I opened my veins. Unstoppably life spurts out with no remedy. Now I set out bowls and plates. Every bowl will be shallow. Every plate will be small. And overflowing their rims, into the black earth, to nourish the rushes unstoppably without cure, gushes poetry ...

In 1941 Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Yelabuga while most families of the Union of Soviet writers were evacuated to Chistopol. Tsvetaeva wanted to name him Boris (after Pasternak); Efron insisted on Georgy. Yesterday.

Her husband Sergei Efron and her daughter Ariadna Efron (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; and her husband was executed. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it.