But the catastrophe of a meeting kept being postponed.’ It seems likely that she was afraid of being rejected as a woman. Her cycle of lyrics, ‘Wires’, is an extraordinary example of the poems he drew from her. Two of these appeared in my earlier selection, but both are amended here, and the other eight are now included.

The only other poet to whom Tsvetaeva wrote with comparable excitement was Rainer Maria Rilke, in 1926. The correspondence came about after Leonid Pasternak, Boris’s painter father, received a letter from Rilke, whose portrait he had made when the German poet visited Moscow. In his letter, Rilke praised the poems of Leonid’s son, which he was able to read in a French translation in a journal edited by Paul Valéry. Pasternak was overwhelmed with joy to hear as much, and was eager to include Tsvetaeva in the exchange. She took up the opportunity enthusiastically, perhaps a little too eagerly for Rilke, who was lying mortally ill in a sanatorium. She was unhappy to discover that he was unable to read her poems in Russian and, after a few exchanges, he fell silent, which she took as rejection. There is a sad postcard from Bellevue dated 7 November 1926 on which Tsvetaeva writes simply:

Dear Rainer,

This is where I live.

Do you still love me?

Marina9

The elegy she wrote for his death at the end of 1926 has been analysed with great eloquence in an essay of Joseph Brodsky, ‘Footnote to a Poem’ 10 He praises the amazing energy miraculously sustaining a sequence which has the nerve, as he puts it, to open on ‘High C’. In it, we are transported from the ordinary chat of the literary world to look back on the earth as if from a theatre box far out in the universe.

Do you ever – think about me, I wonder?

What do you feel now, what is it like up there?

How was your first sight of the Universe,

a last vision of the whole planet –

which must include this poet remaining in it,

not yet ashes, still a spirit in a body –

seen from however many miles stretch

from Creation to eternity, far above

the Mediterranean in its crystal saucer –

where else would you look, leaning out

with your elbows on the edge of your box seat

if not on this poet, with her many griefs…11

Seryozha and Marina had one more child, a son, Georgy, before they moved to Paris. For a time, Seryozha found work as a film extra, but he was often ill, and Tsvetaeva tried to sustain their finances by writing articles for the Russian-language press and accepting charitable handouts from richer friends. She gave the occasional reading, for which she had to beg a simple washable dress from her Czech friend Anna Teskovà. As she wrote in a letter to Teskova: ‘We are devoured by coal, gas, the milkman, the baker… the only meat we eat is horsemeat.’12

Seryozha moved from support of the Eurasian Movement to working directly for the Union of Repatriation of Russians abroad. From this organization, he drew a small salary. Tsvetaeva inquired very little into the nature of this work. Her own isolation among White émigrés grew, and not only because of her refusal to sign a letter condemning Mayakovsky’s talents as a poet after his suicide. ‘In Paris,’ she wrote to her Czech friend Anna Teskova, ‘with rare personal exceptions, everyone hates me; they write all sorts of nasty things about me, leave me out in all sorts of ways, and so on.’13 Sadly, she came to feel equally isolated in her own home. Alya, once so close, had begun to find it easier to relate to her father. Both Seryozha and Alya moved towards the ideals of socialism as the 1930s went on. As soon as Alya was given a passport by the Soviet regime, she made her own way back to Russia. It was never going to be easy for Seryozha to do the same. The Soviet authorities had not forgotten that he once fought for the White Army and demanded some evidence of a change of heart; hence, although he was an unlikely hit-man, Seryozha’s involvement in the murder of the defector Ignace Reiss in September 1937. Tsvetaeva guessed nothing of his activities until the Soviet regime arranged for his passage back to Russia to prevent his arrest. Even when the French police interrogated her, she found it impossible to believe that Seryozha was guilty of such treachery.

With his departure, she no longer had any source of income. No émigré journal would publish her. Friends who had once supported her, turned their backs. She hesitated, nevertheless, even though her teenage son Georgy was eager to return to Russia. For a time she toyed with living once again in Prague. The German invasion made that impossible. By 1939, she and Georgy had little choice but to follow Efron back to Russia, as she had once followed him into exile; ‘like a dog’, as she noted in the journal she wrote aboard the Maria Ulyanova on 12 June 1939, echoing her earlier promise.

Nobody had warned her about Stalin’s Terror, not even Pasternak, who had met her briefly in Paris in 1935 during a Peace Conference – a ‘non-meeting’ she called it.