Earthly Signs [Hardcover]

Marina Tsvetaeva (Author), Jamey Gambrell (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Russian Literature and Thought Series | Publication Date: November 1, 2002

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia's greatest 20th-century poets. Her suicide at the age of 48 was the tragic culmination of a life beset by loss and hardship. This volume presents in English a collection of essays published in the Russian emigre press after Tsvetaeva left Moscow in 1922. Based on diaries she kept from 1917 to 1920, the work describes the broad social, economic and cultural chaos provoked by the Bolshevik Revolution. Events and individuals are seen through the lens of her personal experience - that of a destitute young woman of upper-class background with two small children (one of whom died of starvation), a missing husband, and no means of support other than her poetry. These autobiographical writings, sources of information on Tsvetaeva and her literary contemporaries, are also significant for the insights they provide into the sources and methodology of her difficult poetic language. In addition, they supply an eyewitness account of a dramatic period in Russian history, told by a gifted and outspoken poet.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

It is a commentary on the provincialism of national cultures that a figure of towering greatness in one can be almost unknown in another. Such might be said of Russian poet Tsvetaeva, considered along with Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Pasternak to be the greatest poet of Russia's agonizing 20th century, yet she is not as well known in the West as her talent merits. Tsvetaeva, who committed suicide in 1942 at the age of 48, shortly after her return to her homeland after many years as an exile in the West, wrote this collection of essays in the early period of revolutionary Russia (1917-20). They are published here for the first time in English and could be said to constitute a book of poetry written in prose. Whether describing her experiences gathering food in the Crimea for her family in Moscow or her quixotic tenure at a desk job in Moscow, Tsvetaeva writes with a passionate intensity that makes everything she describes seem to be of gripping importance: "It wasn't I who left the card file: my legs carried me. From soul to legs: without going through the mind. This is what instinct is." Or "To love-is to see a person as God intended him and his parents failed to make him." For historians, this book is of value as an eyewitness account of one of the most momentous periods in world history as witnessed by one of the century's most brilliant minds. Recommended for academic libraries where there is an interest in Russian poetry and history.
Edward Cone, New York
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Passionate, mercurial, and impractical, the romantic and much revered Russian poet Tsvetaeva was born in 1892 into a Moscow family of wealth and culture and began writing at a young age. Alone with her two young daughters when the Bolshevik Revolution broke out, she was utterly unprepared for the catastrophic events that followed. All she knew how to do was write, and write she did in between searching for food and work, zealously keeping a diary in which she recorded the rapid coalescence of a brutal new way of life, preserving snippets of conversation and piercing glimpses into the fractured lives of the dispossessed and starving. She later transformed these electrifying observations into impressionistic, edgy, and sometimes wry essays, invaluable works translated here into English for the first time. Tsvetaeva's atmospheric and confiding essays offer arresting and instructive snapshots of a violent time and place as well as a frank self-portrait of a sensitive soul and gifted poet struggling to survive in a world gone mad, a battle that ended tragically with Tsvetaeva's suicide in 1941. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (November 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300069227
• ISBN-13: 978-0300069228
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,777,793 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "diaries" rather than poetry, December 25, 2009

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doc peterson (Portland, Oregon USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Earthly Signs (Hardcover)

The subtitle of _Earthly Signs_ is "Moscow Diaries, 1917 - 1922." I had taken this metaphorically, with the expectation and hope that Tsvetaeva's poems would be illuminated with a biography. Instead, the subtitle is literal, which was a disappointment; I had hoped for a different translation than Selected Poems (Tsvetaeva, Marina) (Twentieth-Century Classics), which I was unhappy with. Nonetheless, her diaries did give me some insight into the character and personality of the poet, as well as a micro-cosmic view into the chaos, uncertainty and fear that many Russians felt during the Russian Revolution and the Civil War, hence the three stars.

Tsvetaeva was a melancholy woman. This is apparent in her poetry, but it is vividly shown in her dairy. Not caught up in the romance and drama of the revolution, Tsvetaeva instead was concerned with more basic things: safety, food, and the nagging worry of the safety of her family. This is a common thread throughout the diary as she travels from the Crimea to Moscow to elsewhere. The faces, conversations and concerns of those who cross her path are meticulously documented, along with her own reflections and thoughts. One passage in particular struck me, as Tsetaeva meditates on the grief that war inflicts, writing, "A daughter whose father has been killed - is an orphan. A wife whose husband has been killed is a widow. But a mother whose son has been killed?" This is fairly representative of thoughts that occupy the majority of the book.

Much of the power of _Earthly Signs_ is the result of Tsvetaeva herself, to be sure. But I can't help but think that the translator and editor, Jamey Gambrell, also played a role in this. As Gambrell writes in the introduction, "Every translation, like every poem or novel, is a voyage of sorts. My hope is that I have managed to read these earthly signs well enough, to follow Tsvetaeva's path closely enough to repave enough of her singullar road, for English readers to be translated across the river." I believe these hopes have been realized. A pity, then, that Gambrell has not (at least yet), translated her poetry in addition to these diaries.