Our Notes & References

The first appearance in print of Tsvetaeva’s important literary essay which examines poetry, the poetic process, and what it means to be a poet. It has been described as the key to understanding Tsvetaeva’s work. Together with another essay, “Art by the Light of Conscience”, both written in the early 1930s, it sums up her assessments of hers and others’ creative experience.

‘Poet i vremia’ couldn’t be published in the USSR until long after Tsvetaeva’s death, and first appeared in this Prague émigré periodical ‘Volia Rossii’ [The Will of Russia, pp. 3-22]. Living as an émigré in Paris from 1925 until 1939, when she returned to Moscow, the payment Tsvetaeva received for work in ‘Volia Rossii’ formed the basis of her literary earnings for many years.

‘Every poet is essentially an émigré… émigré from the Kingdom of Heaven and from the earthly paradise of nature… An émigré from immortality in time, a non-returner to his own heaven’ (‘The Poet and Time’).

Provenance

Robert Eden Martin (b. 1940; American lawyer and noted collector of Russian, British and American literature works).

Bibliography

Gladkova & Mnukhine, Bibliographie des oeuvres de Marina Tsvetaeva, 1993, no. 495, 46.