A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose

2 ideas

1. Three-Year-Old Learns Pushkin Was Killed

   Naumov's painting of Pushkin's duel hung in Tsvetaeva's mother's bedroom. From it the three-year-old learned that 'Pushkin was killed,' shot in the belly, and concluded that a poet is something that gets killed and has a belly like anyone else. Her first idea of the poet therefore fused poetry with mortality, violence and the vulnerable body before she had read a line of his verse.

2. Mother Pressing Music on a Poet

   In Mother and Music, Tsvetaeva recalls that her mother, who had wanted a son, set her at the piano from around age four and meant her to become a musician, though Marina was already drawn to words. She presents her poetry as growing out of the overwhelming inheritance of music and lyrical feeling her mother poured into her, not mainly as a discipline carried over from the lessons.

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