Ariadna Èfron


Ariadna Sergeyevna Èfron was a Russian translator of prose and poetry, memoirist, artist, art critic, poet ; she was a daughter of Sergei Èfron and Marina Tsvetaeva.

Life

Early life

Èfron's parents and relatives called Ariadna Alya; her mother Tsvetaeva devoted a large number of poems to her. Èfron herself wrote poems from early childhood, and she kept diaries. In 1922, she went abroad with her mother.

Emigration

From 1922 to 1925, Èfron lived in Czechoslovakia, and from 1925 to 1937 in France, from where, on 18 March 1937, she was the first of her family returned to the USSR.
In Paris, she graduated from the Duperré School of Applied Arts, where she studied book design, engraving, lithography, and from the École du Louvre where she majored in art history.
She worked in the French magazines Russie d'Aujourd'hui, France-URSS, Pour-Vous, as well as in the pro-Soviet magazine Nash Soviet, which was published by the "Union of Returning Soviet Citizens". Her translations to French included works by Mayakovsky and other Soviet poets.
The "Union of Returning Soviet Citizens" was in fact a cover organization of the NKVD, but Èfron accepted this and supplied the NKVD information on exiled Russians and those wanting to return to the USSR.

After the return to the USSR

After returning to the USSR, Èfron worked in the editorial board of the Soviet magazine Revue de Moscou. She wrote articles, essays, reports, made illustrations and produced translations.

In prison camps and in exile

On 27 August 1939, Èfron was arrested by the NKVD and convicted by the OSO under article 58-6 to 8 years of forced labour in labour camps. She was tortured and forced to testify against her father. She only learned afterwards about the death of her parents in 1941.
In the spring of 1943, Èfron refused to cooperate with the camp leadership to become a "snitch", and she was transferred to a logging camp in the Sevzheldorlag, a penal camp. An actress of the camp theater, Tamara Slanskaya, managed to ask someone for an envelope so she could write her husband, Gurevich: "If you want to save Alya, try to rescue her from the North." According to Slanskaya, "pretty soon he managed to get her transferred to Mordovia, to Potma".
After her release in 1948, she worked as a teacher of graphics at the art college in Ryazan. After long years of isolation, she felt a great need to communication with friends, and her life was brightened with correspondence with friends, who included Boris Pasternak who sent her his new poems and chapters from his forthcoming novel Doctor Zhivago. She was so impressed by the book that she wrote to Pasternak:
Èfron was again arrested on 22 February 1949 and sentenced, on the basis of her previous conviction, to a life in exile in the Turukhansky District of the Krasnoyarsk Krai. Thanks to her education in France, she was able to work in Turukhansk as an artist-designer in the cultural center of the local district. She produced a series of watercolor sketches about life in exile, some of which were first published only in 1989.
In 1955, she was rehabilitated as there was no proof of criminal activity. She now returned to Moscow, where in 1962 she became a member of the Union of Soviet Writers. In the 1960s and 1970s, she lived in one of the buildings of the ZhSK of the Union of Soviet Writer".

Death

From her youth, Èfron had a heart condition; she suffered several heart attacks.
She died in a Tarusa hospital from a massive heart attack on 26 July 1975. She was buried in a town cemetery of Tarusa. was Samuil Davidovich Gurevich, a journalist, translator, and editor-in-chief of the journal Za Rubezhom. Èfron had no children.

Publications