Tsvetaeva and Efron love story. Literary and historical notes of a young technician. In the "white" movement

The Durnovo-Efron family entered the life of 18-year-old Marina Tsvetaeva in 1911 in Koktebel, where in the house of Maximilian Voloshin and his mother Elena Ottobaldovna Kiriyenko-Voloshina, young Marina met her future husband Sergei Efron and his sisters, Vera and Elizaveta. The fate of the Efron sisters (especially Elizabeth (Lily)) will be closely connected with the fate of Marina before her departure from Russia in 1922, and after Tsvetaeva returns from emigration. The nature of relations with the Efrons will be in different periods different, but no matter what difficulties these relationships endure, family ties did not break.
Today, everyone immersed in the life and poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva is well aware of the Moscow address of Elizabeth Yakovlevna Efron - Merzlyakovsky lane, 16, where in different time Marina Ivanovna found shelter with her son Georgy, who returned a little earlier than the rest of the family members to the USSR, and then, many years later, from exile in Turukhansk, the daughter of Marina and Sergey, Ariadna Efron, where long years the archive of Marina Tsvetaeva, brought by Moore from Yelabuga, was kept - her literary and epistolary heritage.
Tsvetaeva dedicates a separate poetic cycle to Sergei Efron's older brother, Pyotr Efron, and grieves his death from tuberculosis in 1914.
However, there was another fate in the Efron family, which was closely intertwined with the fate of Marina Ivanovna and was invisibly present in her throughout her life.
In March 1914, Tsvetaeva wrote from Feodosia to V.V. Rozanov: “... my husband is 20 years old. He is extraordinarily and nobly handsome, he is beautiful externally and internally. His paternal great-grandfather was a rabbi, his maternal grandfather was a magnificent guardsman of Nicholas I. In Seryozha, two bloods are connected - brilliantly connected - Jewish and Russian. He is brilliantly gifted, smart, noble. Soul, manners, face - all in the mother. And his mother was a beauty and a heroine. His mother, nee Durnovo ... ".

When Marina Tsvetaeva met Sergei Efron, his mother, the “beauties and heroines” Elizaveta Petrovna Durnovo (Efron), was no longer alive. However, the fate that Moore so piercingly wrote about much later, in 1943, in a letter to Samuil Gurevich (“The inexorable machine of fate got to me ...”) had already begun, and perhaps continued its inevitable action, and, admiring the mother of his young husband, Marina did not yet know that in some way, for all the dissimilarity of their views, beliefs, actions, life tasks, the tragic circumstances of the life of Elizabeth Petrovna and her husband, father Sergei, Yakov Konstantinovich Efron, would be mirrored in her fate.
The fate of Elizaveta Petrovna Durnovo (Efron) was truly legendary and tragic. An aristocrat, a nature, according to the memoirs of contemporaries, “thin, pure, deep”, beautiful, intelligent, charming, who in her youth admired Ivan Bunin, Maximilian Voloshin, Pyotr Kropotkin and many other famous contemporaries Liza Durnovo was one of the first student students of the famous Moscow higher courses IN AND. Guerrier, had an extraordinary thirst for learning and unique artistic abilities. At the same time, from a young age, expansive, exalted and possessing an unlimited readiness for self-sacrifice, Elizaveta Durnovo, already in her youth, was an active participant in the revolutionary movement in Russia, later a member of the Opposition Faction of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which broke away from the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. The only and beloved daughter of her parents, she herself, having married, became the mother of nine children, while not stopping active revolutionary activity and having been a prisoner Peter and Paul Fortress in 1880 and Butyrok in 1906.

Without a doubt, Sergei Efron told Marina about his mother, about her tragic death about your childhood. Anastasia Ivanovna Tsvetaeva in her famous “Memoirs” describes how in Koktebel, during her acquaintance with Sergei, he, at the request of Marina, told the story of his family and her. After the story, writes Anastasia Tsvetaeva, “it was impossible to look at Seryozha. We didn't look. Marina, like him, was a living wound. And passionate longing for the departed - worship, awe, the oath of allegiance to his life ate her. On July 12, 1911, Sergei wrote to the sisters from Moscow to Koktebel: “... I was in Gagarinsky Lane - I showed Marina our house. We were not allowed inside.<...>Today we are going to the Vagankovsky cemetery<ище>. Marina's mother is also buried there." And on March 22, 1912, already from Paris, where Efron and Marina Tsvetaeva visited during honeymoon trip, again to the sisters in Moscow: “Dear, yesterday and the third day I was at the grave. I removed it all with hyacinths, immortals, daisies. I planted three perennials: bykovsky heather, a bush of white flowers and, it seems, a laurel bush.<...>The other day I send you some silver<яных>leaves from the grave.
Years will pass, and it will be Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva who will put a tombstone on this family grave at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris, where Elizabeth Petrovna with her husband and their younger son Konstantin. “They were wonderful people (all three!) And they deserved this modest monument (since 1910)," Tsvetaeva writes in one of the letters of that period.
What could attract and delight Marina Tsvetaeva the personality of E.P. Durnovo (Efron) - a woman who devoted her whole life to revolutionary activity, from which Marina herself, as we know, was far away during her acquaintance with Sergei Efron? It seems, first of all, an aura of heroism and romanticism at the beginning, respect for the fidelity of the chosen path later.

