3 Child Panteleimon: a saint revered in the Orthodox Church, supposed to protect people’s health.
Iversky heart: another wonder-working icon of the Virgin Mary, for which a special chapel was built, and which was taken to the city of Vladimir in 1812.

Poems for Akhmatova

p. 1 Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966).
Ah!: in Russian ‘akh’, the first syllable of the poet’s name.

p. 2 Tsarskoselsky: Akhmatova spent much of her youth in, and thereafter frequently revisited, the imperial town of Tsarskoe Selo, near St Petersburg.

Poems for Blok

p. 1 Alexander Blok (1880–1921), Symbolist poet, with whom Tsvetaeva was never personally acquainted, although she met him briefly on two occasions.
five signs: in the old orthography (altered after the Revolution, but always appealing to Tsvetaeva) Blok’s name was spelt with five letters – these four, plus a ‘hard sign’.
spectre/knight/snow/wind: examples of images that deliberately recall images and words from poems by Blok himself.

p. 2 Poem 3: the first two lines and the penultimate line of this poem are a rephrasing of words from a well-known prayer sung in the Orthodox Church.
your river Neva: Blok’s native city was St Petersburg. The first phrase of this poem ‘U menya v Moskve’ could also be translated, to emphasise the contrast, ‘In my Moscow’.
red calico of Kaluga: literally, ‘Kaluga native calico’. Tsvetaeva evokes a typical peasant scene at Tarusa, in Kaluga, where she spent her childhood summers in the family dacha.

p. 3 Poem 9 is dated 9 May 1920, and Tsvetaeva notes on her manuscript: ‘On the day when the powder cellars were blown up in the Khodynka and the window panes were shattered in the Polytechnic Museum, where Blok was reading.’
blue cloak: an image from Blok’s poem ‘O podvigakh, o doblesty-akh, o slave’, written in 1908 and addressed to his wife.
We shall call for the sun…: referring to Blok’s poem ‘Golos iz khora’ (1910), with its lines: ‘You will call for the sun’s rising –/the sun will lie low’ (in the version by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France, in Alexander Blok, Selected Poems, Manchester, Carcanet 2000).

Swans’ Encampment

p. 1 This is one lyric from a long cycle of poems written in Moscow between 1917–21, which was never published in Tsvetaeva’s lifetime. In many of them she adapts the lay of Prince Igor, and the tone of a lamenting Yaroslavna, to describe the heroic nobility of the White Army’s self-sacrifice. When she returned to the Soviet Union in 1939 she left the ms at the University of Basel. It has been suggested that she was persuaded by accounts of her husband, Sergei Efron’s experiences in the White Army (which he found very different from the legendary heroes she describes) not to publish it. This is not so: only an accident, namely a quarrel with the Paris editors of Latest News, prevented the poems appearing there in 1928. Ironically, the quarrel arose out of Tsvetaeva’s admiration for poetry written in the Soviet Union.

p. 2 Ry-azan: the voice names a town near Moscow, and Tsvetaeva breaks the word, drawing out the long syllable to mime the accent of peasants who live there.

On a Red Horse

p. 1 This poem was written in five days in January 1921.

God help us    Smoke!

p. 1 Written on 30 September 1922, shortly after Tsvetaeva and her daughter Alya joined Efron in Czechoslovakia.
necklace of coins: the note on p. 748 of the Moscow-Leningrad edition suggests the reference is to a doorman or hall-porter wearing many medals.

Ophelia: In Defence of the Queen

p. 1 One of a run of epistolatory poems; there is another written as if from Ophelia to Hamlet on the same date (28 February 1923).

Wires

p. 1 A note on p. 749 of the 1965 edition says: ‘from a cycle of 10 poems… inspired by the correspondence with Pasternak which began in June 1922, soon after Tsvetaeva went abroad, and which continued for many years. Under Tsvetaeva’s draft of no.