Publisher's Synopsis
Written during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed, these poems are suffused with Tsvetaeva's irony and humour, which undoubtedly accounted for her success in not only reaching the end of the plague year alive, but making it the most productive of her career. We meet a drummer boy idolising Napoleon, an irrepressibly mischievous grandmother who refuses to apologise to God on Judgment Day and an androgynous (and luminous) Joan of Arc.
