SOURCE: "Marina Tsvetaeva and Russian Poetry," in Melbourne Slavonic Studies, Nos. 5-6, 1971, pp. 178-93.

Below, Livingstone discusses Tsvetaeva's place within Russian poetry. She points out aspects of Symbolism, Acmeism, and Futurism in Tsvetaeva's verse.

I

Pasternak said that Marina Tsvetaeva achieved just what the Symbolists wanted to achieve and did it better. The early Tsvetaeva was

exactly what all the other symbolists, taken together, wanted to be and couldn't. Where their literary efforts helplessly thrashed about in a world of thought-up schemes and lifeless archaisms, Tsvetaeva soared easily above the difficulties of genuine creation, solved its problems effortlessly, with incomparable technical brilliance. ["Three Shadows," in Autobiographical Sketch, 1958].

Simon Karlinsky says [in his Marina Tsvetaeva, her life and work, 1966] that she did what … the Futurists wanted to do, and, again, that she did it better:

In terms of language and versification, the poetry of Posle Rossii is a staggering...