In those years, she and her elder daughter, Ariadne, were almost like sisters. Alya, as she was usually called was as precociously observant a child as Tsvetaeva had been herself. This is how she writes of Tsvetaeva:

My mother is not at all like a mother. Mothers always think their own children are wonderful, and other children too, but Marina doesn’t like little children… She is always hurrying somewhere. She has a great soul. A kind voice. A quick walk. She has green eyes, a hooked nose and red lips… Marina’s hands are all covered with rings… she doesn’t like people bothering her with stupid questions…4

The family fared badly in the Moscow famine. Marina was unskilled at bartering trinkets for food, and she and Alya often lived on potatoes boiled in a samovar. They sometimes went out on a sledge together in the freezing cold to exchange bottle tops for a few kopeks, often leaving the younger child, Irina, strapped against a table leg to prevent her coming to harm. When starvation looked imminent in the winter of 1919-20, Tsvetaeva put both children into the Kuntsevo orphanage, which was thought to be supplied by American food aid. When she arrived on her first visit, Alya was running a high temperature and Tsvetaeva, frightened, took her home to nurse her. Alya pulled through but Irina died of starvation in the orphanage in February 1920. Tsvetaeva was unable to make herself go to the funeral. She blamed Seryozha’s sisters, probably unfairly, for refusing to help her, claiming they had behaved ‘like animals’. She told all her friends to write to Seryozha that the child had died of pneumonia rather than hunger. There was much gossip about her own neglect of the child. Certainly, she was never as close to Irina as to Alya.

The following year was taken up by a new infatuation – Yevgeny Lann, a poet friend of her sister Asya – a humiliating rejection by him, and anxiety about Seryozha as the defeat of the White Army loomed closer. In January 1921, Tsvetaeva wrote a poem of pitiless inquiry into the nature of her own inspiration: ‘On a Red Horse’. The tone resembles that of her other folkloric poems of the period such as ‘The Tsar Maiden’ (1920) and ‘The Swain’ (1922) but the story of ‘On a Red Horse’ is not taken from one of Alexander Afansyev’s volumes of Russian fairy tales; it is her own invention. A handsome rider of implacable cruelty demands that all her other loves be sacrificed for him. These dream-like sacrifices do not secure his kindness, however, and an old woman she encounters reveals the bleak truth: ‘Your Angel doesn’t love you!’ Released from the hope of winning his affection, she plunges into battle as a male figure. A phrase from the resolution of this poem gives this book its title:

And he whispers I wanted this.

It is for this I chose you,

you are my passion, my sister,

mine till the end of time  

my bride of ice – in armour –

Mine. Will you stay with me…5

In 1922, the Civil War ended in victory for the Bolsheviks. Ilya Ehrenburg, who was always in touch with what was happening to his friends, learned that Seryozha had made his escape to Prague, where he had been offered a student grant to study at the university. Ehrenburg brought Tsvetaeva the news and, without hesitation, she and Alya prepared to set off into exile to join him – though it has to be said that Tsvetaeva found Berlin almost irresistibly exciting along the way. When the family was reunited, she was shocked to find how little Seryozha had changed from the boyish young man she remembered. She herself had been shattered by her experience and was prematurely grey at thirty. In Prague, Seryozha was given a room in a student hostel, while Tsvetaeva and Alya lived in the village of Horni Mokropsky.

At first, Tsvetaeva was welcomed in Prague as a major literary figure, but her more conventional compatriots soon turned away from her.