Childhood is not the most carefree time

“When I read the diary of Marina Tsvetaeva’s daughter, my feelings were contradictory. From the desire to burst into tears, pitying the child, to fury from impotence, the inability to change the course of life and history. This pity and rage are also hidden behind the wall of depression of the brilliant poet and Alina’s careless mother. The book is a unique document of the era, a poignant text written by a child himself. The only one of its kind, relevant for all parents who want to penetrate the souls of their young children. In order to finally believe how accurately and deeply children can perceive life. Your children.

Alya started writing her diary at the age of 6. A sensitive girl with early systems thinking describes her dreams, experiences, images and reflections. No, not Alya herself decided to record what happens to her. This is Marina’s idea — this is how Alya calls her mother. Daily two pages in children’s handwriting for development or in order to preserve, reflect Marina’s life in children’s notebooks as in a mirror. Marina is a young mother, passionate about herself, her inner world, her ideas and trying to cope with her depression through creativity. She is alone with the child, Ali’s father, her husband, went to the volunteer front. Marina is not up to Ali. Alya tries to get through to her mother, to get her love. “My mother is weird. My Mother is not like my mother at all. If a mother has a child, Mothers admire all his movements. And my Mother hardly likes small children. She writes poetry. She is patient, always endures to the extreme. She doesn’t want to live the way she does.» Ale is only six. And she has no one besides Marina. And Marina plays with power and feelings: «Take the worm, or you don’t love me.» Alya takes it in horror, but thinks that she has almost made up her mind to say: “I don’t love you, Marina.” Almost, but not resolved. Mother Marina is tragically, divinely great in the eyes of a child. This book also describes a tragic stage in the life of mother and daughters. The hard year of 1919, when Marina gives Alya and the youngest, two and a half years old, Irina, to the Kuntsevsky shelter. Marina, who finds it difficult to cope with her own life, tries to save her daughters from starvation and renounces them, calling herself an aunt. Children were not taken to an orphanage with a living mother. Psychoanalyst Andre Greene described the concept of a «dead mother» inside a woman in her heavy depressive world, and the child’s unsuccessful attempts to awaken the mother from eternal sleep. Alya couldn’t. These children’s notebooks, which were so dear to Marina, were probably evidence for her that there is always a person who loves her, no matter what she does. In them, the young daughter turned into Marina’s mother. But the book is not only about Alya and Marina. She is about all of us. I recently found my notebooks that I wrote when I was 10 years old. The world was completely different then. But the clarity of children’s perception of what was happening and the sadness that accompanied me then confirmed once again that childhood is not the most carefree time.