Poetry. Translated from the Russian by Mary Jane White. "On April 12, 1926 Boris Pasternak wrote a letter of introduction for Marina Tsvetaeva to Rainer Maria Rilke, providing Rilke with Tsvetaeva's address in the Parisian suburb of Bellevue where she was then living in exile. Rilke responded on May 3 with a first letter to Tsvetaeva, covering autographed copies of his Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Oprpheus. Throughout that summer the three poets wrote to each other. In his fourth letter to Tsvetaeva, June 8, Rilke enclosed a poem he wrote that day for her. 'Elegie.' When Rilke died to Leukemia in December 29, 1926, Tsvetaeva learned of his death from Mark Slonim, who asked her to write a piece for the Russian emigre press. Instead, she wrote this elegy, 'NEW YEAR'S,' drawing heavily upon both the correspondence of that summer and Rilke's poem to her"--from the Translator's Introduction.

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (8 October 1892 - 31 August 1941) was a Russian and Soviet poet and writer born in Moscow. Her work was not looked kindly upon by Stalin and the Bolshevik régime; her literary rehabilitation only began in the 1960s. Tsvetaeva's poetry arose from her own deeply convoluted personality, her eccentricity and tightly disciplined use of language. Among her themes were female sexuality, and the tension in women's private emotions; she bridges the mutually contradictory schools of Acmeism and symbolism.