Tsvetaeva

In four months he completed “The Flute-Player,” a political and sexual fantasy about a group of writers in an unnamed totalitarian state, loosely based on the lives of Ms. Akhmatova, the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak and the poets Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam.

It’s a good book, combining personal reminiscence and intensive reflection on works by poets as various as Siegfried Sassoon, Marina Tsvetaeva, Rainer Maria Rilke, Marianne Moore, Eugenio Montale, William Matthews and Haki R. Madhubuti, among many others.

Marina Tsvetaeva’s diaries and notebooks.

We stopped in at a museum dedicated to Marina Tsvetaeva, a beloved Russian poet who, in the early nineteen-hundreds, spent her childhood summers in the town.

Russia’s great modern poets, such as Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, left as profound a mark on her prose as on her verse.