Myths and legends literally shrouded the biography of Elizabeth Petrovna, passing from generation to generation of the Efron family.
In 2012, the publishing house "Prometheus" published a monograph by Elena Zhupikova "E.P. Durnovo (Efron). History and myths. Perhaps, for the first time, the biography of Elizaveta Durnovo was considered here not only in the light of the memories left about her (first of all, the memories of her daughters - Anna and Elizabeth), but also based on archival documents (metrics, protocols of interrogations, reports, indictments, etc.). P.). The latter allowed the author of the monograph to introduce accuracy and clarity into a number of errors that have taken root in the literature about Elizaveta Durnovo (Efron) and Yakov Efron. The clarified circumstances made it possible to consider in more detail and compare them with the circumstances of the life of Marina Tsvetaeva and Sergei Efron and to draw “roll-call-parallels” in the destinies of two generations of the family.
Let us dwell in more detail on several of these "roll calls".

"The Reiss Case" - "The Reinstein Case"

Everyone knows the famous "Reiss Affair", which played the role of a fatal turn in the fate of Tsvetaeva and Efron and for many years entailed accusations of Sergei Yakovlevich of the political assassination of Ignatius (Ignas) Reiss, a resident of the NKVD, who refused to return to Moscow and was killed on September 4, 1937 in Switzerland near Lausanne. Today, the non-involvement of Sergei Efron in this murder is practically proven by historians and literary critics who have studied the archives of the NKVD. The names of its real perpetrators and members of the "auxiliary" Reiss persecution group are named. The name of Sergei Efron is not among them. Did Sergei Yakovlevich take at least an indirect part in this massacre? Let us quote in this connection the words of Irma Kudrova, who, having spent a large research work I'm convinced no. “Today it is quite known that the real leadership of the “action” was carried out not by small emigrant “sixes”, but by high-ranking persons. The main figure was S.M. SPIEGELGLAS.<...>On the instructions of Spiegelglas, major decisions were made, and a group was formed to pursue the disappeared resident. Did Sergei Efron help in this formation? Only in the sense that the “auxiliary” group included people recruited by him at different times<...>This is the real fact."

And now let's go back many years ago - in the year 1879. On March 5, 1879, a political murder was committed in Moscow in the former Mamontov's hotel. Killed - Nikolai Reinstein (a member of the "Northern Union of Russian Workers" and at the same time an agent III branch) - was discovered with a note pinned to his back: “Nikolai Vasiliev Reinstein, a traitor and spy, was convicted and executed by us, Russian socialist revolutionaries. Death to Judas - traitors. In the list of those arrested in the "Reinstein Case" we can see the name "Efron". This is 28-year-old Yakov Konstantinovich Efron - Sergei's father. Ariadna Sergeevna Efron wrote in her memoirs: “... Yakov Konstantinovich, together with two of his comrades, was entrusted with carrying out the sentence of the Revolutionary Committee of Land and Freedom on the Okhrana agent, provocateur Reinstein, who penetrated the Moscow organization. He was executed<...>. The police failed to find the perpetrators.

Speaking about the fate of her grandfather in a high-profile political murder, Ariadna Sergeevna voices one of the myths that have been passed down from generation to generation of the Efron family. As mentioned above, Yakov Konstantinovich was indeed arrested among other suspects in March 1879, but his involvement in the "Reinstein Case" after a lengthy investigation was not proven. On June 14, 1879, Efron is released from custody (he spent 3 months in strict solitary confinement), and a month later, on July 13, due to the complete absence of evidence, he is released from "any responsibility."
Later Yakov Efron retired from political affairs.

Fate seemed to have spared the elder Efron, so that after many years with new force fall on his son - Sergei and eventually destroy him. A truly fatal "roll call" in the fate of the two Efrons is seen in these two political murders, which they did not commit.

Leitmotif of voluntary departure from life in destinies
E.P. Durnovo (Efron) and Marina Tsvetaeva.

Another parallel-“roll call” in the destinies of two generations of the Efonov-Tsvetaev family (in particular, E.P. Durnovo (Efron) and M.I. Tsvetaeva) is the leitmotif of voluntary death and the tragic end of both of them.
The suicidal moods of Marina Tsvetaeva, recurring throughout her life, starting from her youth, combined in her worldview and nature with extraordinary fortitude, the ability to self-renewal and self-resurrection after the hardest blows of fate, with an understanding of the strength and value of her poetic gift, are widely described in color science literature . Therefore, let us dwell in more detail on the named tragic leitmotif in the fate of E.P. Durnovo (Efron).

As already noted, Liza Durnovo, according to the memoirs of her contemporaries, from her youth was a subtle, idealistically inclined, extremely emotional nature. There is a case when in her youth she lost consciousness and fell into a three-day lethargic sleep. The reason was the anger of his father, Pyotr Apollonovich Durnovo, who threw Lisa's notebooks with lectures into the fireplace and forbade her to attend the Lubyanka courses of the 2nd male gymnasium. (After a short time, P.A. Durnovo nevertheless agrees to Lisa’s education, and she enters Guerrier’s courses that have just opened in Moscow).
During the stay of the Durnovo family in Switzerland in Geneva, young Liza falls under the influence of Peter Kropotkin and becomes a member of the First International.
The name of Kropotkin in many years will still bind invisible thread Marina Tsvetaeva and Elizaveta Petrovna Durnovo (Efron), when Tsvetaeva in desperation will write to Lavrenty Beria with a plea for a review of the case of Sergei Efron: “Sergei Yakovlevich Efron,” Marina Ivanovna wrote, “is the son of the famous People’s Volunteer Elizaveta Petrovna Durnovo<...>Pyotr Alekseevich Kropotkin, who returned in 1917, constantly told me about Liza Durnovo with love and admiration ... ”.

