Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) was born in Moscow. Widely considered one of the most renowned poets of twentieth-century Russia, she also wrote verse plays and prose pieces. Tsvetaeva lived through and wrote about the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed. In an attempt to save her younger daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, but the plan failed and Irina died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family, in increasing poverty, in Paris, Berlin, and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. After her husband Sergei Efron and her older daughter Ariadna were arrested on espionage charges in 1941, Sergei was executed and Ariadna was sent to a work camp. Later that year, Tsvetaeva took her own life.