The Voice Over

6.  An inexact quotation from the story “How Treachery Came to Russia” in Rilke’s Stories of God. Compare the same motif in Spolia (“so what bounds Russia, said the crippled man / you know very well what bounds it, said the crippled man”).

7.  An allusion to the biblical epigraph of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (“Vengeance is mine; I will repay”).

8.  Pioneers were members of the mass youth organization in the USSR. Reading stories about pioneer heroes from the Second World War period was part of the patriotic education of Soviet children.

9.  On Bolotnaya Square, see note 5 to “After the Dead Water.” A pro-government rally on Poklonnaya Hill in Moscow on February 4, 2012 was organized as a countermeasure to a wave of anti-government political protests.

10.  From Mikhail Lermontov’s poem “Borodino” (1837), where the phrase is used to juxtapose the generation that, in 1812, fought Napoleon’s army in Russia (bogatyrs, or mythological mighty warriors) and the younger generation to which Lermontov himself belonged.

11.  A 1967 Soviet film set during the Russian Civil War.

12.  An acronym for “party committee,” which was commonly used in the USSR in reference to committees of the Communist Party that existed in every establishment where people worked or studied.

13.  The percent of the people who, according to 2014 polls, did not support the annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine.

14.  A legendary phrase ascribed to one of the participants in the Decembrist uprising in 1825.

THE MAXIMUM COST OF LIVING

1.  Until February 14, 1918, Russia used the Julian calendar, which lagged twelve days behind the Gregorian calendar at the time of Tsvetaeva’s birth. She kept using the Julian calendar in her notebooks and some correspondence until she left Russia in spring 1922. Dates according to the Julian calendar are traditionally marked as “Old Style” in Russian historical references.

2.  Guild of Poets—a literary group founded by Nikolai Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetsky in 1911.

3.  Their birthdays were actually three days apart: September 26 and 29 (Old Style); Efron, born in 1893, was one year younger than Tsvetaeva.

4.  An inexact quotation from Karl Peterson’s “The Little Orphan” (“Sirotka,” 1843), a poem for children much anthologized in the nineteenth century.

5.  From Boris Pasternak’s poem “About This Verse” (1917).

6.  An allusion to Pushkin’s “Inspiration is not for sale, / But you can sell a manuscript” from his “Conversation Between a Bookseller and a Poet” (1824). Translation from Andrew Kahn, Pushkin’s Lyric Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 197.

7.  A phrase from the Russian avant-garde manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912).

8.  “Ein Dichter einzig lebt, und dann und wann / kommt, der ihn trägt, dem, der ihn trug, entgegen.” From Rilke’s inscription on a copy of his Duineser Elegien (1923) sent to Tsvetaeva in May 1926. Translation from Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters Summer 1926, trans. Margaret Wettlin and Walter Arndt (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 81.

9.  “On approche, on prend peur, on disparaît. […]

Disparition subite et totale. Lui—disparu. Moi—seule.

Et c’est invariabl la même histoire.

On me laisse. Sans un mot, sans un adieu. On est venu—on ne vient plus. On a écrit—on n’écrit plus.

Et me voilà dans le grand silence, que je ne romps jamais, blessée à mort (ou à vif, ce qui est la même chose) sans avoir jamais rien compris—ni comment ni pourquoi.”

10.  “Seulement le petit Marcel m’aurait fait moins souffrir par des manques de sensibilité extérieure—étant d’une autre génération, où chacun cédait sa place à une femme, belle ou laid et où aucun ne restait assis lorsqu’une fem était debout et—oh surt ça!—où aucun ne vous parl, les pieds sur une chaise.”

CONVERSATIONS IN THE REALM OF THE DEAD

1.  L. V. Shaporina, Dnevnik, vols. 1–2 (Moscow, 2011).

2.  Shaporina was an artist, translator, and the founder, in 1918, of the first Puppet Theater in Soviet Russia.

3.  An allusion to Fedor Tiutchev’s poem on the death of Pushkin, “29 January 1837,” where Pushkin is called Russia’s “first love.”

WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE

1.  An allusion to Osip Mandelstam’s poem “1 January 1924,” where “the fourth estate” refers to the proletariat whose interests the Bolshevik revolution claimed to protect.

2.  An autobiographical character in Konstantin Vaginov’s novel Goat Song (1927).

3.  Alisa Poret, Zapiski, risunki, vospominaniia, vol. 1 (Moscow, 2012). The second volume came out in 2017.

4.  An allusion to “the cold and gloom of the times to come” from Alexander Blok’s poem “A Voice from the Chorus” (1914).