Passion for revolutionary ideas determined the fate of E. Durnovo - she did not give up her revolutionary views until the end of her life. One of her comrades-in-arms in revolutionary activities (E.N. Ignatova) describes the young Elizaveta Durnovo as follows: “Lilichka”<...>devoted herself with her characteristic fervor and expansiveness to the cause of calling the revolution among the peasants. At first she leaned towards terrorist activities. <...>But having joined the circle, she abandoned terror and took up activities (distributing illegal literature, etc.), into which she introduced extraordinary expansiveness and exaltation: she kept imagining the imminent onset of a general explosion ... Lilichka "was a common favorite."
The first arrest and imprisonment in solitary confinement Peter and Paul Fortress in 1880 plunged the young Elizabeth into a neurotic state. According to the information preserved in the archival documents cited by E. Zhupikova in the previously mentioned monograph, the department of the commandant of the fortress reported to the Police Department that Elizaveta Durnovo “began to show an abnormal condition mental abilities”, She began to have auditory hallucinations, hysterical seizures, and a strong desire to take her own life. The documents record that because of the fear of the suicide of the prisoner, the commandant orders her to be constantly monitored internally. On November 13, 1880, Elizabeth was transferred to the guardianship of her father with a deposit of 10 thousand rubles. A Moscow doctor, titular adviser Sergei Korsakov, who examined her a few days after her release, issued a certificate certified by the police (it was preserved in the State Archives), which states that Elizaveta Durnovo suffers from a nervous breakdown and has a disposition to diseases nervous system. In this state, fleeing from the persecution of the authorities, Elizabeth makes her first flight abroad.

The second, from which she will never return to Russia, will happen many years later. And before that, she will marry Yakov Efron, become the mother of 9 children, but will not give up her views and devote her whole life to political struggle.
Elizaveta Petrovna Durnovo's leitmotif of voluntary death will sound with new force after her second arrest in 1906 and the subsequent forced emigration. Fear, despair, longing, the desire to commit suicide - this is how she will describe her condition in letters to the closest people, first from Switzerland, then from Paris. “You know, - Vera, - how I regret that I emigrated! I'm losing strength day by day<...>I would have committed suicide, and the end, now I would have forgotten to think<...>I hate myself!" “... There is no possibility to be free, so there is an opportunity to die in peace. My days are numbered, of course, my family should not know about it ... Gloomy, cloudy, cold ..., the night hung over the city. The hours go by, the days go by, and soon, soon it will be necessary to commit suicide.
How similar is the state of Elizaveta Durnovo to the state of Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, described by those who saw her before the evacuation to Yelabuga and talked with her in Chistopol! Marina Tsvetaeva was driven to despair by the arrests of her husband and daughter, the lack of housing in her native Moscow, the outbreak of war, fear for her son, rejection of what the world around her was sinking more and more into. For Elizaveta Petrovna Durnovo (Efon), forced emigration, the impossibility of returning to her homeland, and the death of loved ones became the hardest blow.

In 1909, Yakov Konstantinovich Efron dies, and the desire to commit suicide is heard more and more often in her letters of the last year of her life.
In February 1910, 14-year-old Konstantin, the youngest son of Efronov, who lived with his mother in exile, hanged himself. It was the last blow.
There is no single point of view on the circumstances of the departure of Elizabeth Petrovna herself, which followed this fateful event: the chronicle of Parisian newspapers and the memoirs of contemporaries differ in the details of the circumstances of this tragedy. It is only known for sure that Elizaveta Petrovna Durnovo (Efron) hanged herself after her son. They were buried on the same day at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.
Many years later, shortly before her return from emigration to the USSR, Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva will erect a monument on the Efron family grave. A few more years will pass, and to the question of Anastasia Ivanovna Tsvetaeva, how Marina, the daughter of Elizaveta Petrovna Durnovo (Efron), also Elizabeth, died, she will give a response telegram: “Like our mother.”

Notes:

