She failed, as Nina Berberova makes clear in her auto-biography The Italics Are Mine,6 to show the domestic graces that make poverty bearable. Men of comparable genius usually find women to take care of them. Anna Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva’s only equal as a Russian woman poet, always found friends to look after her, even in old age. Tsvetaeva was less fortunate and she resented the burden of the daily round. Nevertheless, it was in Prague that she had her short, fierce affair with Konstantin Rodzevich, which drew from her some of her greatest poetry: ‘Poem of the End’, ‘Poem of the Mountain’ and ‘An Attempt at Jealousy’. Rodzevich ended the affair, and went on to marry an ‘ordinary’ woman with a private income.

When I met Rodzevich in the 1970s, while writing my biography of Tsvetaeva, he was a handsome, well-dressed man in late middle-age. His wife was so jealous of him that he would only agree to meet me when he was sure she would be out. He talked of his love for Tsvetaeva as un grand amour and showed me a portrait he had painted of her which he kept in a locked drawer. Why then had he ended their affair? He attributed this to the great affection he felt for Seryozha. I was sceptical, but I was already suspicious of him. He had fought in the Red Army in the Civil War, but told the émigrés in Prague that he had been part of the White Army, a well-judged subterfuge which did not suggest he was particularly trustworthy.

He had two other secrets, however, which I have only recently discovered. I knew he was an enthusiastic member of the Eurasian movement, along with Seryozha, who drew a salary from it, and my old Cambridge friend Vera Traill’s husband Peter Suvchinsky. I knew, too, that this became a front organisation for the NKVD. What I had not guessed was that Rodzevich was himself working as a Soviet agent. Nor did I guess that he was Vera Traill’s lover. That last is evident in an intimate and long-running exchange of letters discussed in Irma Kudrova’s Death of a Poet and throws new light on Vera’s irritable dismissal of Tsvetaeva’s womanliness, even as she praised her genius as a poet.

About one thing Rodzevich was accurate enough. The distress of Tsvetaeva’s affair drove Seryozha to the point of leaving her. When he suggested separation to Tsvetaeva, however, she was distraught. ‘For two weeks she was in a state of madness… finally she informed me that she was unable to leave me since she was unable to enjoy a moment’s peace.’7

Tsvetaeva has often been accused of preferring to make her closest relationships at a distance, usually inventing the qualities of their recipients. Indeed, she was locked in an epistolary romance with a young Berlin critic whom she had never met at the very moment she entered her affair with Rodzevich. Her important relationship with Boris Pasternak is another matter. For one thing, it was initiated by him and his enthusiasm was equal to hers.

She and Pasternak had only known one another slightly in Moscow; though he was one of the poets she most admired. Pasternak wrote to her after reading a copy of Tsvetaeva’s early poems, overwhelmed by her lyric genius. His words – ‘You are not a child, my dear, golden, incomparable poet,’8 – restored her sense of her own worth. Their correspondence continued with mounting warmth, as poems and plans for poems were exchanged. She had found a twin soul. Soon, he was suggesting that she join him in Berlin where he was visiting his parents. She failed to arrange the correct papers in time, and he returned to Russia without meeting her, though they continued to plan for it. In 1931, when she heard that Pasternak had separated from his wife, she seems to have experienced a kind of panic. She wrote to her friend Raisa Lomonsova: ‘For eight years Boris and I had a secret agreement: to keep on until we can be together.