For decades, the name of Marina Tsvetaeva has circulated in Spain as a nearly secret reference among readers of 20th-century Russian poetry, far from the popularity of Akhmatova or Pasternak. Born in Moscow in 1892, her life was marked by the tragedy of Europe: exile, precariousness, and suicide in 1941 in Yelabuga. A precocious and unclassifiable author, she naturally transitioned between poetry, diary, letter, and autobiographical prose.
Acantilado has been key in promoting her work in Spanish with titles such as My Pushkin, My Mother and Music, and My Father and His Museum. Now, it adds to this constellation the new edition of The Devil in the “Cuadernos del Acantilado” collection (no. 127), a short story that engages intensely with her poetry and reveals the origin of her radical view of writing.
A Narrative from French Exile
The Devil is an autobiographical text written in 1935 in a gloomy apartment in Vanves, on the outskirts of Paris. From the dislocation of exile, Tsvetaeva looks back to her childhood and reconstructs the first “meeting” of little Marina with the devil in her sister Valeria’s room, a refuge for prohibited readings. There is no novelistic plot, but a foundational scene that branches into memories, digressions, and reflections on faith, fear, and the power of words.
The volume is brief—80 pages in sewn paperback, measuring 12 × 18 cm—faithful to the spirit of a “notebook” in the collection. This brevity does not imply lightness: the text serves as a concentrated distillation of Tsvetaeva’s poetics, where each phrase unfolds layers of meaning.
Childhood, Defiance, and the Birth of a Writer
The publisher presents it as an “extraordinary lyrical evocation of childhood and the gestation of an irreplaceable literary genius.” Indeed, here, childhood is not an innocent age, but a time of latent defiance. The girl perceives the rift between the God of duty—distant, despotic, linked to habit—and the devil, who embodies everything forbidden. In that dialectic lies the awakening of a critical and creative consciousness: freedom comes from questioning, from entering the “forbidden room” and opening the banned books.
The Devil as a Metaphor for Language
One of the greatest successes of the narrative is to convert the devil into the symbolic axis of the very act of writing. As the narrator notes: “I know: the devil lived in Valeria’s room because in Valeria’s room, transformed into a bookshelf, was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
The Evil One is not a theological figure but a force of movement, inquiry, and fertile disorder. He represents the words that tempt, that refuse to merely repeat what has already been said, that draw one toward risky but truthful territories. Ambivalence is essential: fear and attraction at once. In a memorable passage, the girl confesses: “There was no action; he was sitting, I was standing, and… I loved him.” This demonic pact with language defines Tsvetaeva’s relationship with literature: writing means accepting that words can lead us to uncomfortable, even dangerous but necessary places.
A Mocking, Exalted, and Icy Prose
The style oscillates between an almost cruel irony toward the devices of inherited faith, lyrical outbursts, and passages of analytical coldness. This blend—mocking, exalted, at times icy—gives the text a unique tone, straddling the border between autobiographical story, essay, and poetic prose, perfectly coherent with the unclassifiable vocation of the author.
The New Edition from Acantilado: Why Now
This recovery comes at a time when independent publishers are re-reading tradition to incorporate female voices that were marginalized from the 20th-century canon. For Spanish-speaking readers, especially those following cultural proposals from Aragon, this edition offers several layers of interest: discovering a fundamental author of Russian modernity, accessing a brief yet demanding text that can be read in an afternoon and contemplated for weeks, and connecting current debates on childhood, religion, and freedom of conscience with a writing born on the margins of interwar Europe.
Who This Book Is For
The Devil is not an easy read, although its length might suggest otherwise. It is ideal for those interested in 20th-century Russian literature, intellectual autobiography, and poetic prose that turns memory into a battleground. It also speaks to anyone questioning the construction of subjectivity in childhood, the tension between religious discourse and individual experience, and the almost “demonic” function of words.
For a cultural magazine, reviewing this book is an invitation to expand the map: from Aragon to Moscow, Vanves, and Yelabuga, following the trace of an author who turned her life—filled with exiles, losses, and imposed silences—into an extreme laboratory of what literature can become.
