This book is the most comprehensive biography available in any language of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva (1892-1941). Drawing on a variety of sources, including the memoirs and letters of Tsvetayeva's family, friends and literary contemporaries, as well as her poetry and autobiographical writings, Maria Razumovsky has been able to reconstruct the major episodes in Tsvetayeva's life, and to relate them to the literary and historical events of her time.

After covering Tsvetayeva's early years in Moscow, Razumovsky takes us from her marriage to Sergey Efron in 1912 through the First World War and the Russian Revolution to her departure from Russia in 1922 - the years of her first success and fame.

Razumovsky then describes the longest and most important period of Tsvetayeva's life, her years of exile in Europe, from Berlin and Prague to provincial France and Paris, discussing both the development of her mature work and her relations with her Russian and European contemporaries. The book ends with Tsvetayeva's last two years in Russia, from her return at the outbreak of war and her evacuation from Moscow, to her suicide in 1941.