'You know, children,' interrupted Marina resolutely with calming gestures of both hands, 'when I was your age, Ada, and my brother was your age, Van, we talked about croquet, and ponies, and puppies, and the last fête-d'enfants, and the next picnic, and - oh, millions of nice normal things, but never, never of old French botanists and God knows what!' (1.10)

 

Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'):

 

 

As a little girl, Marina Tsvetaev spent the summers near Tarusa (a town in the Province of Kaluga), on the banks of the Oka rivier:

 

Детство до десяти лет — старый дом в Трёхпрудном переулке (Москва) и одинокая дача Песочная, на Оке, близ города Тарусы Калужской губернии. ("The Autobiography," 1940)

 

In Oka (a cycle of five poems included in Volshebnyi fonar', "The Magic Lantern," 1912) Marina Tsvetaev speaks of the old garden behind their old house, with an overgrown croquet-ground:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The author (who loves only variegated flower-beds and a quarry above the Oka) asks her lover not to kiss her near the Oka.

 

In her poem Pervoe puteshestvie ("The First Voyage," included in Vecherniy al'bom, "The Evening Album," 1910) Marina Tsvetaev mentions the Palm of Peace:

 

 

We sailed past the shores

where grows the green Palm of Peace...

 

In the same poem (the seventh one in the cycle Detstvo, "The Childhood") Marina Tsvetaev mentions the green eyes (Van's and Ada's half-sister Lucette is green-eyed) of someone who looks at her and her companion:

 

 

 

Andrew Marvell's The Garden begins:

 

 

"Bays" means "laurels." In her poem Mayakovskomu ("To Mayakovski," 1930), on the poet's suicide, Marina Tsvetaev mentions the poets' "laurels:"

 

 

In Marina Tsvetaev's poem VN's "late namesake" speaks to Esenin (the poet who had committed suicide four and a half years before) and mentions Pasternak (the author of Doctor Zhivago, 1957, known on Antiterra as Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance by a pastor, 1.8, and Mertvago Forever, 2.5). Marina Tsvetaev's essay on Pasternak is entitled Svetovoy liven' ("The Shower of Light," 1922).

 

Marina Tsvetaev is the author of Derev'ya ("The Trees"), a cycle of nine poems (1922-23). In the cycle's second poem Marina Tsvetaev calls the oak "a theomachist:"

 

 

 

The poet mentions the bitter taste of rowan-berries. The red berries of a rowan-tree play an important role in Doctor Zhivago. In "The Poems of Yuri Zhivago" the opening poem is Hamlet.

  

'Helped, no doubt,' said Ada. 'Now the Russian word for marsh marigold is Kuroslep (which muzhiks in Tartary misapply, poor slaves, to the buttercup) or else Kaluzhnitsa, as used quite properly in Kaluga, U.S.A.' (1.10)

 

In the first poem of Oka Marina Tsvetaev (the author of "Ophelia to Hamlet" and "Ophelia in Defence of the Queen," 1923) mentions the flowers of kurinaya slepota (another name of kuroslep, "marsh marigold"):

 

 

 

In the closing lines Marina Tsvetaev compares the golden may-beetles to automobiles.

 

Marina Tsvetaev is the author of a mildly "incestous" poem Brat ("Brother," 1923) in the closing quatrain of which Cesare Borgia and his sister Lucretia are mentioned:

 

According to the poet, her brother was given her by Ad (Hell):

 

 

Speaking of bayronka (an open short that Marina's late brother Ivan wears in a picture taken by Sumerechnikov, 2.7): Marina Tsvetaev is the author of Bayronu ("To Byron," 1913) in which she compares young Byron to a demon:

 

 

I think about the morning of your glory,
About the morning of your days too, when
Like a demon you from sleep had stirred
And were a god for men.

(transl. Ilya Shambat)

 

Alexey Sklyarenko