Born in 1982, the daughter of a gifted pianist and the founder of what is today the Pushkin Museum, Marina Tsetaeva had an intense cloistered and romantic childhood. She published her first collection of poetry to acclaim in 1910 and in the following year in the Crimea met Sergei Efron, the man she married, and around whom her life would revolve to the end. In 1917, Sergei joined the White Army and Marina did not see him again for five years. She and her elder daughter, Alya, barely survived the Revolution (her younger daughter died) and, in 1922, they joined Efron in emigration in Prague. There, and later in Paris, she wrote and published many of her greatest works, among them "After Russia". In 1939, estranged from her husband, who had been exposed as a Soviet Spy, virtually ostracized by the emigre community, she returned with her teenage son to the Soviet Union where, in August 1941, she took her own life. This biography is based on 20 years' research.