Marina Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow in 1892. Her first volume of poetry was published in 1910 and attracted notice from some of the most important critics and poets in Russia, including Maximilian Voloshin. In 1922, following the Russian Civil War, she went into exile in Paris, where she became one of the leading writers of the emigre community. In 1939, she returned to the Soviet Union, and her husband was arrested shortly thereafter and subsequently executed by the NKVD. Tsvetaeva committed suicide in Elabuga, a small town to which she had been evacuated following the onset of World War II, in 1941.