Tsvetaeva's mother, Maria Alexandrovna Mein [ru], Ivan's second wife, was a concert pianist,[1] highly literate, with German and Polish ancestry.

Tsvetaeva's two half-siblings, Valeria and Andrei, were the children of Ivan's deceased first wife, Varvara Dmitrievna Ilovaiskaya, daughter of the historian Dmitry Ilovaisky.

There, away from the rigid constraints of a bourgeois Muscovite life, Tsvetaeva was able for the first time to run free, climb cliffs, and vent her imagination in childhood games.

[2] She began spending time at Voloshin's home in the Black Sea resort of Koktebel ("Blue Height"), which was a well-known haven for writers, poets and artists.

She was 19, he 18: they fell in love and were married in 1912,[1] the same year as her father's project, the Alexander III Museum of Fine Arts, was ceremonially opened, an event attended by Tsar Nicholas II.

[2] Tsvetaeva's love for Efron was intense; however, this did not preclude her from having affairs, including one with Osip Mandelstam, which she celebrated in a collection of poems called Mileposts.

[1] The cycle of poems in the style of a diary or journal begins on the day of Tsar Nicholas II's abdication in March 1917, and ends late in 1920, when the anti-communist White Army was finally defeated.

During these years, Tsvetaeva maintained a close and intense friendship with the actress Sofia Evgenievna Holliday, for whom she wrote a number of plays.

[6] Tsvetaeva began a passionate affair with Konstantyn Rodziewicz [ru], a former military officer, a liaison which became widely known throughout émigré circles.

With Efron now rarely free from tuberculosis, their daughter Ariadna was relegated to the role of mother's helper and confidante, and consequently felt robbed of much of her childhood.

Reflecting a life in poverty and exiled, the work holds great nostalgia for Russia and its folk history, while experimenting with verse forms.

Although she had written passionately pro-'White' poems during the Revolution, her fellow émigrés thought that she was insufficiently anti-Soviet, and that her criticism of the Soviet régime was altogether too nebulous.

In the wake of this letter, the émigré paper Posledniye Novosti, to which Tsvetaeva had been a frequent contributor, refused point-blank to publish any more of her work.

[8] She found solace in her correspondence with other writers, including Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, the Czech poet Anna Tesková, the critics D. S. Mirsky and Aleksandr Bakhrakh, and the Georgian émigré princess Salomea Andronikova, who became her main source of financial support.

She got bits of work translating poetry, but otherwise the established Soviet writers refused to help her, and chose to ignore her plight; Nikolai Aseev, whom she had hoped would assist, shied away, fearful for his life and position.

[18] Much of her poetry was republished in the Soviet Union after 1961, and her passionate, articulate and precise work, with its daring linguistic experimentation, brought her increasing recognition as a major Russian poet.

Tsvetaeva's poetry was admired by poets such as Valery Bryusov, Maximilian Voloshin, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Anna Akhmatova.

Tsvetaeva is the unique case in which the paramount spiritual experience of an epoch (for us, the sense of ambivalence, of contradictoriness in the nature of human existence) served not as the object of expression but as its means, by which it was transformed into the material of art.

"Tsvetaeva is such a warm poet, so unbridled in her passion, so completely vulnerable in her love poetry, whether to her female lover Sofie Parnak, to Boris Pasternak.

The poems are vignettes of a tranquil childhood and youth in a professorial, middle-class home in Moscow, and display considerable grasp of the formal elements of style.

Thirdly, the Mileposts collections demonstrate the dramatic quality of Tsvetaeva's work, and her ability to assume the guise of multiple dramatis personae within them.

Tsvetaeva acknowledges her sources in the titles of the very long works, The Maiden Tsar: A Fairy-tale Poem (Tsar-devitsa: Poema-skazka, 1922) and "The Swain", subtitled "A Fairytale" ("Molodets: skazka", 1924).

The collection Psyche (Psikheya, 1923) contains one of Tsvetaeva's best-known cycles "Insomnia" (Bessonnitsa) and the poem The Swans' Encampment (Lebedinyi stan, Stikhi 1917–1921, published in 1957) which celebrates the White Army.

There then followed the twenty-three lyrical "Berlin" poems, the pantheistic "Trees" ("Derev'ya"), "Wires" ("Provoda") and "Pairs" ("Dvoe"), and the tragic "Poets" ("Poety").

Several satirical poems, moreover, are among Tsvetaeva's best-known works: "The Train of Life" ("Poezd zhizni") and "The Floorcleaners' Song" ("Poloterskaya"), both included in After Russia, and The Ratcatcher (Krysolov, 1925–1926), a long, folkloric narrative.

As in the other folkloric narratives, The Ratcatcher's story line emerges indirectly through numerous speaking voices which shift from invective, to extended lyrical flights, to pathos.

Tsvetaeva's last ten years of exile, from 1928 when "After Russia" appeared until her return in 1939 to the Soviet Union, were principally a "prose decade", though this would almost certainly be by dint of economic necessity rather than one of choice.

Mary Jane White has translated the early cycle "Miles" in a book called "Starry Sky to Starry Sky", as well as Tsvetaeva's elegy for Rilke, "New Year's", (Adastra Press 16 Reservation Road, Easthampton, MA 01027 USA) and "Poem of the End" (The Hudson Review, Winter 2009; and in the anthology Poets Translate Poets, Syracuse U.

The poetry by Tsvetaeva was set to music and frequently performed as songs by Elena Frolova, Larisa Novoseltseva, Zlata Razdolina and other Russian bards.

In 2019, American composer Mark Abel wrote Four Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, the first classical song cycle of the poet in an English translation.