Carolyn Kremers writes poetry and literary nonfiction, and teaches part-time at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She was a writing resident at VSC in November 2017. Her books include Place of the Pretend People: Gifts from a Yup'ik Eskimo Village (memoir), The Alaska Reader (literary anthology), and Upriver (poetry). She was a Fulbright Scholar at Buryat State University in Ulan Ude, Russia, in 2008-09 and again in 2015-16. Her website is http://www.pw.org/directory/writers/carolyn_kremers. Read about Marina Tsvetaeva below.
Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941)
Russian writer Marina Tsvetaeva is considered one of the four major poets of the Soviet era, along with Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Osip Mandelstam. Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow and grew up in an educated, upper middle-class family. Her first collection of poems, Evening Album (Вечерний альбом) was self-published in 1910 and well-received in Moscow literary circles. In 1912, at age nineteen, Tsvetaeva married Sergei Efron. They had three children: Ariadna ("Alya," 1912), Irina ("Ira," 1917), and Georgii ("Mur," 1925). Sergei joined the White Army in 1917, and Tsvetaeva did not see him again for five years. In 1922 – having lost three-year-old Ira to starvation and having barely survived the Russian Revolution and the Civil War that followed – Tsvetaeva moved with Alya to Berlin and on to Prague, where Sergei had fled and was attempting to finish a university degree. In 1925, the four of them immigrated to Paris. For many years, Tsvetaeva wrote in exile and poverty.
In 1937, after the outbreak of World War II, Sergei and Alya decided to return to Russia. Sergei had become a Soviet sympathizer, and Alya, who was twenty-four, was working for a French Communist newspaper. Tsvetaeva loved Russia deeply, but she was worried about returning. Mur begged to follow his father, however, and so, in summer 1939, Tsvetaeva returned with Mur to Moscow. Josef Stalin's political purges in the Soviet Union had ended, but people who had lived abroad were viewed suspiciously, as were people who had been academics and intellectuals before the Revolution. Tsvetaeva was unable to find work or to publish, and within a year, Sergei and Alya were arrested on charges of espionage. Sergei was executed, and Alya was sent to a prison camp.
In June 1941, when Hitler invaded Russia, Tsvetaeva and sixteen-year-old Mur were evacuated from Moscow to the village of Elabuga (Елáбуга), in the Tatar Autonomous Republic. There, on August 31, in the entryway of the small, wooden house where she and her son were staying, Tsvetaeva hanged herself. She was 48.
