admirers to prove that she had no idea of her husband’s secret work are absurd and belittle her intelligence. Tsvetaeva herself claimed to have had nothing to do with underground pro-Soviet work “and not only out of total inability but out of a profound revulsion toward politics,
She was not being sincere. Her hatred of Nazism (so clearly expressed in her great cycle of angry poems on Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1939) and her sympathy for the Spanish republicans are well documented. Even emigre poet and essayist Georgy Adamovich, who was rather skeptical of Tsvetaeva, noted her “innate awareness that everything in the world—politics, love, religion, poetry, history, absolutely everything— converges.”7
Much of Tsvetaeva’s work (especially the poetry and prose relating to public figures and events—Nicholas I, Nicholas II, the White movement, Mayakovsky) is clearly political. She raised her children, Alya and Mur, as Soviet patriots (Alya even becoming a Soviet agent in France). Her lover and later close friend in Paris, Konstantin Rodzevich, to whom she dedicated two of her masterpieces,
Tsvetaeva herself apparently did not participate in her husband’s underground activities. Still, she used the apolitical mask mainly as a survival tactic. It helped her to endure interrogations by the French police, but it did not work in Moscow, where she wrote on September 5, 1940: “Everyone considers me brave. I don’t know a more fearful person than I. I’m afraid of everything. Eyes, blackness, steps, and most of all—myself.” And on the same day: “I do not want to die. I want not to be.”8
In other circumstances the ambitious Efron could have become a big shot in Soviet intelligence. But he was executed on October 16, 1941, in the Moscow Butyrka Prison on the ridiculous charges of espionage for France.
On that day the Butyrka Prison was being “cleansed” of prisoners: the Germans were at the gate of Moscow. Knowing nothing of the execution of his father, Mur wrote in his diary, which was first published in 2004: “An enormous number of people are running away, loaded up with sacks and trunks…. The Academy of Sciences, the institutes, the Bolshoi Theater—they’ve all vanished like smoke…. Some say that the Germansare expected in Moscow tonight.”9
Mur did not know he was all alone. (His sister, Alya, had been sent to a northern prison camp the year before.) The sixteen-year-old’s political views were changing quickly now that he was experiencing Soviet reality: “When I lived in Paris, I was definitely a Communist. I attended hundreds of rallies, frequently took part in demonstrations…Andre Gide, Hemingway, Dos Passos were very close to the Communists. Then they grew disillusioned, for various reasons…. So am I, and how!”10
In 1944, when Tsvetaeva’s son was nineteen, he was sent to the front, where he was killed; the whereabouts of his grave—and of his father’s and mother’s—are unknown. They say that when Mirsky was dying in the Soviet prison camp he laughed bitterly at his Communist illusions. Probably Tsvetaeva had profound regrets about returning to the Soviet Union. But there is also an example of a great master hounded by the Soviet regime who remained true until his dying breath to communist ideals, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and atheism.
Photo Insert
Count Leo Tolstoy in his favorite photograph, 1908
Anton Chekhov (left) with Maxim Gorky, Crimea, 1900
The great bass Fedor Chaliapin in the role of Tsar Boris Godunov, Bolshoi Theater, 1918
Sergei Rachmaninoff, in a portrait by Konstantin Somov, 1925
Impresario Sergei Diaghilev, in a portrait by Valentin Serov, 1908
Vaslav Nijinsky, 1906
Igor Stravinsky, 1928
An avant-garde exhibition in Petrograd in 1913, with
Anna Akhmatova with her husband, poet Nikolai Gumilev, and their son, Lev, 1916
Boris Pasternak, in a portrait by Yuri Annenkov, 1921
The first Soviet Commissar of Education (who dealt with all cultural issues), Anatoly Lunacharsky, in a portrait by Yuri Annenkov, 1920
Four pillars of the Soviet avant-garde: the composer Dmitri Shostakovich (far left) with the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold (seated), the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (behind them), and the artist Alexander Rodchenko (standing, far right), 1929
Konstantin Stanislavsky, 1928
Sergei Prokofiev (at the piano, left) with Sergei Eisenstein, working on the film
George Balanchine
Vladimir Horowitz
Vladimir Ashkenazy
The theater director Yuri Lyubimov (left) with the sculptor Ernst Neizvestny
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Vassily Aksyonov
The poet and singer Bulat Okudzhava
The actor, singer, and poet Vladimir Vysotsky
Solomon Volkov (left) interviewing Joseph Brodsky in the poet’s New York residence
The composer Alfred Schnittke at his Moscow apartment
The movie director Andrei Tarkovsky at work
Maya Plisetskaya
Rudolf Nureyev
Mikhail Baryshnikov
The dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky
The emigre writer Sergei Dovlatov
The artists Emilia and Ilya Kabakov, Oleg Vassiliev, and Grisha Bruskin (left to right)
