No Love Without Poetry: The Memoirs of Marina Tsvetaeva's Daughter - Paperback

by Ariadna Efron (Author), Diane Nemec Ignashev (Translator)

Winner of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages 2011 Book Prize for Best Scholarly Translation in English

The memoirs of Ariadna Efron provide an intimate and indispensable perspective on the poet Marina Tsvetaeva's life and work, told from the point of view of her daughter. This wrenching story about the difficulty of living with genius charts Efron's relationship with her parents as they navigate art and exile.

Efron's rapport with her mother, already intense, became strained under the hardships imposed by early twentieth century Russian political upheaval. Efron recounts the family's travels from Moscow to Germany, to Czechoslovakia, and finally to France, where, against her mother's advice, Efron decided to return to Russia. Diane Nemec Ignashev draws on Efron's short stories and her mother's notebooks to supplement the original memoirs. Haunting and poignant, No Love without Poetry completes extant historical records on Tsvetaeva--and showcases Efron as a literary force in her own right.

Author Biography

ARIADNA EFRON (1912-1975), daughter of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva and Sergei Efron, became well known as a writer in her own right upon the publication of her memoirs in 1973 and 1975.

DIANE NEMEC IGNASHEV is Class of 1941 Professor of Russian and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College.