1. Tsvetaeva M.I. Letters 1905-1923 / Compiled, prepared. text by L.A. Mnukhin. M.: Ellis Luck, 2012. S. 174.
2. Efron G.S. Letters. M .: House-Museum of Marina Tsvetaeva, Korolev: Museum of M.I. Tsvetaeva in Bolshevo, 2002, p. 106.
3. Zhupikova E.F. E.P. Durnovo (Efron). History and myths: Monograph. M.: Prometheus, 2012. S. 123.
4. Tsvetaeva A.I. Memories. Moscow: Isograph; House-Museum of M.I. Tsvetaeva, 1995, p. 411.
5. Tsvetaeva M. Unpublished. Family: History in letters / Comp., prepared. text, comments E.B. Korkina. M.: 6. Ellis Lak, 2012. S. 101.
6. Ibid. S. 125.
7. Tsvetaeva M. Sobr. cit.: In 7 vols. T. 7: Letters / Comp., prepared. text and comments. L. Mnukhina. M.: Ellis Lak, 1995. S. 91.
8. Kudrova I.V. The path of comets: In 3 volumes. Vol. 2: After Russia. St. Petersburg: Kriga; Publishing house of Sergey Khodov, 2007.
pp. 512-513.
9. Zhupikova E.F. E.P. Durnovo (Efron). History and myths: Monograph. M.: Prometheus, 2012. S. 83.10. Efron A.S.
10. About Marina Tsvetaeva: Memoirs of a daughter. Kaliningrad: Yantarny skaz, 1999, pp. 67-68.
11. Zhupikova E.F. E.P. Durnovo (Efron). History and myths: Monograph. M.: Prometheus, 2012. S. 103.
12. Tsvetaeva M. Sobr. cit.: In 7 vols. T. 7: Letters / Comp., prepared. text and comments. L. Mnukhina. M.: Ellis Lak, 1995. S. 661.
13. Zhupikova E.F. E.P. Durnovo (Efron). History and myths: Monograph. M.: Prometheus, 2012. S. 77-79.
14. Ibid. S. 156.
15. Ibid. S. 277.
16. Ibid. S. 277.
17. “The French newspaper “L’Humanite” wrote on February 8, 1910: “Citizen Elizaveta Efron, born Durnovo, and her son Konstantin were buried yesterday at the Montparnasse cemetery. The funeral, organized by friends, was private nature. Several hundred Russian emigrants surrounded the eldest son of the deceased. Speeches were delivered at the cemetery by Counts Garelin, Rubanovich, Ivin and Antonov. The Socialist Revolutionary Party and several other Russian socialist groups laid wreaths. The sad ceremony took place with deep grief and heavy excitement of those present.
Cit. Quoted from: Zhupikova E.F. E.P. Durnovo (Efron). History and myths: Monograph. M.: Prometheus, 2012. S.287-288.
18. Tsvetaeva A.I. Memories. Moscow: Isograph; House-Museum of M.I. Tsvetaeva, 1995, p. 800.
--------------
Published by: Yudina I.A. Marina Tsvetaeva and the Durnovo-Efron family: The Crossing of Fates. // "So that there are two in the world: Me and the world!": XIX International scientific-thematic conference (Moscow, October 8-10, 2016): Sat. report - M .: House-Museum of Marina Tsvetaeva, 2017.

Sergey Yakovlevich Efron(October 11, 1893, Moscow - October 16, 1941, Moscow) - publicist, writer, officer of the White Army, Markovian, pioneer, Eurasian, agent of the NKVD. Husband of Marina Tsvetaeva, father of her three children.

Biography

Sergei Yakovlevich Efron was born into the family of the People's Will of Elizaveta Petrovna Durnovo (1855-1910), from a well-known noble family, and Yakov Konstantinovich (Kalmanovich) Efron (1854-1909), from a Jewish family originating from the Vilna province. Nephew of prose writer and playwright Savely Konstantinovich (Sheel Kalmanovich) Efron (literary pseudonym S. Litvin; 1849-1925).

Because of early death parents until the age of majority, Sergei had a guardian. He graduated from the famous Polivanov Gymnasium, studied at the Faculty of History and Philology of Moscow University. He wrote stories, tried to play in the theater with Tairov, published magazines, and was also engaged in underground activities.

After the outbreak of the First World War, in 1915 he entered the hospital train as a brother of mercy; in 1917 he graduated from the cadet school. On February 11, 1917, he was sent to the Peterhof school of ensigns for service. Six months later, he was enrolled in the 56th Infantry Reserve Regiment, whose training team was in Nizhny Novgorod.

In October 1917, he took part in the battles with the Bolsheviks in Moscow, then - in the White Movement, in the Officer General Markov Regiment, participates in the Ice Campaign and the defense of the Crimea.

In exile

In the autumn of 1920, as part of his unit, he was evacuated to Gallipoli, then moved to Constantinople, to Prague. In 1921-1925 he was a student of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Prague. Member of the Russian student organization, the union of Russian writers and journalists.

Soon after emigration, Efron began to feel nostalgic for Russia, the desire to return to his homeland became stronger and stronger. In Prague, Sergei Yakovlevich organizes the Democratic Union of Russian Students and becomes co-editor of the Union's journal Svoimy Pamy, and participates in the development of the Eurasian movement, which has become widespread among the Russian emigration as an alternative to communism. Sergei Yakovlevich belonged to the left part of the movement, which, as the split of Eurasianism deepened, became more and more loyal to the Soviet system.

In 1926-1928, in Paris, Efron worked as co-editor of the Versta magazine close to Eurasianism.

In 1927, Efron starred in the French film Madonna of the Sleeping Cars (directed by Marco de Gastine and Maurice Glaze), where he played the role of a death row inmate in Batumi prison, which lasted only 12 seconds and in many ways anticipated his own future fate.

Since May 29, 1933 - a member of the Parisian Masonic lodge "Gamayun". He was expelled from the lodge on November 8, 1937 after the abduction of General Miller.

In the 30s, Efron began working in the "Union of Homecoming", as well as cooperating with the Soviet special services - since 1931. Sergei Yakovlevich was an employee of the Foreign Department of the OGPU in Paris. He was used as a group leader and recruiter, personally recruited 24 people from among the Parisian emigrants. Several emigrants recruited by him - Kirill Khenkin, in particular - he helped to smuggle to Spain to participate in the civil war. From 1935 he lived in Vanves near Paris.

According to one version, Efron was involved in the murder of Ignatius Reiss (Poretsky) (September 1937), Soviet spy who refused to return to the USSR. But the rumors were denied and he was acquitted.

IN THE USSR

In October 1937 he hastily left for Le Havre, from where he went by steamer to Leningrad. Upon returning to the Soviet Union, Efron and his family were given the state dacha of the NKVD in Bolshevo near Moscow. At first, there were no signs of trouble. However, shortly after the return of Marina Tsvetaeva, their daughter Ariadna was arrested.

