UK Libraries celebrates opening of the American Archive of Marina and Anastasia Tsvetaeva

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Nov. 26, 2024) — UK Libraries has opened the American Archive of Marina and Anastasia Tsvetaeva, one of the largest collections on the authors in the world outside of Russia and the most comprehensive in North America.

The archive comprises hundreds of scholarly and rare books on the Tsvetaev family, countless research materials related to the sisters’ work and literary legacies, as well as more than a dozen personal items belonging to Anastasia Tsvetaeva.

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) is widely regarded as one of the most important Russian poets of the 20th century. Her younger sister Anastasia (1894-1993) is best known for her voluminous memoirs about her early life in the waning days of Tsarist Russia.

The UK community is invited to celebrate the opening of the archive at a free public event Dec. 3. The celebration will feature an archive exhibition and a lecture by Molly Blasing, Ph.D., associate professor of Russian studies in the UK Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures.

Blasing’s lecture, “Russian Literature’s Century of Conflict and Contradiction: On the Lives, Literature and Legacy of Marina and Anastasia Tsvetaeva,” will explore what the sisters’ lives and writings can teach us about war, censorship, prison, exile and freedom.

RSVPs are appreciated. 

The Tsvetaeva sisters

"The story of Marina and Anastasia Tsvetaeva, and their very different and complicated lives, in so many ways is the story of the 20th-century Russian and Soviet experience," said Blasing.

Born into a prominent Moscow family, the sisters came of age at the end of the Tsarist era and lived through the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war and famine. The Revolution would tear the sisters apart and scatter them across the continent: Marina left Russia in 1922 and spent most of her adult life in European emigration in Berlin, Prague and Paris, struggling to make ends meet and suffering through a series of personal tragedies. She returned to the Soviet Union in 1939 but found only poverty and isolation, and died by suicide in 1941.

Anastasia’s life spanned nearly a century, bearing witness not only to the rise of the Soviet Union but also its eventual demise. She survived imprisonment and exile to labor camps following arrests in 1933, ’37 and ’49 for counter-revolutionary activities and associations and was rehabilitated only in 1957, several years after Stalin’s death. She published the first (censored) edition of her famous memoirs of her family and prerevolutionary childhood in 1971, and more versions of the memoirs were published throughout the 1980s-2000s.

“People pored over these memoirs,” said Blasing, who is in the process of translating them into English. “They provided access to this storied family and a time before the Revolution and all of the social changes that came with it.” Anastasia also published several well-respected novels that illuminate her experience in the gulag. She died in 1993 at the age of 98, having lived to see the opening of the Tsvetaeva House Museum in Moscow in 1992.

“The community of Tsvetaeva scholars and devotees is one that is rigorous in its approach to the literature and the history but also deeply committed to the emotional side of these writers’ lives: honoring their tragedies, but also moving beyond them to uncover the ways that humanity survives in periods of division, violence and upheaval,” said Blasing. “If we can understand the way that they’re responding as writers to situations of war, persecution and censorship, there’s so much that we can learn about the present day.” 

Acquiring the collection

The materials in the American Archive were collected over a 45 year period by Uli Zislin, a native Muscovite and devotee of Russian music and literary culture. Trained as an electrophysicist, he and his wife emigrated to the United States in 1996 to be closer to their children, settling in Rockville, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C.

Zislin recently celebrated his 94th birthday. Since his move to the US, Zislin has devoted himself to collecting, preserving, and educating the American public about Russian literary culture. His interests concentrate particularly in the turn-of-the-century flowering of the arts and culture known as the “Silver Age,” a period of great activity for Russian writers and poets, including the Tsvetaevas.

Over the years, his collection has grown to fill his Rockville apartment, a space that officially became the Washington Museum of Russian Poetry and Music in 1997. The museum held poetry readings, concerts and events in an effort to bring this chapter of the Russian literary tradition to Americans.

Searching for a home for his collection, Zislin contacted Blasing in 2021 about the possibility of bringing the materials to UK.

“I wasn’t sure how the Libraries would feel about the idea of this acquisition, but Megan Mummey and Antje Mays and everyone who’s worked on this project have been so supportive right from the beginning in a way that has really amazed and delighted me,” said Blasing. “It’s been a tremendous pleasure to work with the librarians and the staff at UK Libraries, and being able to accept Uli Zislin’s donation has been such a gift to our community.”

In March of 2022, Zislin’s granddaughter Vera Zislin drove from Rockville to Lexington with a car full of 25 boxes of the carefully organized and curated materials.

The gift came at a profound moment, just a few weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“It came as a huge shock to me, to colleagues, to Uli; the full-scale invasion would have catastrophic ramifications for so many people around the world, from countless deaths, destruction of cities, and large-scale displacement of people,” Zislin said. “It also means that researchers and students are not traveling to Russia, of course. So the fact that we have this collection at UK means that students and researchers in North America can continue the very important work of studying this part of the world and its histories as we move forward in this very complicated geopolitical time.”

On that early Sunday morning, with a stunning pink and orange sunrise brightening the sky, Blasing and Collections Analysis Librarian Antje Mays unloaded the boxes with Zislin dialed in over FaceTime.

