She was wounded by his subsequent silence. Her elegy for Rilke was written in the days following his death.

p. 2 German is as native to me as Russian: Tsvetaeva had been brought up by her mother to speak and read German fluently.

p. 3 Baobab: a strange tropical tree native to Africa which looks as if its branches were roots. Many creatures live in the branches. The Baobab has gathered many superstitions around it.

The Ratcatcher

p. 1 These are three sections from a long narrative poem which follows the story of the Pied Piper. It is marked throughout with a disgust for material well-being, so that the abundance in the town is felt as a direct cause of the plague of rats. In later sections of the poem the burghers give the flute-player a contemptuous dressing-down on the use of his art. D.S. Mirsky wrote of ‘The Ratcatcher’: ‘… it is not only a verbal structure that is astounding in its richness and harmony, it is also a serious “political”… and “ethical” satire.’ Tsvetaeva began writing the poem in Vshenory in early 1925, and completed it in Paris in November that year.

p. 2 poods: a Russian measure.

Poems to a Son

p. 1 Georgy returned to Russia with Tsvetaeva in 1939, to join his father and sister. When they were arrested he lived with his mother until they were evacuated to Yelabuga. After Tsvetaeva died, he left to join the army and died, still in his teens, in the defence of Moscow.

Homesickness

p. 1 Kamchatka: a far-eastern Siberian peninsula, sometimes invoked in the sense of ‘back of beyond’.

Epitaph

p. 1 These poems were written for N.P. Gronsky, a young poet killed in a street accident when he was twenty-four. Tsvetaeva had been close to him as a young boy of eighteen in Meudon, and continued to value his poetry highly after they stopped seeing one another. 

Desk

p. 1 Three lyrics from a sequence of six.

p. 2 thirty years: the lyrics were written between 1933 and 1935, and Tsvetaeva must have had in mind her very earliest attempts at poetry.

Bus

p. 1 Easter toys: on Palm Sunday most Russian towns held markets at which sweets, trinkets, and small devils and cherubim were commonly sold.

p. 2 A moist, wood-twig smoke of green: although this verse appears to be another draft of the previous one, both appear in the Moscow-Leningrad edition.

p. 3 Nebuchadnezzar: cf. Daniel, 4:31–3.

p. 4 thief: there is multiple punning on the idea of pillaging as a form of (literal) ‘ripping-off’, or fleecing, throughout the passage.

Poems to Czechoslovakia

p. 1 Tsvetaeva was thinking of the region known to her as ‘Chekhia’ in the country we have until recently called Czechoslovakia.
Vary/Tatras: Karlovy vary (Karlsbad), a famous spa in western Czechoslovakia. By mentioning it along with ‘Tatry’, the Tatras, mountain ranges in the eastern part of that country, Tsvetaeva means to emphasise that the Germans took the whole of the country, and all the pleasures that it offered.
they won: ‘won’ in Russian can also mean ‘took’.