There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

In 1941 Tsvetaeva and her son were evacuated to Yelabuga while most families of the Union of Soviet writers were evacuated to Chistopol. Tsvetaeva wanted to name him Boris (after Pasternak); Efron insisted on Georgy. Yesterday.

Her husband Sergei Efron and her daughter Ariadna Efron (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; and her husband was executed. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it.