Earthly Signs

(Paperback, Main)

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Marina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia's greatest 20th-century poets. Her suicide at the age of 48 was the tragic culmination of a life beset by loss and hardship. This volume presents in English a collection of essays published in the Russian emigre press after Tsvetaeva left Moscow in 1922. Based on diaries she kept from 1917 to 1920, the work describes the broad social, economic and cultural chaos provoked by the Bolshevik Revolution. Events and individuals are seen through the lens of her personal experience - that of a destitute young woman of upper-class background with two small children (one of whom died of starvation), a missing husband, and no means of support other than her poetry. These autobiographical writings, sources of information on Tsvetaeva and her literary contemporaries, are also significant for the insights they provide into the sources and methodology of her difficult poetic language. In addition, they supply an eyewitness account of a dramatic period in Russian history, told by a gifted and outspoken poet.

Reviews

Is there prose more intimate, more piercing, more heroic, more astonishing than Tsvetaevas Was the truth of reckless feelings ever so naked So accelerated Voicing gut and brow, she is incomparable. Clad in the veil of translation, expert translation, her recklessness commands, her nakedness flames. Susan Sontag

When it comes to the Russian poetry of the last century, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Boris Pasternak are reasonably familiar names, but not Marina Tsvetaeva, who is their equal.... Is she as good as Eliot or Pound, one may ask for the sake of comparison. She is as good as they are, and may have more tricks up her sleeve as a poet.... A marvelous selection from her diaries and essays in an exceptionally fine translation by Jamey Gambrell. They give us a view of the times not very different from that found in Isaac Babels stories. Tsvetaeva is an excellent reporter.... Tsvetaevas autobiographical writings and her essays are filled with memorable descriptions and beautifully turned out phases.... Gambrell sums up well the difficulties of Tsvetaevas work in her concise and extremely perceptive introduction. Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books

This style of bold, passionate and innovative thought is much in evidence in Earthly Signs, writings by the Russian Modernist poet Marina Tsvetaeva, in this extraordinary translation by Jamey Gambrell. Carol Muske Dukes, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Jamey Gambrells excellently translated edition with its well-researched and informative introduction graciously fulfils Tsvetaevas desire to see these pieces of diaristic prose bound in a single volume." Rachel Polonsky, The Times Literary Supplement

Author Bio

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was born in Moscow and during the famine of 1922 emigrated with her family to Berlin, then to Prague, before finally settling in Paris in 1925. In 1939, Tsvetaeva returned to the Soviet Union where her husband was executed and her surviving daughter was sent to a labor camp. When the German army invaded the USSR, Tsvetaeva was evacuated to Yelabuga with her son. She committed suicide in 1941. Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture and a translator of Russian literature.