Letter from Marina Tsvetaeva to Nikolai Semenovich Tikhonov, 6 July 1935 (pen & ink on...

Tsvetaeva confronts Pasternak and his views on poetry. The poet opens her powerful letter by thanking Tikhonov for encouraging her to contact Pasternak: 'you came to me as a bridge – a bridge forces people to go in its direction (for that it all that a bridge can do)'. Tsvetaeva continues: 'it troubles me that everything which is to me right, is to Boris sinful and diseased [...] Boris takes on the manly role of Bazarov [the coarse nihilist from Turgenev] and I – like the old timers – I'm in the cemetery [...] I cried because Boris, the best Lyrical poet of our time, betrayed Lyricism in front of my very eyes, calling himself and everything within himself diseased. (Let him claim the high ground [...] but what he does not say is that this disease is dearer to him than health itself)'.