Anastasia Tsvetaeva (1894–1993)

Anastasia Tsvetaeva was born in Moscow, Russia, and was a younger sister of Marina Tsvetaaeva. Anastasia started writing at an early age and made her literary debut at age 21 in 1915 with the book Korolevskiye razmyshleniya (King's Musings), followed in 1916 by Dym, Dym, Dym (Smoke, Smoke, Smoke), both critically praised. In 1921, she became a member of the Writers Union. Her 1927 book Golodnay epopeya (The Famine Epic) remained unpublished, as did her novel SOS or the Constellation of Scorpio. Both manuscripts were confiscated and destroyed by the NKVD, along with numerous other texts. In 1937, she was arrested and accused of being a member of a religious organizaton. She was sentenced to 10 years for counter-revolutionary activities and was sent to the gulag. Released in 1947, she was re-arrested in 1949 and sent to exile in the Novosibirsk region, where she spent the next five years. In forced labor camps, she wrote the novel Amor and in exile Moya Sibir (My Siberia), a collection of diaries published in 1988. After returning from exile and "rehabilitation" in 1959 she started working on her memoirs. Vospominaniya (Memoirs), completed in 1967 and first published in 1971, made her famous and remains her best-known work. Her single volume of poetry, Moi edinstvenny sbornik (My Only Collection) was published posthumously in 1995. The Anastasia Tsvetaeva Museum in Pavlodar, where she spent her first post-exile years, opened in 2012.