Arrested by the NKVD on November 10, 1939. During the Efron investigation different ways(including with the help of torture - for example, placing in a cold punishment cell in winter) they tried to persuade people close to him to testify, including comrades from the Union of Return, as well as Tsvetaeva, but he refused to testify against them. Convicted by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR on August 6, 1941 under Art. 58-1-a of the Criminal Code to capital punishment. He was shot on October 16, 1941 at the Butovo NKVD training ground as part of a group of 136 prisoners sentenced to capital punishment, hastily formed in order to "unload" the prisons of front-line Moscow.

IN State Museum history of Russian literature named after V.I. Dal opened an exhibition dedicated to the 125th anniversary of his birth, "A soul that knows no limits ...". The main motive of the exhibition is the movement from the habitable space, arranged according to the will of the poet, to the loss of home, solitude, and, finally, a place on earth. The curators of the project lead visitors from Tsvetaeva's childhood in her parents' house in Trekhprudny Lane to youth, sanctified by the warmth of Voloshin's house in Koktebel. Then - start family life in Borisoglebsky lane, with its stairs, attic-cabin. After - leaving for emigration, Prague, Paris, searching for oneself in a new world, but, in the end, returning to the USSR after her husband and daughter, loss of a family and her own corner, death.

The exhibition opens with a model of the Tsvetaevs' house in Trekhprudny Lane. In the windows: miniature rooms of Marina Tsvetaeva, attic on a high staircase, and her sisters. According to Tsvetaeva, from childhood she tried on the masks of tragic heroines. Therefore, portraits of Sarah Bernhardt, two Napoleons (her passion for life) and Maria Bashkirtseva hung on the walls of her room. Bashkirtseva published a diary, which was a breakthrough in revealing the inner essence of a woman, which was very close to Tsvetaeva. These were not love, personal experiences, but discussions about creativity, philosophy, and so on.

When Marina was born, her mother was upset that the first child was not a son. “But he will be a musician,” she decided.

"Evening Album" is Marina's first book, which she published in secret from her father.

Shortly thereafter, a fat man, choking from asthma, climbed into the narrow girl's room - a poet. He asked, "Did you read my review of your book?" Marina replied: “No, I didn’t read it.” A little later, these verses appeared:

Marina Tsvetaeva

Your soul is so joyfully drawn to you!
Oh what grace
From the pages of the Evening Album!
(Why "album" and not "notebook"?)
Why does the black cap hide
A clean forehead, and glasses in front of your eyes?
I noticed only a submissive look
And the infantile oval of the cheek,
Children's mouth and ease of movement,
The connection of calmly modest poses ...
There are so many achievements in your book...
Who are you?
Pardon my question.
I'm lying today - neuralgia,
Pain is like a silent cello...
Your words touch good
And in verse the winged swing of the swing
Lull the pain ... Wanderers,
We live for the thrill of longing...
(Whose coolly caressing fingers
Do they touch my temples in the dark?)
Your book is strangely excited -
It reveals what is hidden,
In it is a country where all paths begin,
But where there is no return.
I remember everything: the dawn, shining sternly,
I long for all earthly roads at once,
All ways... And there was everything... so many!
How long have I crossed the threshold!
Who gave you such clarity of colors?
Who gave you such accuracy of words?
The courage to say everything: from children's caresses
Before spring new moon dreams?
Your book is a message "from there",
Good morning news.
I haven't accepted a miracle for a long time,
But how sweet to hear:
"There is a miracle!"

Friendship with Voloshin was friendship forever, although the fate of Marina threw her far away. Nevertheless, in 1911 she came to Koktebel for the first time.

The exhibition shows the life of Voloshin's house and its guests. Many photographs of Marina Ivanovna. Koktebel played an amazing role in her life. Once she was digging sand next to Max on the seashore, looking for pebbles and said that she would marry the first one who finds a stone that she likes. Soon, Sergei Efron, who was then 17 years old, gave her a found carnelian bead.

At the exhibition you can see wedding ring Sergei Efron. In 1912, when he was 18 years old, he and Marina got married. Engraving inside the ring: "Marina". A towel embroidered for the couple by Elena Ottobaldovna, Voloshin's mother, and Marinina's famous bracelets.

From Marina's personal belongings: beads that were hung on a donkey - her father brought them to her from the expedition. And Marina's ring with carnelian. But this is not the stone that Efron gave her. She wore that bead without taking it off, but it has not been preserved.

The house in Borisoglebsky Lane was rented by Marina and Sergey. It was assumed that a happy childhood of their first daughter Ariadne, Ali, would flow in it. But life decreed otherwise: happiness lasted only three years.

The poetess Sophia Parnok will be the first crack in the marriage of Marina Tsvetaeva and Sergei Efron.

At first civil war Sergei Efron goes to the front as a nurse. Marina is alone. Without a livelihood, she is forced to give the children to an orphanage, where she was told that the children were fed American food. humanitarian aid. Irina died in the shelter, and Marina took Alya.

Tsvetaeva was considered indifferent to fate youngest daughter, but it's not. She has very candid notes in which she says that this is her cross and that she is to blame.

Despite all the severity, this is a very eventful period in the life of Tsvetaeva. In the same years, she met with Mandelstam. Petersburg, in Kuzmin's apartment. It was a short love affair - love was the breeding ground for Tsvetaeva's creativity.

