Sergei Efron

Sergei Yakovlevich Efron (Russian: Серге́й Я́ковлевич Эфро́н; 8 October 1893 – 16 October 1941) was a Russian poet, officer of White Army and husband of Marina Tsvetaeva. While in emigration, he was recruited by the Soviet NKVD. After returning to USSR from France, he was executed.

Sergei was born in Moscow. He was the sixth of nine children born to Elizaveta Durnovo (1853–1910) and Yakov Konstantinovich Efron (1854–1909). Both were Russian revolutionaries and members of the Black Repartition. Yakov worked as an insurance agent and died of cancer in 1909. The following year Elizaveta found one of her sons had committed suicide and soon after that day, killed herself. Yakov was from a Jewish family, while Elizaveta came from a line of Russian nobility and merchants; Yakov converted to the Lutheran faith to marry Elizaveta.

Efron contracted tuberculosis as a teenager and his mental and physical health was strained further upon learning of his mother's death. After becoming a student at Moscow University, Sergei volunteered for the military as a male nurse. Due to his poor health, though, he was unable to serve in that capacity. Instead, he enrolled in the officer cadet academy.

When Efron was a 17-year-old cadet in the officers' academy, he met 19-year-old Marina Tsvetaeva on May 5, 1911 at Koktebel ("Blue Height"), a well-known Crimean haven for writers, poets and artists. They fell in love and were married in January, 1912. While they had an intense relationship, Tsvetaeva had affairs, such as those with Osip Mandelstam and poet Sofia Parnok.

Tsvetaeva and her husband spent summers in the Crimea until the revolution. They had two daughters: Ariadna, or Alya (born 1912) and Irina (born 1917), and one son, Georgy.

Efron volunteered for the military in 1914 and by 1917 he was an officer stationed in Moscow with the 56th Reserve. In October 1917 he participated in the battles with the Bolsheviks in Moscow, then he joined the White Army and participated in the Ice March and defense of the Crimea, while Marina returned to Moscow hoping to be reunited with her husband. During that time, though, the relationship between Efron and Tsvetaeva was severely strained with very little communication between the two. Efron was particularly disenchanted with what he felt was a revolution largely unsupported by the Russian people, the expression of which inspired Tsvetaeva's Daybreak on the Rails.

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