The Marina Tsvetaeva Museum in Moscow is located at No. 6 in Borisoglebsky Lane, not far from Novy Arbat street. A two-storey house for four apartments was built here in the middle of the 19th century. Marina Tsvetaeva lived in apartment No. 3 on the second floor from 1914 to 1922 with her husband Sergei Efron and two daughters. Now the Tsvetaeva Museum occupies the entire building.
In 1914 Marina Tsvetaeva was 22 years old. Before that, she lived in her parents` house, and for the summer the Tsvetaevs rented a Villa in Tarusa, Kaluga region, and vacationed there with the whole family. In May 1911, Marina went to the Black Sea for the first time to visit Maximilian Voloshin in Koktebel. There, in Voloshin`s House, she met Sergei Efron. Six months later, on January 29, 1912, they got married, and on September 5, 1912, their first daughter Alya (Ariadna) was born.
After the wedding, Marina Tsvetaeva and Sergey Efron rented an apartment in Sivtsev Vrazhek Lane. They lived there from October 1911 to 1912. Then they went abroad and lived for a long time in the Crimea. Finally, they bought a mansion on Big Polyanka, but then they rented it out, and in 1914 and they rented an apartment in Borisoglebsky Lane for themselves. The apartment has a very unusual layout, but Tsvetaeva, as soon as she entered it, exclaimed: "This is mine!". From the corridor you can enter through three doors.
To the left is the room where the guests lived or the Tsvetaevs rented it out. You can go straight to the large dining room, where the whole family gathered in the evenings. There are no windows in it, but there is a roof window on the ceiling. From the dining room you can go to Marina Tsvetaeva`s workroom and then to the large nursery. If you go from the corridor to the right, you can go to the attic. There was Sergei Efron`s workroom and several other rooms. In prosperous years, there were servants in the Tsvetaevs` house.
The period before the revolution of 1917 was the most productive, when Marina Tsvetaeva wrote a large number of verses, six plays, four poems. Many famous poets of that time came to visit the Tsvetaevs` apartment. In the summer, Marina and Sergey went on vacation to Koktebel to Voloshin, where they met in 1911.
The love story of Marina Tsvetaeva and Sofia Parnok belongs to the same period. They met on October 16, 1914, and on Christmas they went together to Rostov the Great. This affair was a very bright event for Marina, and she wrote a cycle of poems "To a girlfriend". Some of them have become the most famous romances: "Under the caress of a plush blanket", "In front of a mirror, where there`s fog and turbid sleep, your way I want to try - where it will lead And where there is the quay."
Sergei Efron suffered from this relationship between Tsvetaeva and her girlfriend, but did not interfere and in 1915 it ended. However, by that time Sergey Efron had already joined the Volunteer Army and went to the front of the WWI. From that moment on, Marina and Sergey`s connection was interrupted until 1922.
In the summer of 1916 Marina Tsvetaeva came to her sister for three weeks in the city of Alexandrov. It was a period similar to Pushkin`s autumn in Boldino. She wrote many famous poems here. The most famous poem "I like that you are not sick with me, I like that I am not sick with you" Tsvetaeva wrote in Alexandrov in May 1915. It is dedicated to Maurice Mintz, her sister`s husband.
After the Revolution of 1917, the situation deteriorated sharply. Sergei Efron, while in the Volunteer Army, joined the White Movement. He was still far away from his family. The house in Moscow was not heated, and Marina heated the stove with furniture from the apartment. In 1918, a communal apartment was created from the Tsvetaevs` apartment and several more families were settled.
In 1919, the situation became desperate. There was no money for food, and Tsvetaeva gave her daughters to the Kuntsevo orphanage, which she later regretted very much. Daughter Irina died of starvation there. In 1921 Marina Tsvetaeva received the first letter from Sergei Efron. She learned that her husband was alive and living in Berlin. In 1922, Marina decided to leave Russia for her husband. So she left the apartment in Borisoglebsky Lane.
The exposition of the Tsvetaeva Museum in Moscow
Marina Tsvetaeva`s parents` house in Trekhprudny Lane was wooden, so in 1918 it was dismantled and used for firewood. The same fate could have befallen the house in Borisoglebsky Lane. In 1979, the two-storey house was resettled and prepared for demolition, but Nadezhda Kataeva-Lykova remained the only tenant who refused to leave, and sought to create a Marina Tsvetaeva Museum in the house.
As a result, first a library was opened here, and in 1990, on the initiative of Academician Dmitry Likhachev, a Museum of the poet Maria Tsvetaeva was created in apartment No. 3. The memorial apartment is furnished with furniture from the beginning of the 20th century. The atmosphere is recreated here, when the Tsvetaevs received guests there and raised their daughters.
An exhibition dedicated to Maximilian Voloshin, who was one of Marina Tsvetaeva`s closest friends, has been created on the ground floor. A grand piano is installed in a room on the ground floor, where concerts are held, romances to Tsvetaeva`s poems are played.