As Marina writes in her notebooks, Alya lived in her little world, in Seryozha's attic room, among the drawings. Drawings from 1917-1922 are exhibited for the first time. Ariadne will continue to paint in exile.

Marina's personal belongings. Cup of the Czech period. Meat skewer. View from a house in Borisoglebsky.

Sergei Efron leaves Russia. Marina is alone. For several years she has been looking for him: she does not know whether he is alive or dead. Her piercing notes remained that if he is gone, then her life is over.

Despite the fact that all this time she had some short novels, her connection with Efron was inextricable. At the same time, Marina did not hide her love interests from anyone.

Marina instructs Ehrenburg, who lives here and now in Berlin, to look for Efron. Two years later, he finds him in Prague. He entered the University of Prague, did not know anything about the fate of Marina, became interested in Eurasianism, and communication with Russia was lost for him.

Ali's memories have been preserved of how mother and father met at the train station in Berlin. Suddenly a voice: “Marina, Marinochka!” And some A tall man, panting, arms outstretched, runs towards. Alya only guesses that this is dad, because she has not seen him for many years.

Marina will spend a short time in Berlin. He will meet here with and write a memoir "The Captive Spirit".

The emigration of Marina Tsvetaeva lasted 17 years. Life is hard: she said that in Russia she was without books, and in exile - without readers. Emigration did not accept her, because she was the wife of a man who begins to cooperate with the NKVD

But at this time she writes a lot.

Then she fell in love with Pasternak's poems and fell in love with their author in absentia. She corresponds with Rilke.

Life in Prague is very expensive - the family lives in different suburbs.

There was an amazing document left, it is not at the exhibition, this is a letter from Sergei to Max Voloshin, who was a kind of confessor for both Marina and Sergei. He knew immediately that something had happened. And what happened in Marina's life was Konstantin Rodzevich, Sergey's friend in Eurasianism. Marina left amazing records about these meetings, saying that he was a lover of lovers, that this is what she lives for. In a letter to Voloshin, Sergei says that a breakup is inevitable, that Marina is exhausted by lies and nightly departures. He tried to leave, but Marina said that she would not survive without him.

The connection with Rodzevich ended rather quickly, and Marina gives birth to her third child - the son of George, Moore, as he was called in the family.

They live hard: they collect cones, mushrooms. Marina without a table, cleans, cooks potatoes, washes, four of us live in one room.

1 /11

This portrait of Tsvetaeva by Boris Fedorovich Chaliapin, son, is exhibited for the second time. On the back is a pencil portrait of Efron. If Marina looks pretty attractive, then Efron in a pencil sketch is already an old man.

“Yes, I, perhaps, a strange person, Others marvel! To be, despite our twentieth century, So happy! Not listening to the secret similarity of souls, Not all such fables, To tell everyone that I have a husband, That he is beautiful! .. "

This is the first poem that Marina Tsvetaeva dedicated to her husband Sergei Efron.

Husband is a high school student

They met in Koktebel, Marina was invited to stay by her older friend Maximilian Voloshin. Eighteen-year-old Marina was looking for beautiful stones on the seashore, seventeen-year-old Sergey came up and began to help her. Marina looked into his huge eyes with incredibly long eyelashes and thought:

if he finds and gives me a carnelian, I will marry him.

Of course, Seryozha found this carnelian.

Many years will pass, and Sergey bitterly writes in a letter to a friend that Marina cannot live without storms and heroes that she invents herself. If the hero turned out to be a nonentity - well, she soon cooled down to him, if not, then she continued to invent him. Without this, she could not write poetry ... But Marina also came up with Sergey, immediately appointing him, still a boy, a shy orphan, a tragic knight and a lion. She called him that: Leo, Leo.

The need to comply with this idea frightened Efron, but he had no choice.

The first joint years were cloudless. Tsvetaeva surrounded Sergei some even over-concern. He fell ill with consumption, and Marina took care of his health, writing reports to his sister about how many bottles of milk he drank and how many eggs he ate. Marina took care of Sergei like a mother: he was still a high school student, and when their eldest daughter, Alya, was born, he took exams for the eighth grade as an external student.

cursed days

The war began, and Efron tried to sign up for the front as a volunteer. They didn’t take him: the medical board sees traces of a tuberculous lesion on his lungs, and then he goes to the front on an ambulance train. Then he managed to enter the cadet school. After the revolution, Sergei fought on the side of the White Army. For two years, Marina did not hear anything about her husband, and did not even know if he was alive.

Marina was tormented by anxiety, heavy thoughts about her husband plagued her, but she was a poet, and even in these two years she flared up, fell in love, or invented love for herself. Just a feeling for Sergei was above all this and occupied a separate place in her soul:

“If you are alive, if I am destined to see you again, listen! When I write to you. You are, since I am writing to you! If God does a miracle - leaves you alive, I will follow you like a dog ... ”, she wrote.

And with all this, she had to live, live, survive in hungry post-revolutionary Moscow. Once, when all the possibilities to get food were exhausted, Marina sent the girls to the Kuntsevsky orphanage: she was told that the children were fed rice and chocolate there. When it turned out that there was no chocolate at all, and the children in the orphanage were crying from hunger, Marina took eldest daughter- beloved. Wouldn't take two. On March 2, 1920, little Irina died of starvation.

"Snatching the older one from the darkness - She did not save the younger one."

