A Captive Lion: The Life of Marina Tsvetayeva

From Library Journal
Tsvetayeva (1892-1941), one of the greatest of Russian poets, addressed our beleaguered century in a unique, forceful voice. In Feinstein she has found a superb translator and a biographer whose feeling for her subject is evident in every concise line. As Feinstein portrays it, Tsvetayeva's life was gallant and doomed: possessed by the daemon and fed artistically by a series of bisexual passions (some, like that for Pasternak, purely epistolatory), she was never ruthless enough to tear away the web of family loyalties that bound herand one can argue that to have done so would have diminished her as a poet. Wherever possible, Feinstein lets Tsvetayeva speak for herself; in Lion she uses a score of poems from the anthology to illluminate the poet's experience. Readers interested in knowing more about Tsvetayeva's life and work in the Russian intellectual context can consult Simon Karlinsky's definitive Marina Tsvetayeva: the woman, her world and her poetry (Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1986), but this biography and the Selected Poems will enrich any library's shelves. Mary F. Zirin, Altadena, Cal.Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.


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Tsvetayeva (1892-1941), one of the greatest of Russian poets, addressed our beleaguered century in a unique, forceful voice. In Feinstein she has found a superb translator and a biographer whose feeling for her subject is evident in every concise line. As Feinstein portrays it, Tsvetayeva's life was gallant and doomed: possessed by the daemon and fed artistically by a series of bisexual passions (some, like that for Pasternak, purely epistolatory), she was never ruthless enough to tear away the web of family loyalties that bound herand one can argue that to have done so would have diminished her as a poet. Wherever possible, Feinstein lets Tsvetayeva speak for herself; in Lion she uses a score of poems from the anthology to illluminate the poet's experience. Readers interested in knowing more about Tsvetayeva's life and work in the Russian intellectual context can consult Simon Karlinsky's definitive Marina Tsvetayeva: the woman, her world and her poetry (Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1986), but this biography and the Selected Poems will enrich any library's shelves. Mary F. Zirin, Altadena, Cal.


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