"A single naked soul." --Mark Slonim
"A mist-wreathed nun." --Osip Mandelstam
"She is just organically unaware of other people, even those closest to her, except when she needs them. Some of her keys are mute. You can't call her either good-natured or mean. She is a creature of ungovernable impulses. She is capable of disregarding everything except herself. She is pig-headed. She is very clever, very talented. When she is working at something she really wants to do, it isn't work to her but sheer enjoyment. And she's still only an adolescent...Time will tell what will become of her." --Valeria Tsvetaeva (half-sister), diary, 1909
"She lowered her hood and I saw her luxuriant cap of golden hair. I stood behind her and Oh! what a dress she was wearing! It was unusual, ravishing: silken, browny-gold, wide, flowing luxuriantly down to the floor, the narrow waist firmly gathered in by an old-fashioned corsage. At the slightly open neck, a precious stone. A magical girl from the last century!...I couldn't stop watching Marina Tsvetayeva. Under the cap of her golden hair I could see the oval of her face, broad on top, tapering below, her fine nose with its barely perceptible aquiline trait, and her greenish eyes, the eyes of an enchantress." --Maria Grinyova, 1913
"She recited in a calm slightly mocking voice....Her gray eyes, however, were cold, transparent. Those eyes did not know fear, even less humility, or obedience." --Nikolay Yelenev
"My mother is very strange.
"My mother is not at all like a mother. Mothers
always admire their child and children generally, but Marina does not like
little children. She has light brown hair; it curls up at the sides. She has
green eyes, a hooked nose and pink lips. She has a slender build and arms which
I like. Her favorite day is Annunciation Day. She is sad, quick and loves Poems and Music. She writes poems. She is
patient and tolerant to the extreme. Even though she gets angry she is loving.
She is always hurrying somewhere. She has a big heart. A gentle voice. A fast
walk. Marina's hands are full of rings. Marina reads at night. Her eyes are
nearly always full of fun. She does not like being pestered with silly
questions, then she gets very angry.
"Sometimes she walks about like someone
lost, but then she suddenly seems to wake up, starts to talk and again seems to
go off somewhere." --Ariadna Efron, age 6
"Marina used to wear a winged coat -- a coat with a cape, a ridiculous dress:
some simple dress with pink buttons fit for a street fair which did not belong
here. Since she was always tightly belted I called her 'horseman'....Marina
washed her wheat-colored hair in our bathroom whenever she came. And she went
to sleep without taking off her shoes, though I had given her our last clean
sheet that I had washed myself. Her hair was very beautiful and fluffy. Her
pale face was puffy from a diet consisting mainly of frozen potatoes; her eyes
were green -- 'salty peasant eyes,' as she wrote...
"She grabbed Bebutov (a theater director) from me immediately, while he was
still warm. When, in the dark, I went to the dining room for matches (Marina
had taught me to smoke, she and hunger) they were already lying 'in position.'
She lay on top of him and was casting her spell with words. She often said that
her main passion was to communicate with people; that sexual relationships were
necessary because that was the only way to penetrate a person's soul....
