In 2019, the Azbuka publishing house published a collection of poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, “Love is Flesh and Blood...”, the cover of which was decorated with a portrait. Svetlana Saltanova, an employee of the Higher School of Economics, found out whether the photograph really depicts the famous poetess.
Soon after the publication of the collection, the Higher School of Economics (HSE) drew attention to its cover. A university employee, journalist and author of a book about Tsvetaeva’s legacy not only proved the publishers’ mistake, but also figured out how fake photography is regularly used in publications related to the poetess over the past years. The results of her investigation Svetlana Saltanova published on the university portal IQ, and we offer a retelling of a fragment of this material to our readers.
This is not the first time that the photo that the publishers chose for the cover has been called a portrait of Tsvetaeva. For example, in 2012, the image was published with an appropriate caption in the book “Ariadne Efron. Unknown Tsvetaeva. Memories of a Daughter” and was used in a documentary about the poetess on the “Culture” channel. Four years later, the “attribution” of the portrait was set in stone - the portrait was placed on a memorial plaque in Samara. It was then that social network users noticed the error, and officials sent a request to the poetess’s house-museum. Experts confirmed that the photo does not show Tsvetaeva, and the board had to be updated. On the Culture channel, apparently, they did not know about this incident and in 2017 they again used the portrait in announcements of programs for the 125th anniversary of the poetess.
Where did this portrait come from? The photograph was taken more than thirty years after the death of the poetess. In 2008, it was published on LiveJournal by a user under the nickname Piony in a selection of “doubles” of famous people. According to Piony, Tsvetaeva was her personal “double”. It turned out that behind the nickname was Elena Erykhova, a St. Petersburg resident who, after marriage, changed her last name to Kerzner and moved to the American city of Houston.
Is it true
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