Marina and Anastasia Tsvetaeva Museum

About museum

In May 1911 the young Marina Tsvetaeva visited Max (Maximilian) Voloshin. They had met earlier — at the end of 1910 in Moscow. In Tsvetaeva’s newly published first collection of poems, Evening Album, Voloshin immediately recognized a future great poet. After their acquaintance he invited her to Koktebel. Almost two months of rapture, sea, sun and poetry, and meeting her future husband Sergei Efron made her fall in love with Cimmeria forever. Her gratitude to Voloshin would be expressed in 1932 in the remarkable memoirs "Zhivoe o zhivom" (Living About the Living) and in a cycle of poems dedicated to the poet’s memory. At the end of May Marina’s younger sister Anastasia arrived in Koktebel. The three of them — with Sergei — set off for Feodosia. "And we understood… that Feodosia is a magical city and that we loved it forever," Anastasia wrote in her memoirs. In 1913, after burying their father, the sisters decided to leave Moscow and spend the winter in Feodosia. Marina Ivanovna, with her husband and daughter Ariadna, rented an apartment at the Redlikhs' dacha on Annenkaya Street (Shmidt St., 14); Anastasia Ivanovna, with her son Andrei, settled on Bulvarnaya Street (V. Korobkov St., 13). "I rented… a little house on Bulvarnaya Street. The house had a raised foundation so the second floor was fairly high. There were three rooms: a dining room, my room and the children's room. The apartment was corner…," Anastasia Tsvetaeva recalled. "Marina lived ten minutes from me, up the gentle hill… The garden around the low long house was thick, cozy, cheerful, and from the hill there was a view of the sea… The little rooms where Marina lived with Serezha, Alya and the nanny were low and old; the old simple furniture pleased the eye with poufs, a small sofa, a lampshade, a painting in a faded frame. The casement windows, opened to low bushes, let in the smell of broom — it called to Koktebel…" And, emphatically: "…I remember them, and I say: Marina was happy with her wonderful husband, with her amazing little daughter — in those pre-war years. Marina was happy." Guests came to that house; people arrived from Koktebel — from the House of the Poet — and Maximilian Alexandrovich himself often visited. How many places on earth were there where Marina Ivanovna was happy, how many of the apartments where the Tsvetaeva sisters lived have been preserved? Koktebel and Feodosia preserved the Tsvetaeva addresses. Grateful admirers of the Tsvetaevas’ work began to dream of a museum in their memory and to collect its future exhibits. In the 1990s, through the zealous efforts of I. M. Dvoynina and her associates, the dream gradually began to take shape. More than a thousand items were collected; memorial evenings and Tsvetaeva bonfires were held; the subject of creating a museum was widely covered in the press. The initiative found support and the city authorities came to help. In 1999 memorial plaques were installed on both buildings. In 2001 the museum was officially registered as a branch of the reserve 'Cimmeria M. A. Voloshin', and later the city allocated premises adjacent to the one where Anastasia had rented an apartment. The Marina and Anastasia Tsvetaeva Sisters Museum opened its doors to visitors in July 2009.