“It was some kind of abnormal love” – Kommersant FM

Kommersant FM columnist Petr Voronkov talks about how the poetess raised her son and why he was not ready for an independent life.

Bolshevo near Moscow today is the dacha of Sergei Efron, provided to him as an employee of the NKVD. It was here, to her husband’s house, that Marina Tsvetaeva returned from immigration with her son Georgy in 1939. The young man by that time turns 14 years old. For the first time in Russia… George was born in the Czech Republic. He is credited with so many heterogeneous qualities that it is difficult not to get confused. He is both a rare scoundrel and a genius. Sergei Efron, the father, said that there was nothing of him in his son, “the spitting image of Marin Tsvetaev.”

And Marina Ivanovna loved her son, kissed him, fed him. His sister held him to prevent him from struggling, and his mother shoveled porridge into him spoon by spoon, which Moore, as he was called, swallowed with disgust. Friends recalled: when he was a little over a year old, in a baby carriage lay not a child, but a well-groomed man – cold and angry eyes looked at the world. At four years old he weighed 32 kg. Marina was proud of this and compared him to Napoleon.

Moore spent his childhood in Paris, where he learned to read and write at an early age. School photographs show him to be twice the size of his classmates. Tsvetaeva idolized her son and did not let her go even one step, even when he grew up. He was a big guy, and his mother often took him by the hand like a child. It was some kind of abnormal love, which Moore himself was very burdened by and due to which he was not at all prepared for an independent life.

Despite this, after her death, he transported the entire archive of the poetess to Moscow and entered the Literary Institute. He dreamed of becoming a writer, constantly kept a diary. In fact, he loved his mother. Her death made me grow up and reconsider a lot. In 1944, George went to the front and disappeared. He was 19 years old.

According to rumors, he was in the penal battalion, surrendered to the Germans, and was shot by his own people… And only 30 years later did my sister learn that, despite all his unpreparedness, he fought heroically and was absolutely fearless. Residents of the village near which he died erected a monument on his grave. “Boys need to be pampered—they might have to go to war,” Marina Tsvetaeva once wrote.