One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.

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.