What books did Marina Tsvetaeva love: “How many books! What a crush "

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The talented poetess loved books since childhood, even in her poem "For Books" she very colorfully and emotionally described her childhood delight from visiting a bookstore with her mother at the age of seven. Books accompanied Marina Tsvetaeva all her life, and her literary preferences spanned different genres. The letters, diaries and questionnaires contain lists of authors who were preferred by the Russian poet of the Silver Age.

"Christine, daughter of Lavrance", Sigrid Undset

Marina Tsvetaeva considered the historical trilogy Singrid Unset to be the best work telling about the difficult fate of a woman. The poetess dreamed of having it in her library and was ready to give almost half of the books she had for her.

The Morbakka Girl: A Child's Notes, Selma Lagerlef

Marina Tsvetaeva frankly admired the works of the Swedish writer, she was completely captivated by the literary style. Selma Lagerlef's memories of her childhood, of the stunning family estate, sold for debts and then redeemed by an elderly writer, conquered Tsvetaeva. It is worth noting that the writer's memories will not only bring a lot of pleasure to readers, but will also help to understand where the "girl from Morbakka" got her inspiration and moral strength from.

"Marie Curie", Eva Curie

Marina Tsvetaeva considered the book, written by the youngest daughter of the great scientists Pierre and Marie Curie, to be the best monument to daughter's love. The poet was impressed with the love and admiration with which Eva Curie wrote about her outstanding mother. At the same time, boring, as it might seem at first glance, the description of the life path turned into a fascinating reading for the reader.

“Diary of Maria Bashkirtseva. Selected pages"

This book, which became a literary sensation at the beginning of the twentieth century, could not be ignored by Marina Tsvetaeva. However, the frank story of the growing up of a naive girl is of undoubted interest even today.

Books to be burned with

There were books in the library of the poetess, to which she constantly returned. She often reread them, each time she found something new and unusual. Among the books that belonged to this list were the epic poem "The Song of the Nibelungs", the ancient Russian literary monument "The Lay of Igor's Host" and the immortal "Iliad" by Homer.

Each gives an era

The questionnaire, which Marina Tsvetaeva filled out in 1926, also contained questions about her favorite books. The answers were supposed to be used in the bibliographic Dictionary of writers of the twentieth century, but at that time the publication never came out. In the questionnaire, Marina Tsvetaeva listed the books sequentially, believing that each of her favorite books characterizes an entire era in her life.

The first on the list was the old story "Ondine" by Friedrich de la Motta Fouquet in a brilliant poetic retelling by Vasily Zhukovsky, to whom the poetess was read in early childhood. In adolescence, she repeatedly reread the romantic legend from the history of Württemberg "Liechtenstein" by Wilhelm Hauff.

Marina Tsvetaeva turned to the work "L'Aiglon" by Edmond Rostand in her early youth. She was very interested in the interpretation of well-known events from the life of Napoleon II. The older the poetess became, the more attention she paid to books. She sincerely loved the works of Heinrich Goine and Johann Goethe, loved reading Friedrich Hölderlin.

However, don't think. That in adulthood she was only interested in foreign authors. Over the years, she took literature more and more seriously, and the list of her preferences, drawn up when the poetess had matured, included the works of prose writers Sergei Aksakov and Nikolai Leskov, poets Gabriel Derzhavin and Nikolai Nekrasov. Marina Tsvetaeva highlighted the work of her contemporary and her literary colleague Boris Pasternak in a separate line.

By the way, as a child, she loved the poems of Lermontov and Pushkin, but her attitude to "Eugene Onegin" was very cool, the novel in verse did not cause her violent delight.

The relationship between Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak is one of the most tragic pages of Russian poetry. And the correspondence of two great poets is much more than the letters of two people who are passionate about each other. In their youth, their fates seemed to go parallel, and during rare intersections they did not touch the young poets.