A gripping and revealing narrative of the persecution of one of Russian literature's brightest poets during the Stalin era; The Death of a Poet is a harrowing narrative account of how the forces of fate combined to destroy the life of one of twentieth-century Russian literature's most talented and esteemed poets during the bloodiest period of Stalin's regime. In 1937, at the height of her creative powers and living in exile in Paris, where rumours of Stalin's purges had been circulating in the emigre community, Marina Tsvetaeva made the fateful decision to follow her husband Sergei Efron, who had been forced to flee from French authorities, back to Moscow. She had been living in exile for more than twenty years. Soon after their reunion, both Alya, their daughter, and Efron were arrested for 'anti-Soviet activity.' Cast onto the street and living in fear that her own arrest was imminent, the poet who once stood at the pinnacle of Russian letters descended into a living hell, compounded by official persecution, the indifference of peers and friends, and finally, the beginning of World War II and Nazi air raids over Moscow. Incorporating unprecedented access to KGB records, Irma Kudr
