"A poet of genius." --Vladimir Nabokov"Unique, profound, passionate, inspiring ... Asks questions we didn't know existed until she offered them to us, and answers to some of poetry's most enduring mysteries." --C.K. Williams"Although generally less well known here than Pasternak, Akhmatova and Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva is counted by some critics as the greatest of these four major poets of postrevolutionary Russia ... Infused with high passion and a heroic tenacity of spirit." --"Publishers Weekly"

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was a Russian poet and memoirist. Tsvetaeva's work was admired by many poets of her time, including Rainer Maria Rilke, Boris Pasternak, and Joseph Brodsky, among others. The Russian Revolution prompted Tsvetaeva's husband to join the White Army, and she and her young children were trapped in Moscow and thrown into extreme poverty for five years, the subject of the poems in "Moscow in the Plague Year." In 1941 her husband was shot on the charge of espionage, her daughter sent to a labor camp, and Tsvetaeva herself sent to Yelabuga, where she found herself once more desperately looking for work until her suicide later that year. The author lives in Moscow, Russia.