30 May 2007. Gray skies, summer dawn. Puffs of whitish smoke drift up from roof of the 7-eleven, just over the cleaners. One fine blue line circumnavigating a darkened window...the words, spelled out in neon, turquoise green--Clean Living. Oh that it were so. Tsvetaeva last night, her response to a query from the new Bolshevik state, forwarded to her in Paris by Boris Pasternak, asking as to her origins as a writer. Many of her answers indelible. Social origins: peasant, worker, employee, cleric... "Of noble birth." "I know no literary influences, only human influences." "Things I hold most dear: music, nature, poetry, solitude." "Life is a railroad station; soon I will set out--for where? I will not say..."
Her photograph, 1925 or so, with daughter Ariadna. A life of rivers: Tarussa, the Oka, Koktebel, Chernomorye, the Kama...the Yenisei...
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