In any case, that great weariness which she evoked in her poem ‘Bus’ already consumed her. She found Efron had been given a small house in Bolshevo, a little way outside Moscow. Other news was bewildering. Both her sister Asya and her nephew had been arrested. Her old friend Prince Mirsky, a dedicated Communist and brilliant literary critic, had also been imprisoned. Osip Mandelstam was dead.

Tsvetaeva felt lonely in Bolshevo even while her own surviving family were still with her. Other members of the household were members of the group of Soviet agents Seryozha had recruited in France. Her son, a good-looking young man, enjoyed teenage flirtations. Tsvetaeva had neither time nor energy to write more than scraps. ‘Dishwater and tears’, she jotted in a notebook. The year of the Nazi–Soviet pact was a crisis. Worse was to follow. First Alya was arrested, and interrogated brutally; as a result she implicated Seryozha as a French spy. Alya was sentenced to fifteen years in the Gulag in spite of her ‘confession’. Then Seryozha himself was arrested.

When Tsvetaeva visited Moscow, she found old friends were afraid to meet her, as a relation of convicted criminals. Even Ehrenburg was brusque and preoccupied. Pasternak received her without the least intimacy during a party for Georgian friends. Anna Akhmatova, however, agreed to meet her at the flat of Viktor Ardov on the Ordynka, an act of some courage since her own son, Lev, was already held in the Camps. Akhmatova never discussed what was said between them, but in later conversations she remembered reading Tsvetaeva part of ‘Poem Without a Hero’, noting ironically that Tsvetaeva objected to her use of figures from commedia dell’arte. Tsvetaeva read her part of her ‘Attempt at a Room’, which Akhmatova thought too abstract.

The two women were very different creatures. Tsvetaeva did not perceive herself as a beautiful woman. She once remarked scornfully that, although she would be the most important woman in all her friends’ memoirs, she ‘had never counted in the masculine present’. After her affair with Rodzevich ended, she wrote poignantly to her young friend Bakhrakh in Berlin: ‘To be loved is something of which I have not mastered the art…’14 Yet Tsvetaeva had her own sense of grandeur. She knew herself to belong among the finest poets of her century. She did not make the mistake of blurring the distinction between serving poetry and serving God, any more than she would ever allow for poetry the utilitarian hope that Art can do civic good. In the closing passage from ‘Art in the Light of Conscience’ she makes that clear: ‘To be a human being is more important, because it is more needed… The doctor and the priest are humanly more important, all the others are socially more important.’15 Tsvetaeva had written no more than scraps of journal for nearly two years.

When the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, Tsvetaeva evacuated Georgy and herself to Yelabuga in the Tatar Republic, just across the river Kama from Christopol where the Writers’ Union was housing key writers. Tsvetaeva was not denied lodging there, but she feared there would be no job for her. Her indecision was obvious to Ludia Chukovskaya, Akhmatova’s friend. It may be that she heard then that Seryozha had already been shot in the Lubianka. Whatever the trigger, the depression which gripped her was deepened by Georgy’s hostility when she returned to the village hut in Yelabuga.