Boris Pasternak (Poet):
“With the exception of Blok, Annenskiy, and - though with certain caveats - Andrey Beliy, the early Tsvetayeva was that which the whole lot of the other Symbolists wanted to be, but could not reach, even all stacked together.”
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Maximilian Voloshin (Poet):
“…(Marina) Tsvetayeva’s diary-like openness…”
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Joseph Brodsky (Poet):
"(Tsvetaeva's poetic) tonality (is a) purely spiritual aspect of [her] creativity... a pure voice soaring upward. (Her sense of space enables her to enact a) spiritual flight precipitated not so much by the presupposed location of the 'next world’ as by the overall poetic orientation of the author... And the whole poem (as, essentially, (Tsvetaeva's) oeuvre in general) is a development, an elaboration of this theme [time] — better still, of this state, i. e., of drawing nearer to time — expressed in the only palpable spatial categories: height, the next world, paradise." (1981)
Excerpted from Brodsky’s essay on Marina Tsvetaeva's poem "New Year's" (one of the poetic works Tsvetaeva dedicated to Rilke, one of her best epistolary soulmates). SOURCE: Brodsky, Joseph; Rubin, Barry (Translator); “Footnote to a Poem"; Less Than One. Selected Essays; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1981/1986; Pages 195-267.
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D.S. Mirsky (Critic):
"(Tsvetaeva is an) idealist (for whom the) material world is only an emanation of essence... For Tsvetaeva the word cannot be a Sign of a thing, for the thing itself is only a sign. Words for her are more ontological than things; they bypass things and are directly connected with essences: absolute, self-contained, irreplaceable, untranslatable." (1926)
SOURCE: Translated by Simon Karlinsky (Source: Mirsky, D.S.; Karlinsky, Simon (Translator / Editor); Appel, Jr., Alfred (Editor); “Marina Tsvetaeva"; The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West 1922-1972; Berkeley: University of California Press; 1977; Page 89)