"Marina was terribly worried about Asya [her sister], who had stayed with the
Whites. She spoke of her every day: 'Asya, how is Asya, what is happening to
Asya?' Then Asya arrived -- totally toothless, with naked gums from scurvy. A
few days later Tsvetaeva came alone, asked me to come outside, and said, 'I
cannot live with Asya, she irritates me.' I just stared in bewilderment. That
was typical of Marina." --Vera Zyagintseva
"Irina's death played an enormous part in Mama's decision to emigrate--quite as large a part as the fact that Papa was abroad already. Mama could never put it out of her mind that children can die of hunger here. That's why I see red when I read the usual cliche--that Tsvetaeva 'didn't understand' and so 'didn't accept.' Nothing was easier for her to understand, or more impossible for her to accept." --Ariadna Efron
"The man to whom her feelings were directed at a particular moment is less important than the pouring out of these feelings on paper...The people with whom Tsvetaeva maintained contact at a deeper level were all "invented" by her; she created them in accord with her fantasy, making them up at whim, barely taking their true nature into account at all." --Aleksandr Bakhrakh
"She worked and wrote and gathered firewood and fed scraps to her family. She washed, laundered, sewed with her once thin fingers, now coarsened by work. I well remember those fingers, yellowed from smoking; they held a teapot, a cooking pot, a frying pan, a kettle, an iron, they threaded a needle and started a fire. These very same fingers wielded a pen or a pencil over paper on the kitchen table from which everything had been hastily removed. At this table Marina wrote--verse, prose, sketches for entire long poems, sometimes she would trace two or three words and some particular rhyme and copy it many, many times." --Helene Iswolsky
"I perceive her as a person who values herself too highly, whose opinion of herself is wrong and who is too morbidly self-preoccupied to be able to or to wish to understand other people...It is difficult for me to agree with you in your high evaluation of Marina Tsvetaeva's talent. Her gift seems to me shrill, even hysterical. She is not a master of language. Language is her master." --Maxim Gorky, letter to Pasternak, 1927
"Marina Tsvetaeva did not enjoy great popularity, but still people came. Her dress was modest, worn, thin bangs on her forehead, her hair an indefinable color -- ash blond with streaks of gray, her face pale, slightly sallow. Silver bracelets and rings on her work-worn hands. Her eyes were green, but not mysteriously green, and not strikingly beautiful, looking straight ahead like the eyes of a night bird blinded by the light. She obviously did not see those who had come to look at her or listen to her. Marina Tsvetaeva recited her poems in a loud voice, stressing individual words and cadences as though she were issuing a challenge. She didn't seem to care about the impression she was making. I have never met a performer who was freer from the desire to please the public." --a friend
"Tsvetaeva is causing much harm to herself by her silver rings: let her sell them first." --an acquaintance when asked to buy a ticket for one of Tsvetaeva's readings, early 1930s
"She looked terrible; I was amazed to see how she had suddenly aged and somehow dried up. I embraced her and suddenly she began to cry, softly and silently; it was the first time I had seen her in tears....I was shocked by her tears and by the absence of complaints against fate, as well as by some hopeless certainty that it made no sense to fight, that one had to accept the inevitable. I remember how simple and routine her words sounded: 'I would like to die, but I have to live because of Mur; Alya and Sergey Yakovlevich don't need me any more...' When asked about her plans for the future, she said she would have to return to Russia and would apply for a Soviet passport because 'anyway, it's impossible for me to stay in Paris without money or in any way to be published, and the emigres will hound me; already mistrust and hostility are everywhere." --Mark Slonim
"She had the angry manners of a master, a loud and sharp voice. But behind her self-assured tone and judgements one could feel how lost she was and how terribly lonely. Her husband and daughter had been arrested; with her son, I noticed, there was no common language. Writers avoided contact with her because she was a former emigree. In the eyes of this gray-haired woman with an unusual face, appeared at times such an expression of despair and suffering, that it conveyed stronger than words her condition." --Noye Luriye
"M.Ts. was thin and exhausted, and her face was grey and colourless. She had a
greyish curl over her forehead, small pale-blue eyes, and an expression that
was anxious and unfriendly. She was like some hobgoblin that was about to make
a sideways jump, play some trick, scratch you and perform a somersault. She
spoke quickly and irritably, in spasms, often interrupting the other person:
'In the physical world I am very undemanding, but in the spiritual world I am
intolerant!' She was dressed very poorly; everything was thrown together any
old how. She wore a beret and a cold fur coat with a little grey collar... she
took off her coat, sat down at the desk and began to write something. I thought
inspiration must have descended on her and timidly asked what she was
writing.
"'What does that matter to you?' M.Ts. replied angrily. 'This is my
notebook, you have one too. I wouldn't have had time to note anything down at
home, but I can do it here.'
"I obediently began to make some tea, hoping her writing wouldn't go on for too
long. Finally M.Ts. laid down her pen with a satisfied look and put her
notebook away in the cloth bag that she took with her wherever she went..."
--Olga Mochalova, a Soviet poet