No Love Without Poetry

Winner of the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages 2011 Book Prize for Best Scholarly Translation in English The memoirs of Ariadna Efron provide an intimate and indispensable perspective on the poet Marina Tsvetaevas life and work, told from the point of view of her daughter. This wrenching story about the difficulty of living with genius charts Efrons relationship with her parents as they navigate art and exile. Efrons rapport with her mother, already intense, became strained under the hardships imposed by early twentieth century Russian political upheaval. Efron recounts the familys travels from Moscow to Germany, to Czechoslovakia, and finally to France, where, against her mothers advice, Efron decided to return to Russia. Nemec Ignashev draws on Efrons short stories and her mothers notebooks to supplement the original memoirs. Haunting and poignant, No Love without Poetry completes extant historical records on Tsvetaevaand showcases Efron as a literary force in her own right.