“I will never forget the day that Antje Mays and I went to the back room in Willy T and started opening the boxes. All of these materials just started appearing: primary sources, an incredible range of scholarship, decades of conference proceedings, photographs, artifacts, all surfacing one after the other,” Blasing said. “And it struck me: everything that we need to study these writers is now here in our collection.”

Preserving literary legacies

Marina Tsvetaeva is now regarded as one of Russia’s most important literary figures, but the process of bringing her work to the public has been a long one. She published two books of poetry in the Soviet Union before leaving in 1922 but was not published again in the USSR until the mid-1960s, nearly 25 years after her death.

“So much of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry is about this longing to use words to create bridges to people and places and times that you can’t access in the real world, whether it’s because of emigration, or war, or death” said Blasing. “These poetic themes emerge from the challenges of being isolated from a readership and lacking a community of support at so many points in her life. It manifests in spectacular poems that bridge these divides spatially, sonically and linguistically, building third spaces to commune with other poetic souls and connect with writers across centuries.”

Russian poetry is highly intertextual, drawing on meter, rhyme and language from the long Russian literary tradition and intertwining voices past and present. Just as many Americans have a readily-recallable corpus of song lyrics, said Blasing, the same is true for Russians and the works of their greatest poets. “Just about anyone you approach on the streets of Moscow would be able to recite from memory poems from Pushkin, Levertov, Pasternak or Tsvetaeva.”

But one of the most interesting things about this now-ubiquitous poet is that her work totally disappeared from the official literary culture for nearly half a century.

“It’s only after her death — through the work of her daughter Alya, her sister Anastasia and a number of other people who devoted themselves to recovering her literary legacy — that she was finally brought to publication,” said Blasing.

This process of recovery and rehabilitation is well-represented in the archive, which contains materials about the many scholars, readers and friends who have done the difficult work of preserving knowledge of the sisters’ work, lives and historical contexts. Decades of conference proceedings, oral histories, photo albums of literary events and materials from the establishment of the Tsvetaeva House Museum in Moscow reveal the process in step-by-step detail. This work can now continue from its new home in Lexington.

Personal artifacts of Anastasia Tsvetaeva

Given her fame, university libraries tend to have materials on Marina, but the Anastasia materials are unique for archives located outside of Eurasia.

“The University of Kentucky now has the largest collection on Anastasia in North America, together with a very comprehensive set of materials, both scholarship and primary texts, on and by Marina,” said Blasing.

The collection’s most unique items are the dozen or so personal artifacts that belonged to Anastasia, which fall into three key categories. First are items from Anastasia’s life as a writer: her glasses, a pen and notebooks with details ordinary and extraordinary. There are two locks of her hair, one accompanied by a poem dedicated to Anastasia which was written by a friend inspired by the exchange of locks. Second are items from her life in the gulag and in exile, including a map of a garden plot from her time in Siberia and a manuscript page of a novel written during the same period. Arising from moments of extraordinary difficulty, these items provide information on a very intimate scale about the immense prison system that existed under Stalin. Third are items related to her life of religious devotion: a paper icon in a makeshift metal frame and a prayer list for the health of friends.

“In this age where so much of our lives — both as scholars and as humans in the world — is happening in digital form, the fact that students and researchers can come here and see and touch these items that connect us to the past is something that’s increasingly rare and a very special part of what this collection offers,” said Blasing.

Research present and future

In the summer of 2022, thanks to funding through the Office of the Vice President for Research and the College of Arts and Sciences, three students worked during the summer to process the collection and conduct independent research projects.

Nafisa Nigmatova (’25) led the team to transliterate, translate and record the collection while processing and rehousing the materials. Rowan Brazel (’23) photographed Anastasia'’s artifacts and developed the three-fold thematic division described above.

With support from the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, Johnna Warkentine (’24) digitized audio and video files from the collection, including a video made by Zislin. Filmed during a Christmas celebration in Anastasia’s apartment shortly following her death, the video shows many of the wide cast of characters who have been instrumental in bringing these literary lives to the readership.

“The collection is full of VHS cassettes and audio cassettes that we’re just starting to dig into,” said Blasing. “There’s a lot of work to be done on audio, video and oral history preservation, especially.”

The collection will give students access to one of the premier Russian literary collections in the world.

“One of the things that is most exciting to me as a scholar and a teacher is that we can involve our students who are studying Russian and immediately have an opportunity for them to apply their language skills to working on the materials in this collection. Anyone with a desire to work to learn the language can begin to access these materials in a deeper way,” said Blasing.

“I’m excited to see what is to come from our student researchers. UK has wonderfully robust undergraduate research programs that give students in the humanities excellent opportunities to make use of collections like this,” she added. “For students of Russian language, literature, culture, and history, whatever you are drawn to, there is something in this collection that will spark interest. There’s a lot of work to be done to really make the most of this gift.”

As the premier research library in the Commonwealth, UK Libraries empowers lifelong learners to discover, create and connect by providing ever-expanding access to quality information and collaborating with academic and creative communities worldwide to advance knowledge, enhance scholarship, and preserve the history and culture of the Commonwealth. More information about UK Libraries can be found on its website.