There is a memorial grave of Marina Tsvetaeva at the Peter and Paul Cemetery in Yelabuga. The place where Marina Tsvetaeva was buried on September 2, 1941 is not known, but she is definitely buried on the southwestern outskirts of this cemetery.
Marina Tsvetaeva arrived in Yelabuga with her son for evacuation. They were settled in the house of the blacksmith Brodelshchikov, where they were allocated a bedroom. The conditions for all the evacuated people were the same, but Marina Tsvetaeva was in an extreme degree of despair and depression, so she decided to commit suicide. She hanged herself on August 31, 1941, in the hallway of the house where they were housed, on a large nail driven into a beam.
Marina Tsvetaeva was buried on September 2 at the Peter and Paul cemetery without a funeral service and a cross, since it is forbidden to bury suicides according to the church rite. According to one version, a stick was stuck in the place of her grave, but the next year it was carried away by streams of melted snow. According to another version, there was a cross on the grave, but other believers could have removed it, since she was a suicide.
20 years later, in the autumn of 1960, Marina`s sister Anastasia Tsvetaeva visited Yelabuga. She communicated with the widow of the caretaker of the Peter and Paul Cemetery, who died the same year. She pointed out an approximate location on the southern edge of the cemetery.
Son George, who attended the funeral, could have indicated the place of her grave. After the death of his mother, Georgy returned to Moscow, but was re-evacuated to Tashkent in October 1941, when the Germans came close to the capital. At the age of 19, he was drafted into the army, and he died in 1944 in a battle near Druya, Vitebsk region.
Anastasia Tsvetaeva found four unmarked graves on the southern outskirts of the cemetery. A forked pine tree grew near one grave. She remembered that next to their Villa in Tarusa, where sisters Anastasia and Marina spent every summer, there was a similar forked pine tree. The sisters often climbed on it and talked for a long time.
Anastasia decided that this was a sign from above and installed a cross near the grave under a pine tree with the inscription: "Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva is buried in this side of the cemetery." This is the most real burial place of the great Russian poet of the Silver Age. In 1970, the pine tree was cut down, and a large monument to Marina Tsvetaeva was erected on an unnamed grave. Now all lovers of the great poetess`s work who come to Yelabuga come to this monument.
In 1990, Patriarch Alexy II allowed the funeral service of Marina Tsvetaeva to be held in absentia, even though it contradicted the church canon. The Patriarch showed Christian compassion for the state in which Marina Tsvetaeva found herself in 1941. He also said that "people`s love" allowed him to make this decision. The funeral ceremony took place on August 31, 1991, on the day of the 50th anniversary of the poet`s death in the Church of the Ascension of the Lord at the Nikitsky Gate in Moscow.
