It was the first poem from "The Disciple" cycle (yet it's #6 there) I decided to translate, as it caught my everything – attention, mind, imagination and breath. Marina managed to unite two things, quite difficult to be united within one place – macro- and microcosmos. As for her spiritual leader, he is addressed as You (capital letter), as if he was portrayed as God the Father. All objects given in plural are to emphasize his glory, though it is put implicitly by belittling...

Yesterday, when I was working (again) on Tsvetaeva’s cycle of poems called “The disciple”, a sudden idea crossed my mind, that the addressee of the cycle was a complete mystery to me. It was quite interesting, because of personal spirit of the poems.

According to the cycle, Marina is someone’s devoted disciple, an eager follower, even an apostle. She deeply admires her spiritual leader and worships this unknown person as a god. There are motives of self-denial and self-sacrifice,...

When someone among her close friends noticed, that her son was difficult to deal with, Akhmatova promptly replied: “Don’t forget, he hasn’t been subscribed to any library since his nine years old as a son of a public enemy executed by shooting.”

In 1960-es Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova had a special notebook of most personal and cherished poems of hers, known as “The Cherished Notebook”. As a joke, she called it “The Proud Flesh”. Many of those poems were her deep considerations about personal responsibility of a poet for the epoch he/she destined to live in. Only some of them were included into her last book entitled “The Race of Time” and published, as the poetess decided, that the tough censorship was over.

“I’m strong, I need nothing, but my very soul! I want ease, freedom, understanding, - nobody to keep and to be kept tight! My entire life is a romance with my own soul…”

Marina Tsvetaeva about her own self