Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia's greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life beset by loss and hardship. This volume presents for the first time 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, Earthly Signs describes the broad social, economic, and cultural chaos provoked by the Bolshevik Revolution. Events and individuals are seen through the...

.."..The fact of the matter is that everything that happens in culture ultimately comes down to this, to the four famous temperaments: melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, and choleric. That's what I think. It seems to me that our Big Four can also be divided by according to these temperaments, inasmuch as all of them are actually very distinctly represented in the group. Tsvetaeva is unquestionably the choleric author. Pasternak is sanguine. Mandelstam is melancholic. And Akhmatova is phlegmatic. Together they cover the whole poetic universe." -Joseph Brodsky Included in this dual-language...

Marina Tsvetaeva is acknowledged today as one of the twentieth century's greatest poets, a masterful innovator who produced a remarkable body of work before her untimely death in 1941. This bilingual collection contains six of her acclaimed narrative poems, most translated into English for the first time. Tsvetaeva always regarded the narrative poem as her true challenge, and she created powerful and intensely original works in this genre. They can be seen as markers of various stages in her poetic development, ranging from the early, folk-accented 'On a Red Steed' to the...