Meeting

Another terrible year passed, and Ilya Ehrenburg found Efron in Prague. Soon Marina received a letter from her husband: “My dear friend, Marinochka, today received a letter from Ilya Ehrenburg that you are alive and well. After reading the letter, I wandered around the city all day, mad with joy. What should I write to you? Where to begin? I have a lot to say to you, but I have forgotten how not only to write, but also to speak. I live by faith in our meeting. Without you, there will be no life for me. Live! I I will not demand anything from you - I do not need anything, except that you are alive. Take care of yourself, I conjure you ... God bless you. Your Sergei.

Marina procured a foreign passport, took Alya and left for her husband. Little Casanova

They lived in the Czech Republic for three years. Sergey studied at Karov University, Marina and Alya rented a room in the suburbs of Prague. Here Efron and Tsvetaeva experienced the biggest test for their marriage: Marina fell in love with Konstantin Radzevich. It was a classmate of Sergei, the local "little Casanova", a rather ordinary person. As usual, Marina invented a hero out of him, writing poems for him all night long ...

I had to choose: new lover or husband. She was in despair, did not sleep for two weeks and finally announced that she would not be able to live, knowing that Sergey was somewhere completely alone.

“And I could if Marina got to the person whom I trusted. I knew that little Casanova would leave Marina in a week, and under Marina’s state, this would be tantamount to death, ”Sergey admitted in a letter to Voloshin.

Marina lived for a long time with the feeling that she was forced to give up incredible happiness. Her husband was for her at the same time a saving straw and a millstone around her neck. Sometimes she hated him, got annoyed at his every gesture, every word ... It was difficult for both him and her.

Soon after this story, Marina had a son, Moore. She was always sure that Moore's father was Efron.

Home

The family moved to Paris. Efron began to talk more and more about his desire to return to his homeland. He began to think that his participation in the White Movement was dictated by a false sense of solidarity, that the emigrants were largely to blame for the country they left ... These reflections led him to cooperate with the Soviet authorities. In the Paris Homecoming Union, he became one of the leaders, participated in a number of dubious actions of the Soviet special services ... Children also connected their future with the Soviet Union, even Moore was eager for the USSR. Alya left first. Bunin saw her off at the station:

Fool, where are you going, they will rot you in Siberia.

If I was like you 25, I would go too. Let Siberia, let them rot! But Russia!

Then came the turn of Efron - he was exposed after one unsuccessful operation, and he literally fled to the USSR.

In this family, Marina was the only opponent of the return: "I'm impossible there." And she would never have returned if not for her husband. Once Tsvetaeva caught the eye of a letter that she wrote in hungry Moscow in 1917: “If God does a miracle, leaves you alive, I will follow you like a dog ...” .

“Here I’ll go. Like a dog,” she wrote on this yellowed piece of paper in 1939.

A few months after returning from exile, Ariadna was arrested, and then Sergei. He was waiting for the arrest - this whole short period was accompanied by heart attacks and panic attacks for him. These days, Marina wrote her last work, dictated by love for her husband - a letter to Beria, in which she begs "to figure everything out", that she had lived with her husband for 30 years and had not met a person better than him ...

Marina committed suicide on August 31, 41. Efron was shot a month and a half later: she was gone - he was gone too. Moore died at the front.

In all this crucible, only Alya survived the Mordovian camps and the Siberian exile, and the pink carnelian, a long time ago, in an unreal happy life given by a shy boy to a green-eyed girl...

M. Gasparov, Entries and extracts:
“Only now I understand how lucky it was to read the poems of Tsvetaeva, and then Mandelstam<...>without knowing anything about the authors. Today's readers first receive the myth about Tsvetaeva, and then, as an optional supplement, her poems.

You can't really say. It was so with me, and not only with me - I judge by some of my friends and acquaintances of my youth. First - the Tsvetaeva Museum, stories about her fate. Then poetry, much later, and at first youthful-romantic, and gradually, gradually everything else.
One of the elements of the myth is the romantic love story of Marina and Seryozha, which, of course, is described by Ariadna Efron and Anastasia Tsvetaeva, as well as various exalted fans of Tsvetaeva. Indeed, if you don’t think about it, it’s beautiful: she met - an eighteen-year-old, he - a seventeen-year-old, Koktebel, a hidden and guessed carnelian bead, a feeling that this is forever, marriage in six months, the birth of a daughter - a future beauty and clever girl (young Tsvetaeva herself writes about this, both in poetry and in letters of that time), then ... well, it’s better to skip a couple of years here, not to think about Parnok and all that, then a four-year separation, and it’s also better not to think about many things, not only about hobbies, but also about the death of her daughter, but after her - a new meeting, and then, almost to the very end, together (the last two years, of course, in separation, but she continued to take care of him, transfers, letters to authorities, etc.). At the age of sixteen, such love stories make an impression.
Crazy idea, but still...
The main, tragic mistake in Tsvetaeva's life, which she herself admitted, was this very marriage with Efron - see, for example, the entry dated December 5, 1923 in Tezeya's draft notebook:

“Personal life, that is, my life in life (i.e., in days and places) failed. This must be understood and accepted. I think that 30 years of experience (because it failed right away) is sufficient. There are several reasons. that I am I. The second: an early meeting with a beautiful person - the most beautiful, which was supposed to be friendship, but realized in marriage. (To put it simply: too early marriage with too young. 1933) ".

