary famine), and perhaps for political reasons (her husband, Sergey Efron, had fought against the Bolsheviks and emigrated to Berlin at the end of the 1917 revolution), Marina and her surviving daughter left for Europe in 1922 to join Sergey another child was born. Years later, the family returned to Russia and each of them to tragic fates. Marina took her own life in 1941.

I am glad she lived and wrote, as are many others. My life is richer because of Tsvetaeva. Reading and translating her work has given me such pleasure. I could say I learned Russian because of her. Meditating on her poetry, her lines, her wordplay, and her prose, bring me to another place. Rambling on in her conversational manner, she let herself go in writing. So inspiring! I went to her home on Borisoglebsky pereulok in Moscow several times, in 1992 and 1993, when supporters were just setting things up, but I saw and felt her more in her poetry, in her writing, and in details of her life.

With her mischievous eyes and brown hair turned up at the ends, Marina, who let herself love women and question gender roles, was encouraged in her passion and originality in her youth in Russia. Her connection with and interest in women emerged early in her life. In 1911 she fell in love with Asya Turgeneva, a friend of her youth, and described her with an eye on gender variance—a leopard skin on her shoulder, “her male businesslike air.” But ”she is going away, you see, and I will lose her, lose her affection. And there was a nobler, deeper feeling: a longing for the whole race, the lament of the Amazons for the one who was going away, going over onto that other shore, for the sister departing—to them.”

The wild artist Maximilian Voloshin, whose mother was a cross-dresser, invited Marina to join his circle ( kruzhok ) of artists in Sudak in the Crimea, overlooking the Black Sea, and she fit in well. There she met her husband Sergey, poets Adelaida Gertsyk, Osip Mandelshtam, and many others. She even brought her lover, poet Sophia Parnok, to Voloshin’s dacha in 1915. In reviewing Marina’s first book of poetry, dedicated to the artist Maria Bashkirtseva, Voloshin wrote “Tsvetaeva does not think, she lives in her verse.” And she herself captured her own approach to poetry as follows: “The poem writes itself through me.”

Marina’s independence and radical spirit were powerful. As Nadezhda Mandelshtam, the wife of the great Russian Jewish poet Osip (with whom Marina had a brief affair), described her: “she was absolutely natural and fantastically self-willed. I have a vivid recollection of her cropped hair, loose-limbed gait—like a boy’s—and speech remarkably like her verse.” Marina liked to shock people, quite attracted to the image of the Amazon, and at times displaying a certain masculinity in her appearance.