How do you feel about books with unlikable protagonists? Because that’s true of ‘Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga’ by Venus Khoury-Ghata (pub. Seagull Books). Not that Tsvetaeva didn’t have her reasons for being unlikable. She desperately wanted someone to stay in love with her forever, and desperately sought romantic and sexual attention from men, and a few women, and would carry on with up to ten people at a single time. She thought nothing of taking one of her husband’s best friends as a lover, and made a ‘Sophie’s Choice’ style choice between her two daughters during the Moscow famines of 1921-1922. She was volatile, felt and acted upon her emotions in the extreme, and had an enormous ego and sense of entitlement.
Yet, she was also very talented, a modernist Russian poet whose works are read long after her tragic su*cide. She was passionate, and lived through the Russian revolution and famines, and through the persecution of artists by the Communist regime. She had dalliances (mostly written) with both Rilke and Pasternak.
The book goes back and forth in time, starting with her death, weaving back to the life that led up to it. Khoury-Ghata, a Lebanese-French author who writes beautifully and in a way that immerses you into Tsvetaeva’s life and emotions, chose to narrate this book in second-person, which can be a bit difficult at times.
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