Marina Tsvetaeva was a native of Moscow, a city that played a significant role in her poetry and prose. Together with Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, she is frequently considered a representative of the "Moscow branch" of twentieth-century Russian poetry, as opposed to the "Petersburg branch," which included Anna Andreevna Akhmatova and Osip Emil'evich Mandel'shtam. Still, Tsvetaeva's personality and her creative work transcend any narrow classifications. She was a poet of exceptional intensity and dense verbal texture--as well as a brilliant essayist--and she disregarded the conveniences of any school. In the words of Pasternak, "Tsvetaeva had an active, virile, militant soul, resolute and indomitable. Both in art and in life she had an eager and avid, almost a rapacious need for definition and finality, and in pursuing this she outstripped everyone else" (from Pasternak's Sobranie sochinenii v piati tomakh, 1991). Her post-Symbolist poetics was experimental to a degree: it displayed certain...