Mythologized by exalted ladies, of whom there are always many around Tsvetaeva, the union that began on May 5, 1911 on the Koktebel coast and ended with the death of both in 1941, he survived her exactly one and a half months. She foresaw the total death accurately (“So together and we’ll go down into the night: Cradlemates ...” - this is December 1921), in contrast to the details of her own death, which appeared more than once in verses (“I know, I will die at dawn ...”, “You go, you look like me ...”, “Early dawns on Vagankovo ​​...”)
Typical - and not the only one in Tsvetaeva's biography - is the passion of a Russian woman for the weak, sick and wretched, who needs to be raised from the ground, sheltered, warmed and given food (she makes a line from this poem an epigraph to "Poems to an orphan" - the result of another passion of Tsvetaeva ), and then carry it around for the rest of your life. Actually, she has a poem, “Be sorry...”, where just such a woman's pity is very accurately depicted.
Because of Efron and only because of him, she went abroad, to the Czech Republic, where he studied at that time, despite the fact that it was more or less immediately obvious that they had no worthy future either there or anywhere. was not expected in post-war Europe.
Because of him, Tsvetaeva had additional difficulties in exile: many, at least women, treated her much better than Sergei Yakovlevich, they sympathized with her, felt sorry for her - without even understanding the size of her talent, without perceiving poetry.
She coped with the difficult life herself in different countries and in different periods, if she had lived without a husband, only with her son, she would have completely survived in Paris. In the end, she coped with the difficult Soviet life in 1939-1941, until the war began: she earned enough money for herself and for her son (and not only to pay rent and food, they bought books, she paid for his schooling - since 1940, the senior classes of the school were paid; and also transfers to prison and sending Ale to the camp - she describes a lot of purchases and preparations for this). So if she were in Paris, but without Efron, without the stigma of "Soviet spies", she would have survived with a high probability.
Arguments about what ruined her bloody Soviet regime do not hold water. Yes, her last years in their native Moscow were terrible, and it is impossible to understand and accept the fact that many mediocrity who came in large numbers, called writers, had apartments in Moscow, or at least rooms, and she, a Muscovite, the daughter of a professor at Moscow University, from a family that did a lot for Moscow, was not found square meters- just like later her daughter - Ariadna Sergeevna will have her own apartment in Moscow only in 1965, ten years after her release from the camp.
Nevertheless, her family members had more chances to survive in the USSR than in Nazi-occupied Europe. It seems that Sergei Efron would not have survived the war in any case - even if he had not been arrested, even if the sentence had not been death, because in the last years of his life he was already a completely sick person: he was constantly sick in France, so Marina Ivanovna must was to arrange him in a sanatorium and take care of him, and in the USSR he visited sanatoriums, in particular, in 1938. Although he survived in prison for about two years, although the interrogations were very tough, definitely with a psychological (report of his wife's arrest), and possibly with a physical (different signature) impact ... But Ariadne survived and lived another 20 years after liberation. She died at 62, unfairly early, but we must not forget that in addition to prison, camps and exile, there was also a hungry sick childhood(her heart was sick from her youth, the doctors told her about this even before all the arrests - so it’s not only damned Stalin who is to blame here). The fact that George died is not directly related to the "bloody regime" - during this period of the war, survival was partly a matter of chance, as well as physical training, the ability to fight: those who were drafted in 1943-1944 had much more chances to survive than those who went to the front in the first two years of the war. So he still had a chance to survive. I don’t know if Tsvetaeva could have survived his death, but if he had survived, it can be assumed that they would have met after the war and could somehow live on.
And if she had not returned to the USSR? The Efrons could not have escaped to the United States like the Nabokovs: none of them spoke the language, they could not teach at the university either, and, as far as one can judge, they were not very good at other jobs. Again, Efron's communist predilections did not give any chances. If she had stayed in Paris in 1939, her and her family would have faced a fate no less, and perhaps even more tragic, than in their homeland: firstly, their sympathy for Soviet Union. Secondly, many people knew about Efron's work on Soviet secret services, he was considered involved in the murder of Ignatius Reiss, and after this murder and the disappearance of Sergei, many turned away from Tsvetaeva - the last year and a half in Paris is almost complete loneliness. But even without this murder and flight of Efron, surely one of the enemies would have informed on him and on Ariadne, and they would have been arrested and killed as Soviet spies or simply as communists.
Well, do not forget about the nationality of Sergei Efron. Formally, he was baptized and his mother was a Russian noblewoman (but where did she get involved and with whom did she contact ...). In 1940-1942, in this situation, they might still have survived in Paris, if their own, that is, Russian emigrants, had not snitched on them, but in 1943-1944, despite the fact that everyone had surname "Efron", they would have been arrested with almost one hundred percent probability as Jews, everyone, including George. And, it’s scary to write this, but nineteen-year-old Georgy Efron would have been much more likely to die in this situation in the same 1944, only not in Belarus, but in Poland (in Auschwitz), just a little to the west ...
Yes, it's all very scary, but such was the time. And such is the family.
But if there hadn’t been a marriage with him, she would have remained with great probability in Russia. What would happen to her? It is unlikely that she would be much worse than abroad. She would have had a place to live (yes, they had begun to compact her already in 1920 or 1921, but they would have left her a room or two in the same apartment - or in any other where the revolution could have caught her if life had developed differently ). She could translate - what she did when she returned to her homeland. I don’t think that she would have been threatened with arrest, like Anastasia - she was a much more whole person, there would hardly have been a reason like in the case of Anastasia. In the end, Valeria Tsvetaeva was not arrested. Andrey Tsvetaev died in 1933, and I don't recall that he had any particular problems with the authorities.
But the myth of "Marina and Seryozha" is strong ... And, of course, the exclusively bloody regime and Comrade Stalin personally are to blame ...