A moving collection of autobiographical essays from a Russian poet and refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was born in Moscow and published her first collection of poems, Evening Album, at the age of eighteen. During the Moscow famine of 1922, she 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, she was evacuated to Yelabuga with her son. She committed suicide in 1941. Tsvetaeva's letters to Boris Pasternak and Rainer Maria Rilke are featured in the NYRB Classic Letters- Summer 1926.Jamey Gambrell is a writer on Russian art and culture. She has translated, among other things, Vladimir Sorokin's three-volume Ice Trilogy and Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx and White Walls (all available as NYRB Classics).