Marina Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) Russian poet, born in Moscow in 1892, began to publish in her teens, to multiple good reviews. She was a working contemporary of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak and Rainer Maria Rilke, all of whom were important to her as rival, lover, correspondent, and mentor, respectively. Tsvetaeva was admired by Joseph Brodsky in 1978: “Well, if you are talking about the twentieth century, I’ll give you a list of poets. Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva (and she is the greatest one, in my view. The greatest poet in the twentieth century was a woman.)”