13.1 Queen of Evidence

In the month of July, some visitors arrived on a riverboat cruise. Among them was a lady, fifty-two years old with ice-blue eyes, who received an earnest welcome from the residents. She paid a visit to the primary school wearing a blue dress with white polka dots. She did not come to recite her poems or read from a book. She came all the way from that far to extent her appreciation to the folks in Turukhansk where she had been exiled between 1949 and 1955.

Tyler Friesen was told to stand in the back rows so he stood in the shadows.

She was Ariadna Sergeevna Efron, the daughter of Sergei Efron and the famous poet Marina Tsvetaeva to whom she referred to as Marina. And her mother called her Alya.

Sergei Efron was born in Moscow in 1893. As a teenager enrolled in the officers’ cadet academy, he came across Marina in Koktebel – a Crimean haven for writers and poets, where he was recuperating from tuberculosis. They fell in love and were married in 1912. They had an intense relationship even though Marina had affairs, two daughters were born, both in Moscow – Ariadna in 1912 and Irina in 1917, later gave birth to a boy named Georgy in 1925 in Czechoslovakia.

Even the christening of the girl called Ariadna on 20^th December was aristocratic in its style. Professor Ivan Tsvetaev, the respectable director of the Museum of Fine Arts, came to the baptism of his first granddaughter in full dress uniform.

Sergei Efron was involved with the 56^th Reserve in the military and spent in Moscow where he joined the White Army and participated in the Ice March. During this time their relationship was severely strained with awfully little communication between the two. Marina returned to Moscow hoping to be reunited with her husband. She was faced with a terrible famine and trapped in Moscow for five years. Starvation and worry eroded her looks and with no immediate family to turn to, she had no way to support for herself and her daughters. She placed them in a state orphanage in Kuncevo. Ariadna became ill and Irina died of malnutrition in February 1920.

At the end of the civil war, Efron was united with his wife and daughter in Berlin in May 1922. This family moved to Prague in August. Living in unremitting poverty and unable to afford an accommodation in Prague itself, with Efron studying politics and sociology at the Charles University and boarding in hostels, Marina and Ariadna dwelt in a village outside the city. The Czech authorities paid her a small stipend.

“We are devoured by coal and gas, the only meat we eat is horse meat,” she wrote.

In 1925, this family settled in France where they would live for the next many years. Ariadna acquired an education from École Duperré and majored in art history at École du Louvre. While in Paris, Efron was developing Soviet sympathies and homesick for Russia. Eventually, either out of idealism or to garner acceptance from the Communists, he began to spy for the NKVD and in doing so was established at a dacha in the country.

Ariadna shared his Stalinist views and gradually turned against her mother. She contributed her work for the French magazines; Russie d’Aujourd’hui, Pour-Vous, France-URSS, as well as for a pro-Soviet magazine, Nash Soviet, which was published by the ‘Union of Returning Soviet Citizens’ – a cover organisation of the NKVD. She knew it and in fact supplied information to the NKVD of the exiled Russians wanting to return and recruits to the Comintern in Spain.

In March 1937, she was the first from the family to return to the USSR and started work in the editorial board of the Soviet magazine Revue de Moscou published in French. Here she met Samuel Gurevich.

In September 1937, the French police implicated Sergei Efron in the murder of the former Soviet agent and defector Ignace Reiss on a country lane near Lausanne, Switzerland. Efron was said to have been in the car of the assassins. A police search of both his office and the flat however yielded no evidence.

He was called back to Moscow by the NKVD and upon his return, held under house arrest in a dacha.

After Efron’s flee, the French police interrogated Marina at the Paris Sûreté Nationale headquarters on 22^nd October. She apparently seemed confused and answered somewhat incoherently but was quoted saying that Efron had been fighting in Spain and that “his trust might have been abused…my trust in him remains unchanged.” The police concluded that she was utterly deranged and knew nothing of the murder. Marina did not seem to know that her husband was an NKVD agent, nor the extent to which he was compromised.

Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892 and her full sister Anastasia or Asia in 1894. They always quarrelled and often violently but both grew to become poets in their own right. Marina was a poet of exceptional intensity and dense verbal texture as well as a brilliant essayist. From her early childhood she lived an extremely emotional and intellectual life. She spoke three languages – Russian, German and French.

This family spent their summers in Tarusa and idolised the countryside. At the age of six, Marina began to attend music classes and generated her first poems. When her mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis, they went to live abroad. At first, at Nervi in Italy, near Genoa. In 1904, the two children were sent to school in Lausanne and afterwards moved to Freiburg im Breisgau. In 1905, the family returned to Russia, settled in Yalta, and their mother died in 1906. Marina attended several schools in Moscow and made a trip to Paris on her own to study Old French literature at the Sorbonne, or rather, with her keen obsession for Napoleon.

In the winter of 1909, Marina and Asia met Lev (Ellis) Kobylinsky and Vladimir Nieländer. They played a significant role in introducing the girls to the world of Russian and French modernist poetry. Moreover, Marina entered into a complicated relationship with both men. It all echoed in Marina’s very first book of verse, ‘Vechernii al’bom’, which she published at her own expense.

Next, she befriended Maksimilian Voloshin, who wrote not only an exceedingly warm review of the book but also a verse of welcome for her. Voloshin was a writer of more considerable stature who introduced her to the Moscow literary community and invited her to his retreat at Koktebel.

There, in May 1911, Marina met Sergei Efron, an aspiring writer who was a year younger than herself.

Marina’s connection with the theatre world gave her bright moments. She met great many people; artists, writers, actors, including Boris Pasternak. She continued to write throughout these years and published volumes of her work, had a tumultuous life and many affairs that she expressed in her literature. Her reckless courage did not result in her arrest and she properly believed that she avoided arrest because of the power of poetry.